BY TYLER DURDEN- Alexander Rubinstein - AUG 17, 2023 - 12:05 PM

Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky has uploaded a video to his Telegram channel showing him holding court with one of the most notorious neo-Nazis in modern Ukrainian history: Azov Battalion founder Andriy Biletsky.

Western media has dismissed evidence of neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine by citing President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage. But new footage published by Zelensky shows the leader openly collaborating with a fascist ideologue who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

On August 14, just over an hour after Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced another $200 million in military aid to Kyiv, Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky published the video depicting what he called an “open conversation” with Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade.

“I am grateful to everyone who defends our country and people, who bring our victory closer,” Zelensky wrote, following his encounter with the unit on the outskirts of Bakhmut. While casual Western observers might not have realized it, the brigade Zelensky was addressing is actually the newest iteration of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

“The 3rd separate assault brigade, excellent fighters,” Zelensky wrote days after the consultation, in a Twitter post that also alluded to a separate meeting with the Aidar Battalion, another neo-fascist outfit that has been accused of war crimes by Amnesty International. “They have stopped the enemy from advancing towards Kostiantynivka and pushed the occupiers back up to 8 kilometers.”

But the group’s origins are no secret. Describing their most recent rebrand in a YouTube video released in January, the unit explained: “Today we officially announce that the SSO AZOV is expanding to a brigade. From now on, we are the 3rd separate assault brigade of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Like its predecessor, the unit is led by Andriy Biletsky, who founded the Azov Battalion and has long served as a figurehead for the closely-aligned National Corps political movement.

But in spite of Biletsky’s rich Nazi pedigree, the video Zelensky published shows him sharing a moment of bonhomie with a white nationalist militant who has described Jews as “our enemy,” or as the “real masters” of the oligarchs and craven politicians that have corrupted Ukraine.

“How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked on the eve of Russia’s intervention, pointing to his Jewish heritage. “How could a people who lost eight million lives fighting Nazis could support Nazism?” Perhaps the question needs to be asked again of the Ukrainian president following the tribute he paid to his country’s top neo-Nazi ideologue.

Ukraine’s Jewish leader meets “The White Leader”

Since Russia’s military operations in Ukraine kicked off in 2022, Biletsky had taken pains to distance himself from his fascist past. He now claims that an infamous promise he made to rid the world of “Semite-led untermenschen” was actually fabricated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. But Biletsky’s most notorious screed against Jews was not an isolated outburst. Indeed, his record of Nazi-inspired tirades is extensive and has been a matter of public record for decades.

Biletsky’s college thesis was a defense of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a group of paramilitary Nazi collaborators founded by Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that carried out ethnic cleansings of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles. After leaving university, Biletsky quickly embedded with multiple fascist outfits, including the “Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian Organization ‘Tryzub’” and the Social-National Party — not to be confused with the National Socialist Party of 1940’s Germany.

Biletsky left the Social-National Party in protest in 2004 as the group began to rebrand and move away from overt neo-Nazi symbolism. Two years later, he led an organization called Patriots of Ukraine, which has been linked to numerous mob assaults. One Patriot of Ukraine member has claimed the group was behind the seizure and torching of the headquarters of a political party during the US-backed “Maidan” coup in 2014.

According to Ukraine’s Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Patriots of Ukraine “espoused xenophobic and neo-Nazi ideas, and was engaged in violent attacks against migrants, foreign students in Kharkiv and those opposing its views.” What’s more, “Biletsky and some other members were suspected of violent seizures of newspaper kiosks and similar criminal activities.”

“For three years running, the organization has gained notoriety for its torch processions around student campuses in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Chernivtsi which fill foreign students studying in Ukraine with terror,” the human rights group noted in 2008. During a Patriots of Ukraine general meeting in 2009, Biletsky raved: “How can we describe our enemy? The authorities and the oligarchs. Do they have anything in common? Yes, they have one thing in common: they are Jews, or behind them are their real masters — Jews.”

In 2011, Biletsky was arrested for allegedly ordering Patriot of Ukraine members to kill a fellow ultranationalist inside the group’s office following a dispute and spent the following years in pre-trial detention. Thanks to a resolution passed by the Ukrainian parliament after the Western-backed overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych, he would ultimately be released in 2014. But during his three years in custody, Biletsky managed to have a number of his fascist screeds published in a collection titled “The Word of the White Leader.”

One essay in the collection, dated to 2007, rails against Jews and Black migrants, casually dropping the n-word in the process. “Ukraine is the light of Europe! Our Nation still has enough strength to withstand this influx of foreigners, to cleanse our land and light the fire of purification throughout Europe!” the essay concludes.

In another essay outlining the ideology of “Social-Nationalism,” Biletsky praised National Socialism as a “great idea,” but criticized the Nazis as having been insufficiently eugenicist in their family welfare programs. He complained they supported parents with multiple children “without considering the biological quality of each individual family.”

“The result,” he continued, was “a significant increase in the birth rate, [but] a significant decrease in the percentage of the Nordic type in the population.” Because “these social benefits are aimed at the masses, they encouraged the worst human material to give birth to a child in the first place,” the self-proclaimed “White Leader” lamented.

A subsequent Biletsky manifesto entitled “Language and Race – Primary Issues” expanded on the “social-nationalist” concept: “Ukrainian social-nationalism considers the Ukrainian Nation to be a blood-racial community… Race is everything for nation-building – Race is the basis on which the superstructure grows in the form of national culture, which again comes from the racial nature of the people, and not from language, religion, economy, etc.”

As for the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, Biletsky wrote, “The issue of total Ukrainization in the future social nationalist state will be resolved within 3-6 months with the help of a tough and balanced state policy.”

Following his release from prison, Biletsky got his chance to carry out a campaign of violence against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine. As war broke out in the country, with the Russian majority of the east seeking self-determination in the face of a nationalist post-coup government viewed as Western puppets, Biletsky dissolved the Patriot of Ukraine and formed the Azov Battalion to wage a war against the separatists. Around this time, he was also elected to the Ukrainian parliament, remaining in office until 2019.

The new paramilitary outfit set up shop in Mariupol, using the port city as a staging ground for attacks on the Donbas, and violently crushing forms of feminist and liberal political expression on the city’s streets.

Meanwhile, the National Corps, a political party founded by Biletsky in 2016, has been described as a “nationalist hate group” even by the US State Department. The party has repeatedly incited violence against the Kyiv Pride march, in 2018 calling on “all concerned citizens of Ukraine” to prevent the march from being held. In 2019, one National Corps leader had a more direct message: “Stay home and don’t show up in public. Ever. That will make our life easier and keep you safe ;).”

In 2019, it seemed almost as though Biletsky’s influence was waning. An electoral coalition he formed with several other prominent neo-Nazis in Ukraine failed to gain enough votes to pass the threshold to gain any seats in parliament. Meanwhile, Vlodomyr Zelensky won the presidential election on a platform of making peace with Russia.

But Biletsky still held on to a trump card as a nationally-recognized strongman. When a Ukrainian news channel announced a two-hour live studio “TV bridge” between Ukrainian and Russian civilians aimed at fostering a stronger mutual understanding, Biletsky seized the moment to issue a thinly-veiled threat against Zelensky if he did not have the event canceled in a day’s time. If Zelensky did not intervene, “the answer to the Kremlin’s ‘little green men’ will begin to be given by ‘little black men,’” Biletsky said, referring to the black garb of fascist elements like Azov.

Biletsky called on Zelensky to be “The leader of a state at war,” and, “Not a clown, not an artist from oligarchic corporations, but the President.” Zelensky responded within the timeframe of the ultimatum by denouncing the dialogue and seemingly offering a jab back at Biletsky, arguing that Ukrainians were being “manipulated by politicians who really want to get into parliament.”

A few months later, the pair butted heads again after Zelensky ordered Ukrainian troops, including Azov fighters, to withdraw from a frontline town in the Donbas in an apparent effort to honor the terms of the Minsk Accords. Biletsky fired back with threats to dispatch thousands more troops in open defiance of the president’s orders.

Zelensky’s showdown with fighters refusing his orders culminated with the head of state nearly breaking down on camera and pleading to the militants: “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons.”

Just a few short years later, in the midst of a hot war with Russia, Ukraine’s Jewish president, and Ukraine’s most famous living antisemite seem to have put aside their differences.

As Shakespeare put it, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”

UK about to send Ukrainian neo-Nazi mercenaries to Africa

By Inteldrop - Lucas Leiroz, journalist - 17 Aug. 2023

Apparently, the UK is interested in expanding its anti-Russian provocations to Africa. The British agency MI6 is allegedly preparing a team of Ukrainian saboteurs to intervene in African countries and neutralize the growing wave of cooperation with Russia on the continent. The case clearly shows how the Western powers plan to internationalize the conflict with Russia and raise it to the ultimate consequences.

Reports were made by several Russian news agencies, citing sources familiar with military matters. It is believed that around 100 Ukrainian far-right militants are being mobilized by British spies to carry out sabotage maneuvers in Africa. The anonymous informants also said that the team’s focus will be on destroying civilian infrastructure and eliminating political leaders, thus affecting the social stability of the targeted countries. For this reason, sources classified the neo-Nazis recruited for the operation as an “assassination squad”.

There is also information that points to the existence of a broad scheme of cooperation between the British and Ukrainian sectors of espionage and special services. The plan to recruit Ukrainian veterans to Africa allegedly involves high-ranking officials linked to Kiev’s Main Directorate of Intelligence. In other words, this is not just a UK hiring of Ukrainian mercenaries, but a joint state operation between London and the neo-Nazi regime.

“According to information, confirmed by several sources, UK special service MI-6 has formed and prepared for deployment on the southern continent a sabotage and assassination squad, comprising members of Ukrainian nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, in an attempt to prevent cooperation between African countries and Russia (…)

The task of the Ukrainian squad, formed by the British special services, will be to carry out sabotage attacks at infrastructure facilities in Africa and to assassinate African leaders eyeing cooperation with Russia (…) Lt. Col. of GUR [Main Directorate of Intelligence] of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry V. Prashchuk was appointed to be the commander of the Ukrainian squad of cutthroats”, a source told Russian journalists.

In the same sense, it is important to emphasize the danger represented by the leadership of an officer like Vitaly Prashchuk. The officer of the Ukrainian Main Directorate is a well-known veteran of the war in Donbas, having actively participated in the hostilities between 2014 and 2016. His function was precisely to command a squad of intelligence agents focused on sabotage operations against the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. In addition, he has already previously participated in joint operations with British forces in Africa – more precisely in Zimbabwe.

Considering the several cases of sabotage against relevant public figures and civil facilities in Donbas during the early years of the conflict, it is expected that a wave of terrorist attacks will start to happen in the African continent. This raises a series of concerns from a strategic and humanitarian point of view, further pushing African countries to seek cooperation with Russia in order to guarantee the security of their populations.

Another point to be analyzed is how the case reveals the Western readiness to internationalize the conflict against Russia. The same actors involved in the Ukraine War are now directing efforts to Africa simply because local governments have shown a willingness to cooperate with Russia. This means that in fact, the West’s involvement in the conflict is not because of any “solidarity” with Ukraine, as claimed by the media, but because of a real intention of war against Moscow.

Ukraine is just the most serious flank in this Western war effort. Now, they are betting on Africa as a new frontline, as Sahelian states have sought friendship with Moscow – something considered unacceptable by Westerners. Wherever there is cooperation with Russia, there is some Western provocation to create chaos, instability, and conflict. This is because NATO does not expect to defeat Russia directly on a battlefield, since Moscow’s military power is massive, thus betting on the creation of different flanks and points of tension.

It must be remembered that in recent months it has been reported that Western weapons sent to Ukraine are ending up in the hands of African criminals. More than mere Ukrainian corruption, some experts believe that what is happening is also a strategic redistribution of resources, with NATO officials sending equipment to African terrorists, considered allies against Russia and its allied states. Now, with the data pointing to the sending of neo-Nazi mercenaries to carry out sabotage in Africa, there is even more evidence that in fact, the West is deliberately cooperating with the rise of terrorism in Africa.

However, instead of neutralizing the pro-Russian wave in Africa and intimidating African leaders, the British-Ukrainian attitude tends to further increase the desire for cooperation with Russia in these countries. Having data that point to the Western intention to sabotage them, African governments will seek to sign even more cooperation agreements in defense and security with Moscow.

In practice, the West may succeed in generating chaos and conflict, but it will fail to prevent the growth of friendly relations with Russia in Africa.

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.  Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.

Source: InfoBrics