@kravietz @8petros This is just complete lies. The AZOV battalion was basically almost exclusively neo-nazi when it was initially founded, though soon grew to include other far-right nationalists and football hooligans who did not necessarily define themselves as national socialist.

The idea that there was a mere 100 - 200 nazis in their ranks is beyond laughable.

They also never "disbanded", they were incorporated into the national guard. And they are still full of neonazis, not completely, but there are still a few thousand neonazis in the ranks of AZOV, and other military formations. Especially the Russian Volunteers Corps, armed by the Ukrainian gov, which is exclusively made up of neonazis.

You only have to spend a few minutes scrolling through many of the social media accounts ran by AZOV members and supporters to find hundreds of recent photos of AZOV fighters with nazi flags, banners, tattoos, patches and graffiti.

Just check out some of these telegram accounts:

https://t.me/azovukrainesupport

https://t.me/ukrainefront88

https://t.me/fortresskyiv

https://t.me/EternalMuscovite

https://t.me/vallholl

https://t.me/russvolcorps

@kravietz @8petros Obviously the official AZOV page does not post explicit nazi propaganda anymore, like they did in the early days (though they did keep the nazi wolfsangel logo). They have a new media strategy and orders from the national guard which forbids this.

That does not change the fact that there are still a great deal of neonazi soldiers in Azov.

I didn't claim to be sending you an "official" AZOV account. I sent you links for a number of different social media accounts run by Ukrainian Nazis (there are countless more). Some of the people running these accounts are active members of AZOV.

If you spend some time searching through the content of those accounts you can find many recent photos of AZOV soldiers holding Nazi flags, showing off Nazi tattoos, posting in front of Nazi graffiti, ect.

The text post I shared was written by:

https://t.me/ultrasnotreds2

A nazi football hooligan page (some of their admin are Ukrainian), and the post was shared by a number of the other Ukrainian nazi pages. If you scroll through their posts for a couple minutes you will find it.

Though I believe that you have zero interest in actually investigating this. And would prefer to share lies than actually look at what actual Ukrainian nazis in Azov say about this.

@RadicalGraffiti

The text post I shared was written by:

Which is related to Azov… how exactly? Because in order to support your initial claim that, essentially, today’s Azov is “Nazis”, you seem to be trying to find any far-right extremist groups and desperately trying to associate them with “Azov”, even if it’s a channel written in English with far-right news from all around the world and no apparent association with Ukraine apart from casual “Слава Україні!” in their header. You’re literally scratching the bottom here.

If you were to honestly look for neo-Nazis anywhere, there were scandals involving neo-Nazis in all world’s armies, including German, American and Russian. Yet, you don’t rush to call them neo-Nazi as a whole… except for Ukraine, parroting the Russian narrative. And surprisingly, you’re kind of right in not doing that, because actions of individuals don’t impact the whole organisation of thousands of people… unless they’re sanctioned by the organisation’s policy. And this is certainly not the case with either German, Ukrainian or American armies, all of which clearly ban neo-Nazi symbolics.

I wouldn’t be so sure in case of Russian army, granted the fact that openly neo-Nazi Utkin was rewarded highest Russian medals by Putin himself, and openly neo-Nazi Milchakov was similarly honoured by other Russian diplomats. But still, at the surface Russian army kind of doesn’t display Nazi symbolics and its allegiance to fascism is displayed more by the genocide it’s conducting in Ukraine and Syria.

@8petros