Azov Battalion: Why Mainstream Media Love Ukrainian Nazis

Below is my just-submitted article for this week’s edition of American Free Press. -KB

Azov Battalion: Why Mainstream Media Love Ukrainian Nazis

by Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press

The mainstream media insist that Azov Battalion fighters are heroes. Holed up inside the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Azov soldiers, we are told, have been bravely resisting the Russian invaders.

On April 24 The New York Times ran yet another pro-Azov story headlined: “Ukrainians in Mariupol’s steel mill are holding on despite intensifying attacks a commander tells The Times.” The Times nearly swooned over the courage and prowess of the Azov troopers: “The defense of the Azovstal factory in Mariupol is emblematic of the fierce and to many unexpected resistance of Ukrainian forces against their more powerful and more numerous adversaries. For nearly two months a relatively small band of fighters has withstood a relentless barrage of attacks from land sea and air ...”

The liberal media’s love affair with the Azov Battalion seems bizarre, given that same media’s ongoing demonization of “right-wing extremists” including Le Pen voters in France, Orban voters in Hungary, Trump voters in the US, and pretty much anyone who isn’t on board with the Biden presidency, internet censorship, COVID hysteria, transgender ideology, and various other fads, fallacies, and five thousand flavors of foolishness. If normal, sensible, tradition-minded people who happen to be somewhat immune to mass-formation psychosis are “right-wing extremists,” what does that make the Azov Battalion?

Azov members don’t just vote for the wrong party or think the wrong thoughts. They brandish swastikas at torchlight parades, lionize Hitler and his Ukrainian ally Bandera, and revel in the mass slaughter of helpless civilians and the torture, murder, and mutilation of people who disagree with them—especially journalists, politicians, and the fifteen million Ukrainians who are ethnic Russians.

The Azov Battalion is a neo-Nazi terrorist group that was integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces after the CIA-sponsored 2014 coup that overthrew democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovych. Though Azov has only around 1,000 official members, its allies, including the Svoboda party, the Right Sector, and National Corpus, and the many sympathizers and voters for those parties, add up to well over a million Ukrainians.

These Ukrainian Nazis or “UkroNazis” as they are sometimes called have taken over Ukrainian society by terrorizing their opponents while infecting the larger society with their brand of ultra-nationalist extremism. They succeeded in capturing President Zelensky, who was elected on a peace platform, by openly threatening his life. And they took over the Ukrainian armed forces by installing Azov members and sympathizers throughout the many branches of the military. These embedded Nazis serve as watchdogs who make sure that the regular non-Nazi troops, many of whom are ethnic Russians, obey even the most criminal and/or suicidal orders. If they don’t, the embedded Nazis will summarily execute them—or worse.

Why does the mainstream media love Ukrainian Nazis? The short answer: They are “our” Nazis. The Azov stormtroopers and their friends were installed in power by the CIA in 2014 in a coup bankrolled by American taxpayers.

But the CIA-UkroNazi relationship didn’t begin in 2014. It goes back to Operation Paperclip, the CIA program that Americanized both German and Eastern European Nazis after World War II. The CIA quickly made friends with the successors of UkroNazi founding father Stepan Bandera, supplying money and arms to the Ukrainian Nazi movement in order to weaponize it against the Soviet Union. So the UkroNazis have been American proxy fighters against Russia for 75 years. But it wasn’t until 2014 that the CIA was able to install them in power.

Today the CIA works closely with the Nazi-infested SBU (Ukrainian secret police) to plot the kidnapping, torture, and murder of political opponents of the Zelensky regime. Among the countless victims are mayors of Ukrainian cities such as Volodymyr Struk, mayor of Kreminna, who was kidnapped on March 1, tortured, and shot in the heart. Leaders of opposition political parties are also being systematically kidnapped, tortured, and exterminated by CIA-advised UkroNazis. A recent example is Oleh Kalashnikov, who was shot by a death squad as he entered his home earlier this month.

The CIA-organized UkroNazi SBU death squads also target journalists. In one recent instance, widely-read columnist Oles Buzina was shot by masked gunmen on April 14 in Kiev.

Even American journalists are not necessarily immune. On April 15, American independent war correspondent Gonzalo Lira was kidnapped by the SBU and held for a week, then placed under virtual house arrest. Many observers feared that he, like so many Ukrainian journalists, would be tortured and killed. But apparently the UkroNazi authorities and their CIA advisors determined that torturing an American journalist to death would generate bad publicity. (Though the mainstream media didn’t breathe a word about Lira’s disappearance, the alternative media covered it extensively.)

Bottom line: If the American people knew the truth, they would support Russia’s effort to denazify Ukraine.