[ElectronicIntifada] Representatives of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion have been touring Israel to drum up support for the unit’s imprisoned fighters. They have been meeting with Israeli politicians and soldiers.
Azov intelligence officer Illia Samoilenko was released in a prisoner exchange with Russia in September.
He had been one of the hundreds of Azov fighters who surrendered in May at the end of the long Russian siege of the eastern city of Mariupol.
"Israel values freedom, values strength, Israel values honor. It’s the same things that we also value," he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week.
Samoilenko also told The Times of Israel that "he sees Israel and Ukraine on the same side, the civilized battling the uncivilized in a struggle for the future of humanity," the outlet summarized.
The Anti-Defamation League, a major Jewish communal and Israel lobby group, for instance, warned in 2019 that Azov was a "Ukrainian extremist group" with "ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists."
But now with Western governments arming Ukraine, including the Azov Battalion, in a proxy war against Russia, there is a concerted effort to hide this ugly reality from public view.
Consequently – with help from the media and now Israel and its lobby – Azov has in recent months attempted to rebrand itself.
Seeking a stamp of approval from Israel is a time-honored strategy of European and American far-right extremists seeking to gain mainstream legitimacy.
In May The Times of London reported that Azov was planning to change its symbol from the wolfsangel – a far-right symbol associated with a division of the German army during Hitler’s Nazi regime.
But even that surface-level whitewash seems to have been too much of a change for Azov to endure. The symbol remains visible in all of Azov’s online outlets. Recent Azov social media postings show their fighters still using the wolfsangel.
| Oh my — this one is absolutely ripe, Spike the Hairy6811. First the source — Electronic Intifada — is dedicated to waging a propaganda war against the existence of Israel because the physical intifada failed. One of their key themes is that Israel’s Jews are the new Nazis, not the Jew-hating Palestinians, who in their view are nothing less than Nobel Savages. Being that the founders were mostly of Palestinian descent themselves, the sentiment is understandable, if not exactly predisposing them to be fair and balanced. Second, while Ha’aretz proudly brands itself as “The New York Times of Israel”, incredible shrinking circulation and elite leftwing anti-Israel perspective included, and is therefore rarely worth reading, I gift you the actual Times of Israel article this post references, from just before Christmas, so that you and our readers can judge for themselves. Key paragraphs for our purposes: |
AZOV 2.0
In 2016, Samoilenko, then a university student in Kyiv, decided to join the Azov Regiment to fight Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He said he joined the unit because of the soldiers’ professional and intellectual prowess. “Because I am motivated, dedicated, self-proven, and I matched the people just like me, people who constantly training, who have big ideas in their heads. A lot of intellectual people. A lot of people who willingly came to military service.”
The Azov battalion rose to prominence in 2014 as a volunteer outfit fighting alongside Ukraine’s army against pro-Moscow militias and Russian troops in the Donbas before being integrated into Kyiv’s official forces.
Many saw the unit as a far-right organization that used Nazi imagery and attracted antisemitic nationalists. The unit has featured prominently in Russian accusations that the government in Kyiv has Nazi sympathies.
In 2017, antisemitic graffiti, as well as the symbol of Azov Regiment, was sprayed on Odessa’s Jewish institutions.
Vyacheslav Lykhachov, a Russia-born Israeli who monitors hate crimes in Ukraine, acknowledges that there were neo-Nazis among the group’s founders in 2014, but says that most far-right ideologues left by the end of the year.
“The rest of the right-wing radicals, who clearly articulated their views, were deliberately cleaned out by the new commandant of the regiment in 2017,” Lykhachov explained.
“There are no units created based on ideology among Ukrainian National Guard, nor are there any among the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” he continued.
Samoilenko also readily admitted that the far-right was present at the “beginning of the Ukrainian National Renaissance” — the Euromaidan protests in 2013 — and there was a presence in Azov as well.
“We had, in the first couple of years, people with questionable reputation. Yeah, of course we had them,” he said, but added they didn’t last as the regiment became more professional. “The marginals, the people, the adventurers, they just been leaving and they were not staying for too long.”
The unit has soldiers with a range of ideologies, said Samoilenko, including antifascists, socialists, and anarchists. “There are Jews in there and they were all this time,” he added, “but not in a great numbers because a lot of people were frightened by the Russian propaganda.”
One of the company commanders currently in the field is Jewish, said Samoilenko: “He’s performing very well.”
Yulia Fedosiuk, whose husband was taken captive by Russian forces when members of the regiment surrendered at Mariupol’s Azovstal plant in May, agrees with the sentiment.
“One of my best friends, he is a Jew and he is in Azov,” said Fedosiuk, who is in Israel as part of the same delegation as Samoilenko, funded by a pro-Kyiv organization. 
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