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UKRAINIAN NEOFASCISM – War Time Developments: Part 1 ‘Azov’ and Part 2 ‘Right Sector’

by Gordonhahn, September 5, 2025

Neo-fascism and ultranationalism may not have been the most powerful element in Ukraine or even among Ukrainian nationalists before the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, but they are almost certainly so now, and they are becoming increasingly powerful military-politically, culturally, and ideologically. 

Ukraine’s neofascists have never been satisfied with the Maidan revolt, despite their pivotal role in overthrowing the previous oligarch-dominated order, which the Maidan revolt only replaced in part. They have always looked tot he future and completion of the ‚nationalist revolution‘, as they call it. A few years ago, Dmitro Yarosh, founder and then leader or “coordinator’ of Ukraine’s neofascist Right Sector (RS) and later advisor to now fired Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who is now Kiev’s ambassador to the UK, promised there would be a ‘second phase of the nationalist revolution’ of which the February 2014 Maidan revolt was supposedly but the first.

The second phase is to sweep away the liberal and oligarchic remnants of the pre-Maidan democratic order brought into the Maidan regime, in Yarosh’s view. Yarosh recently repeated his call for the completion of the neofascist revolution on his Facebook page: “As it turned out, during the Dignity Revolution and the Russian-Ukrainian War, Ukrainian nationalists became the main factor in the Ukrainian national-liberation struggle in the 21st century… I am a Ukrainian Nationalist – sounds proud both in Ukraine and across the world. The next power after the War for Independence should be nationalist. Otherwise, we will once again be led down an unbreakable cycle of national humiliation, corruption, degeneracy, moral degradation, economic decline, inferiority and defeat… Therefore, after the War for Independence, the wise, courageous and noble should rule in Ukraine. Glory to the Nation!”

Similar views are held by Ukraine’s many other ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist groups and their leaders, and they have been waiting for the moment to complete their revolution. The catastrophe of the war, its outcome, and consequences are bringing their dream ever closer to reality. These factors alone could assist the neo-fascist’s rise to power, even if only temporarily.

There once was a time when the West acknowledged Ukraine’s neofascist threat to republican rule, even as it helped armed, trained, and equipeed the neofascists‘ cocoons, the siloviki –, i.e. the Ukrainian military, SBU, and HRU. The de facto NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council, at the time noted:

Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city councilmeetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.

“International human rights groups have sounded the alarm. After the March 8 attacks, Amnesty International warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”^[1]

Below I look at the political and cultural role neofascist groups have been playing in Ukraine, particularly since the beginning of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. In this Part 1, I begin with the most powerful and influential neofascist structure, Azov. No other neofascist or other fporm of Ukrainian group has seen its power and influence in the state and society be so enhanced over the last decade and certainly since the beginning of the beginning oft he NATO-Russia Ukrsainian War. Indeed, Azov’s leader, Andriy Biletskiy could very well be Ukraine’s next president and become so in the not too distant future.

Part 1: Azov

The Azov Battalion emerged from the Nazi-inspired Social-National Assembly (SNA) founded by Andriy Biletskiy, now commander of the Ukrainian army’s 3rd Separate Assault Battalion ‘Azov’. Azov’s rise along with its politics and ideology have much in common with Adolph Hitler’s Waffen SS.^[2] Prior to running the SNA, Biletskiy led the equally ultra-nationalist ‘Patriots of Ukraine,’ the military wing of the Ukrainian National Army, self-procliamed successor to the Nazi-allied outfir of the same name during World War II. The ‘Patriots were infamous their beatings of immigrants. In a 2010 interview Biletskiy described his organization as nationalist “storm troopers.^[3][4] A year later Biletskiy was in prison, after his organization—already renamed the SNA—had been involved in a series of shootouts and mass brawls.

The SNA’s, Azov’s, and Biletskiy’s ideology is an extremist brand of Ukrainian neofascism melded with international white supremacism. The SNA program emphasizes the concept of “nationocracy,” which was later incorporated into the RS program and propaganda courses. The SNA in power would ban all political parties, organizations, associations and ideological groups, so the ethnic Ukrainian elite holds full power: “Political power is wholly owned by the Ukrainian nation through its most talented, idealistic and altruistic national representatives who are able to ensure proper development of the nation and its competitiveness.” “Supreme power (executive, legislative and judicial) of the Ukrainian state will be in the hands of the head of state, who is personally responsible to the nation’s own blood and property.” Capitalism is to be “dismantled” and democracy is to be “eliminated.” All actions that fail “to comply with obligations to the nation and the state will entail the restriction of civil rights or deprivation of citizenship … The ultimate goal of Ukrainian foreign policy is world domination.”^[5]

In 2007, Azov’s ideology is reflected in its leaders statements. Top leader, commander Biletskiy, castigated a government decision to introduce fines for racist remarks, noting: “So why the ‘Negro-love’ on a legislative level? They want to break everyone who has risen to defend themselves, their family, their right to be masters of their own land! They want to destroy the Nation’s biological resistance to everything alien and do to us what happened to Old Europe, where the immigrant hordes are a nightmare for the French, Germans and Belgians, where cities are ‘blackening’ fast and crime and the drug trade are invading even the remotest corners.”^[6] Biletskiy has also said: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”^[7] In 2017, Biletskiy gathered his men in order to express Azov’s support for former Bosnian Serb military officer and convicted war criminal, Ratko Mladić, running directly counter to Western policy. Mladic was held responsible by a Western-sponsored war tribunal at the Hague for war crimes during the Yugoslav civil wars in the 1990s, including the Srebrenica massacre. Biletsky declared Mladić a “patriot of Serbia” and refers to the Iinternational Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the Hague as a “Zionist tribunal.”^[8] More recently, in May 2025 Biletskiy claimed that Hungary, Poland, and Romania are waiting for Ukraine’s collapse so they can annex their former territories that became part of Ukraine under Sdtalin in the wake of the USSR’s victory over fascism: “They are not preparing for war. They are preparing to take their own scraps in the event of a global defeat of Ukraine,” he asserted.^[9]`

On the basis of Azov, Biletskiy founded the National Corps with an affiliated paramilitary organization ‘National Teams.’ One of the points of Biletskiy’s foreign policy vision and of National Corps’ program is the creation of a union of countries called the ‘Intermarium’, which would include, among others, Ukraine and Poland – an idea also propagated by many Western apologists and supporters of Ukrainian neofascism. However, Poles, as victims of the OUN’s and UPA’s massacres 80 years ago in Volyn and elsewhere, do not shy away from noting Azov’s neofascism. They point out that Azov members eagerly use Nazi symbols, including the „Dirlewanger“ of the 36th SS Grenadier Division, which massacred Poles in Warsaw’s Wola during the Warsaw Uprising.^[10] And, as noted above, Biletskiy recently accused Poland, along with Hungary and Rumania, with having designs on Ukrainian territory……………………………………………………………………………………….

The NATO-Russia Ukrainian War is strengthening Azov’s hand in Ukraine’s army, politics, and culture. In the course of the war, the Azov Battalion was incoroprated into the army, becoming the Ukrainian army’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, while retaining a brigade in the National Guard (the 12th National Guard Brigade), into which it was originally incorporated. Azov also has another military unit, known as ‚Kraken‘, under the control of Ukrainian Military Intelligence (GRU) and its director, the CIA-trained Kyrylo Budanov. Kraken has been involved in a series of war crimes, including the execution of captured Russian soldiers. This year,the 3rd Assault Brigade ‚Azov‘ was upgraded further to become the Third Army Corps ‚Azov‘.^[18]Thousands of new soldiers will be integrated into Azov, and a special training school for sergeants established for it will inevitably indoctrinate recruits with ultra-nationalist ideology. Azov 3rd Assaualt Corps‘ founding ceremony, replete neo-Nazi pagan-like symbolism, was held near Kyiv and attended by Biletskiy and his fellow commanders. Participants offered “The Prayer for Ukraine,” a hymn borrowed from the neofascist, antisemitic OUN, whiuch enthusiastically collaborated with the Hitler’s Nazis in the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War II.^[19] The new commander of Azov’s 3rd Assault Brigade, Yaroslav Levenets, appointed in April-May, recently met Zelensky in an awards ceremony. He allegedly helped to organize the 2017 killing of Denis Voronenkov, a former member of the Russian parliament. As of December 2021, Levenets was still wanted in Ukraine.^[20] Aside from the army’s and therefore Azov’s growing role in Ukrainian society as a result of the war, Azov maintains a youth organization called ‘Centuriya’, which networks Azov across Ukrainian society in schools, children’s camps, and sports clubs.

According to Havryshko, Azov benefits from „enormous media presence“ and university support in Ukraine and uses „celebrity journalists and media experts to create a glamorous image of their units.“^[21] Indeed, Biletskiy, other leaders and members appear frequently on mainstream television and other media. Ukrainian and foreign media propagate Azov’s units as „true patriots“ and “elite brigades,” respectively, whereas in the West before the war there was significant reporting on Azov‘s and other Ukrainian groups‘ neofascist political orientation and ideology. …………………

With this media and academic network, Azov is able to insinuate neofascism into every knook and cranny of Ukrainian society. For example, it has been at the forefront of a campaign to slander and threaten the life of a leading scholar of historical and contemporary Ukrainian neofascism, Professor Marta Havryshko of Clark University in Massachusetts, running her out oft he country. As a result of the campaign Havryshko was fired from her position in the Kripyakevich Institute for Ukrainian Studies for her research on various aspects of this subject inculding the violence committed by the WW II-era Ukrainian fascist organizations OUN and UPA allied with Nazi Germany, contemporary Ukrainian glorification of Ukraine‘s Waffen-SS division “Galicia”, and her rejection of ultra-nationalist driven history policies. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://gordonhahn.com/2025/09/05/ukrainian-neofascism-war-time-developments-part-1-azov-and-part-2-right-sector/

September 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment