I don’t think I’ve ever heard of azov.
AZOV started out as a Banderite* fascist paramilitary group that was active in fomenting violence, and eventually civil war in Ukraine in 2014. The neo-Nazi aspect of AZOV and similar paramilitary outfits in Ukraine is one of the reasons the West was leery of supplying certain weapons to Ukraine back then. They were eventually incorporated into the Ukrainian military as a brigade after the invasion.
There used to be lots of news stories about them and their love of Nazi symbols before the Russian invasion of 2022, but ... See, for example:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/azov-battalion-neo-nazi/
Zelensky ran on a peace ticket promising to implement the Minsk Agreement and won 70% of the vote. The Ukrainian people wanted peace. When Zelensky went to the front to try to get AZOV to comply with the agreed ceasefire, they laughed at him and mocked him. The video is painful to watch. Just before the Russian invasion, his popularity had slid all the way down to 20%, between his failure to deliver the peace he promised and corruption scandals. See:
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/
The above is not always considered the most reliable source, but I have thoroughly checked this story out.
*The current crop of Banderites hate ethnic Russians way more than Jews, but the originals during the Nazi era loved slaughtering both.
It’s similar to, but not exactly the same as, the fascist Ustase (Nazi) reemergence in Croatia in the 1990s, when the latter-day version was more interested in persecuting and slaughtering Serbs than Jews (hardly any Jews left in Croatia after WWII anyway — back during WWII they ran death camps for Serbs that horrified even their SS minders, while handing their Jews over the Germans for shipment by train to their infamous camps).
The steel plant in Mariupol
Russian ethnic Ukes surrounded it maybe 20 months ago
Uke elements ran to the tunnels
With hostages
Those men and women were mostly Azov
They gave up when their leaders surrendered to Russia etc and they paraded them out
Azov has been around in various forms since before we engineered the maiden coup there
Pretty sketchy bunch with glaring neo Nazi tendencies and affections
That’s a quick skinny from only memory