The Ukrainian activists on FR insist that there never was a Nazi presence in the Ukraine. They act like they don’t know the Azov Nazis ‘integrated into’ the Ukrainian National Guard.
Reminds me when I got into a heated conversation in an Israeli airport lounge with a moron who ran for PA (Us Senate) about a certain group he was supporting in Syria.
Never mind they were effing Commies.
Sick of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend....and we’ll just clean up the mess later with blood and treasure”.
And? Post WWII, this ONE unit had ties that were Fascist. Today, there are only a FEW people in the entire unit that still espouse a National Socialist ideology...
Who the f*ck cares... Most likely... they will fight and die and remove themselves from the gene pool.
Does this in some way make you feel better about supporting Putin in attacking another sovereign Nation in his bid to rebuild the Soviet Union?
On the contrary. There’s no argument that the Poroshenko era battalions were massively nazified. As was the Ukrainian Rada.
But that was 2014-19.
Between 2019 and 2022 Ukraine voted out the nazis in the Rada, and the nazis in the regular military were broken up.
By December 2021 even the DPR observers were admitting that the occasional firefights between combatants were killing less than ten combatants a month.
When Russia attacked Mariupol, the Azov battalion became a rallying point because they had 8 years of experience in guerilla warfare and knew where the arms caches had been hidden. So anyone wanting weapons and training quickly went, naturally, to Azov.
So Russia can thank its own retarded self for turning a near irrelevant Azov Nazi battalion within the National Guard that had been broken up, into the go-to outfit for the Ukrainians’ Home Defense.
And Azov attracted a lot of non Nazi members because they had the weapons, training, battlefield experience, and were in the right place at the right time.
I’ve told you both before, I am in regular contact with “ethnic Russian” Ukrainians from the Donbas who are now in Zaporizhzhia city defending it from the Russians. They had to go to Azov first, when the Russians showed up, because when the enemy tanks are on the horizon you can’t go 600 miles northeast for assistance; you go to the local militia that’s sitting on a stockpile.