As recently reported by The BFD, Facebook has temporarily lifted its ban on posting praise of the “Azov Battalion”. Just who are the Azov Battalion, and why were they blacklisted by Facebook, under its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy?
Long story short: they’re a neo-Nazi militia founded by white supremacists. They recently posted a Twitter video, showing themselves greasing bullets intended for Muslims with pig fat.
So, why is Facebook suddenly allowing its users to praise neo-Nazi white supremacists? Why was the CIA funding and training them? And what’s their connection to New Zealand?
Azov Battalion is reportedly a unit of the NGU, backed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. Despite its possible official background in Ukraine, Azov Battalion is known in the West for its extreme neo-Nazi stance, and for its suspected involvement in a number of terrorist attacks and separatist incitement incidents in various countries and regions, including the riots in China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2019.
Let that sink in: this is not just any rag-tag militia, this is an official unit of Ukraine’s National Guard. It’s as if the US National Guard endorsed its own KKK regiment. Try to imagine the world’s media turning as blind an eye to that as they are to the Ukraine’s dirty little not-so-secret.
As it happens, though, it’s also the US Deep State’s dirty little secret.
Since Azov Battalion was founded in 2014, many American media outlets have revealed its potential connections with the US authorities.
According to a Yahoo News article from January 2022, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been secretly training forces for Ukraine since 2015. The CIA has been overseeing a secret intensive training program in the US “for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel,” the article quoted “five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative” as saying.
The multi-week program includes training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, said the former officials. In addition to the above-mentioned, the CIA also started “traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there by 2015,” Yahoo reported.
Note also that this was all before the Bad Orange Man’s time: in fact, it was the “scandal-free” Obama administration that changed US law to allow it to fund neo-Nazis.
Also in 2015, the US Congress removed a ban on funding neo-Nazi groups like Azov Battalion from its year-end spending bill, said an article by The Nation magazine in January 2016. In July 2015, two Congressmen drew up an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations bill that limited “arms, training, and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion,” but the amendment was removed in November following “pressure from the Pentagon,” an insider told The Nation.
The American Deep State has been supplying the neo-Nazis with not just training and funding, but also weapons. Weapons manufacturers state that their sales of lethal weapons to the Ukraine are conducted in “very close co-ordination” with US and Ukrainian authorities. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab has confirmed that US weapons went to the Azov Battalion.
The Biden administration is continuing Obama’s neo-Nazi-helping ways. Late last year, the US was just one of two countries who vetoed a UN draft resolution “combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism”.
The other was the Ukraine.
(The US government, it should be acknowledged, justified its veto on First Amendment grounds.)
The Azov Battalion isn’t just limiting its evil to committing atrocities, from looting to rape, torture and murder — as documented by the UN’s OHCHR — in the breakaway regions of the Ukraine.
In March 2019, 51 people were killed at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in a mass shooting by Australian Brenton Tarrant. Tarrant, who displayed a symbol used by Azov Battalion during the attacks, claimed in his manifesto that he had traveled to Ukraine, according to an article published on the website of the Atlantic Council in February 2020.
US media in September 2019 reported an attempted terrorist attack by an America soldier who tried to bomb a major American news network. The soldier Jarrett William Smith, arrested by the FBI, said that he “planned to travel to Ukraine to fight with violent far-right group Azov Battalion,” ABC News reported that month.
The Global Times
Numerous other neo-Nazis in Australia have also travelled to the Ukraine to train with the Azov Battalion.
So, it seems that neo-Nazis are just fine and dandy with the media-political war machine and Big Tech. As for the CIA training violent, fanatical militias to fight their dirty proxy wars in foreign countries — there’s no way that could go wrong!
Advice
It must be acknowledged that the source for this post is the CCP-mouthpiece, The Global Times (hence its emphasis on linking the Azov Battalion to unrest in Hong Kong). However, its claims are backed by other sources and links have been added in the text.
