So the Russians are the real Nazis?
The funeral ceremony, such as it was, was over in less than six minutes. One by one, the soldiers filed past the open coffin where the body of Serhei Zaikovsky lay wrapped in clear plastic and covered with the battalion’s yellow and blue standard, obscuring the wounds from the tank shell that killed him.
A young blonde woman, ashen-faced and eyes vacant, fell forward across the body. One soldier caught her and led her gently outside as the coffin lid was screwed tight. Six soldiers hoisted it onto their shoulders as her howls cut through the whistling wind outside.
Private Zaikovsky, 27, was killed on March 24 in a ferocious battle to retake the village of Lukianivka, east of Kyiv, from a Russian tank battalion. He was “a rare intellectual, a scholar and a linguist,” his friend and commander, Yevgenii Vradnik, said outside the bare chapel in Kyiv Memory Park, where the crematorium is situated. “It is a very big loss for Ukraine.”
> Kotenko was one of three Ukrainian members of an anti-tank unit killed that day retaking the village, a victory that would never have been possible, Vradnik said, without the aid of the British-supplied missiles that helped to destroy an entire Russian column.
It was one of a string of successful Ukrainian counteroffensives credited for Russia’s announcement yesterday that it would “fundamentally cut back” its assault on Kyiv; less a willing strategic recalibration than an acknowledgement of its failure to advance on the capital in the face of fierce resistance.
The men who retook Lukianivka and carried Kotenko’s body back for cremation, are members of the ultra-nationalist Azov Battalion, whose far-right origins have provided fertile soil for President Putin’s claims to be freeing Ukraine from neo-Nazi control.
Cont.
Created in 2014 by volunteers to battle Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, it was absorbed into the regular army, while much of its founding leadership departed in a mostly failed bid to enter national politics. Now the battalion, boosted by a flood of recent volunteers, is playing a key role resisting the invasion, not only on its original turf in the besieged city of Mariupol, but around Kyiv, where President Zelensky leads the war cabinet.
>Putin’s bitter rhetoric around denazification — with Azov’s white-supremacist origins as his key evidence — raises controlled but familiar anger among the battalion’s commanders. “Perhaps he really believes it,” Vradnik muses. “He lives in a strange, warped world. We are patriots but we are not Nazis.”
Kotenko’s bleak send-off in the bare chapel mirrors the rejection of the Orthodox Christian faith by a growing number of young Ukrainians, especially around the Sea of Azov. Ukraine’s paganism was replaced by Christianity in 988, when Volodymyr the Great of Kievan Rus tossed the thunder god Perun into the Dnieper River, and herded Kyiv’s population in after him for a mass baptism.
Volodymyr became the patron saint of both Russia and Ukraine but Azov’s nationalist leanings hark back to the original pagan faith, which some cite as the inspiration for its symbols, including Azov’s trademark Wolfsangel, also used by Nazi Germany.
Azov has its fair share of football hooligans and ultranationalists but also scholars like Zaikovsky, who worked as a translator and book editor. Anton Shekhovtsov, an expert in the European right, claims Azov has evolved so far from its origins as to make its far-right roots meaningless.
Cont
/uhg/ on suicide watch :pepePoint
Dey Wus De Real Nazis N Sheet
Ukraine is a democratic country and people of all nationalities and religions live here side by side,” said Artem Hubenko, who came to Kyiv’s striking Soviet modernist crematorium to mourn his comrade, Denis Kotenko, the second of the three Azov men killed in Lukianivka last Thursday.
“We have Jews, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians and Russians all among our fighters. We are all fighting for Ukraine.”
Kotenko’s funeral stretched longer, attended by some 40 soldiers and a small sprinkling of civilians, but it was no more religious than the one summoned to send off Zaikovsky.
In the cavernous Hall of Farewell, a female officiant told the mourners that Kotenko, 25, had joined the battalion when young, but with time had become one of their best and they should all give glory to his memory. “Glory to Ukraine!” she cried out. “Glory to the heroes!” the soldiers replied, their fists held tight across their chests in Azov’s signature salute. “Glory to the nation!” she declared and the soldiers responded: “Death to our enemies!”
Cont
No one in their battalion of 120 men knew exactly how many Russians they killed in Lukianivka, only that they had pushed back an original force of 400 some 18 miles. “There were many Russians killed,” Hubenko said, without emotion. “We did not allow them to escape with any tanks.”
The NLAW anti-tank missiles gifted by Britain have been critical to their gains: far more manoeuvrable and destructive than local equivalents. They were grateful for the weapons, Vradnik said, but even they had their limits. “To retake our regions, we need vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft weapons from Nato,” he said. “It’s very hard to bring down Russian aircraft with the mobile weapons we have. Our children are more important than fear of Putin’s aggression.”
Nowhere is that plea more urgent than in Mariupol. From a basement, a commander recorded a video asking the world to save the city. “I ask you not to confuse patriotism with Nazism,” he said. It was they, he said, who were confronting “the real Nazis of the 21st century”. “Glory to Ukraine!” he declared.
Clearly the azovs are moderate nazis, so we once more must form a coalition of the willing, this time against Putler and his extremist nazis!
Sure.
My question is why steal the aesthetic? Are they too retarded to come up with anything of their own?
>challenging its far-right reputation
oh so they no longer fight under the wolfsangel and have parades for nazi collaborator bandera?
oh, they do? hmm!
It’s their own words.
I do. Posers and Larpers need to get btfo
the american occupations are all pretty boring right now
the russian occupation is the only one worth memeing about at the moment
True
This rebranding won’t save them
Heil Hitler, Slava Geroem
It’s ruined them in my eyes imagine cucking that fucking hard.
We're patriots we just want you to destroy us LEGALLY
The fact that they are backed by the ukrainian government is the real issue.
The fact that the so called democratic nations ignore that, is intolerable. Paramilitary organisations backed and controlled by the government sounds like Wild west or Africa.
And they have done atrocious things.
West would probably make them a martyrs when they are gonna get wiped out
Yeah bit of a red flag they were allowed to exist in the first place
It’s possible but it’d probably just be easier to memoryhole them
Azog are going to undergo a rebrand like how Al-Qaeda rebranded to Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham. Next they're going to decry Russia for being transphobic and highlighting how progressive they are for getting fucked by trannies.
It wouldn’t even surprise me
Soooo, what will r*ddit use now to convince Any Forums to fight for Ukraine?
I think that was their only thing so hopefully they’ll fuck off now
But that’s Reddit’s default position anyway. Azog is basically larpier antifa.
I think it's a case of glowniggers using what they know works. If you're trying to recruit and train a semi-regular militia to fight against a neighboring super power (specifically Russia), how do you convince them that it's in their interest? More accurately, which ideology would appeal the most to the type of person you're trying to recruit?