• Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    a western article about this guy from 2019

    Azov formed a political party, the National Corps, in 2016; it’s headed by Andriy Biletsky, who was once the leader of the neo-Nazi “Patriot of Ukraine” organization. Last year, Azov introduced the National Militia, a paramilitary group whose existence continues to worry a number of human rights groups, given their propensity for street violence and vigilantism. With a claimed 10,000 members, Azov looks set to be a fixture on the Ukrainian political scene for a while yet.

      • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I have a lot of footage archived from the 2014 ukrainian civil war and one of them is a pogrom carried out against Roma. I save this stuff not because I enjoy viewing it or having it on my hard drive, but because I don’t trust western media or even western historians to properly preserve this stuff.

        Also, the Azov battalion is a “territorial defense unit” that mostly attacks Ukrainians in Donbass and Luhansk. It is political parties like Svoboda and their paramilitary wings like C14 that are usually doing those pogroms. Naturally all these reactionary organizations cross-pollinate so there is a tendency to just call them all Azov because it’s a name everyone knows by this point.