NATO (the US) is funding Nazi nationalists that wear swastika tattoos and think Bandera was good. They are doing this because Ukrainians don't want a civil war, so it's hard to find people to fight and die. Therefore, we pick the moderate rebels as we are so fond of doing.
I just learned about the Azov battalion about 15 minutes ago, but I can't find any sources online that indicate them having more than a few hundred volunteers.
The US has a knack of dumping weapons on countries and having those weapons eventually end up in the hands of reactionaries, but I think at present those reactionaries make up a vanishingly small fraction of the weapons recipients.
Azov was folded into the military proper as a precondition of securing western military aid, as the Ukrainian government needed to be able to show proper chain of command to get help and Azov wanted the shells, so they came to an agreement to integrate.
But these hardcore Azov guys are anarchists by nature and a lot of them hate the Ukrainian government as much as they hate the separatists, so they still act independently without having to answer to the government. Some did eventually just merge into the military.
Putting a number on the size today of Azov is difficult because of how the two melded together. Some people joined Azov because they just wanted to help fight and didn’t care about the neo nazi stuff. Some are true believers. But one thing for certain is that it’s not some fringe group that exists on Wikipedia only.
> Putting a number on the size today of Azov is difficult because of how the two melded together. Some people joined Azov because they just wanted to help fight and didn’t care about the neo nazi stuff. Some are true believers. But one thing for certain is that it’s not some fringe group that exists on Wikipedia only.
This might be true, but it's not evidenced by the video. The video documents two independent groups, one of whom (the first) look like they might belong to Azov. I counted 7 people at the most.
OTOH, it's clear (from the end of the video) that there are protests in Kiev itself with reactionary (or at least hypernationalist) themes. It's not clear to me where the line is on those, probably because I'm not Ukrainian. But those protestors are in the capital.
In sum, it's not clear to me that we should discount NATO's current arms distribution because one of two groups in a video from 2019 has far-right members, members who cut a deal with the overarching military chain of command to secure arms for the broader military.
I can't claim to be intimately familiar with Ukraine, but based on the US's history of funding the most violent psychopaths imaginable, I really doubt it's an accident.
I will also note that in the past, several elements of NATO's high command were former Nazi generals, so I really doubt there's a ton of angst about it internally.
Absent any evidence that NATO arms were specifically directed towards neo-Nazi groups (and not just groups affiliated with Ukraine's national police, which Azov unfortunately seems to be), I think there's nothing to support anything except it being an accident.
And again, this is from someone who exercises extraordinary skepticism in the context of US international action.
