There are neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations fighting alongside the Ukrainian National Guard, though the western media has consistently described as baseless President Vladimir Putin’s allegations of such.
Azov Battalion, affiliated to the National Corps, Ukraine’s ultra –nationalist party, has just become news because Facebook, which banned the organization before from its platform, has now changed its policy as the Nazi group joined Ukrainian forces to battle a common enemy: Russia.
Putin has said he is out to denazify Ukraine on Feb 24, when he declared his so-called “special military operation” that has killed 135 civilians, according to the UN, and displaced more than 1.2 million.
The west and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushed back with not just a slew of economic sanction, but with steady debunking of the allegations.
Aware of this as far back as 2014, the US Democrats have been insisting on the need to list the Azov Battalion as a terrorist organization, according to The Intercept.
The group’s involvement in the 2014 Crimean war against Russia was marked with rape and torture. Azov first commander Andriy Biletsky was a former Ukrainian lawmaker.
Facebook also took them down for their hate speech and offline violence against civilians.
Just last year, the investigative journalism platform said, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to label the Azov Battalion a foreign terrorist organization.
“It uses the internet to recruit new members and then radicalizes them to use violence to pursue its white identity political agenda,” she said.
Blinken, a former consultant to Facebook, and others, however, are not making a point of neo-Nazism now, not even the training, weapons, and fund (about $350 million) they are handing out to the Ukrainian military, and a terrorist group, a decision America will straining to make to help others.
The President Barrack Obama refused to sell weapons to Nigeria writhing in the grip of Boko Haram between 201 and 2015.
Obama complained of rights abuse and corruption that raised the possibility of the weapons ending up with the terrorists.