The Terrorists Among US11 Azov Battalion and American Congressional Support

by George Eliason, special correspondent for The Saker Blog in Novorussia

On April 13, 2014, Ukraine launched its ATO against the people of Donbass. Since that time Ukraine has received billions of US dollars and EU euros to combat a Russian invasion. Ukrainian politicians stole and continue stealing the money as fast as it comes in, regardless of what it’s purposed for.

But did Russia ever attack Ukraine? Will Russia ever attack Ukraine? These are the two biggest questions that should be front and center when considering US tax dollars for military aid to Ukraine.

In a candid moment according to the planner who developed Ukraine’s Information Operations and propaganda machine, all of the support given was for nothing.

“Once Ukraine determined that the RF (Russian Federation) was not going to attack and Russia was not a credible threat, they launched their Anti-Terrorist Operations against the rebels (p 65).” Russia’s Hybrid War in Ukraine: Breaking the Enemy’s Ability to Resist Finnish Institute of International Studies by András Rácz

What this means is Ukraine’s current posturing and attack of Donbass is due to the fact that it is NOT facing an invasion or the danger of one happening from Russia. The report erroneously describes a hybrid cyberwar and Ukraine’s IO planner agrees this assessment isn’t accurate at all.

Overall, great report, although I believe the author embraced the term hybrid warfare too easily, only because it is en vogue, popular to use.- Joel Harding on András Rácz

Why is the US Congress trying to waste hundreds of millions of US tax dollars to prepare Ukraine for a war that has never happened and won’t?

If Ukraine, its NGOs, and think-tanks are lobbying on building prejudices pushing for US military intervention based on blatantly lying to take billions in US tax dollars, shouldn’t all support be reconsidered? I mean all support.

Azov battalion is a symptom of a much larger problem stemming from Ukraine. The obvious question is why are they so important to people trying desperately lobbying for them? Why is Ukraine’s Zelenskiy having such a hard time getting rid of them if he actually wanted to?

Let’s start at the end. What does Internal Affairs Ministry Arsen Avakov’s Azov Battalion think about the US, its people, and its government?

As the article progresses you’ll see how Azov relates to Ukrainian’s and Americans alike. I’ll open up their support network which is some of the most successful lobbying efforts of the century so far. And I’ll show you how, why, and where this mentality transferred back to the US and the 2016 and the current election cycle.

In the interview with Foreign Policy, the Azov commander Biletsky (now Ukrainian Senator) states:

“Unfortunately, among the Ukrainian people today there are a lot of ‘Russians’ (by their mentality, not their blood), ‘kikes,’ ‘Americans,’ ‘Europeans’ (of the democratic-liberal European Union), ‘Arabs,’ ‘Chinese’ and so forth, but there is not much specifically Ukrainian…It’s unclear how much time and effort will be needed to eradicate these dangerous viruses from our people.”

The takeaway is Jews, Americans, and Europeans need to be eradicated like viruses…full stop. As you’ll see Ukraine supports this sentiment. The Ukrainian Diaspora supports this sentiment. Do you?

Any Congressman voting for funding this mess and the other 100 terrorist groups like them in Ukraine votes for enemies of the American people.

Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Voldymyr Ogrizko on Shuster Live (largest Ukrainian talk show): “‘Americans must be willing to die for Ukraine, because the former Soviet republic, fighting with Russia, defends the values of the Western world. And they are willing to die in Iraq or Afghanistan? If they are really talking about their values, they must be willing to die in Ukraine. Today we protect their valuables. This and our values. We protect their lives and their blood, ( He is talking about America )’ – said Ogryzko. He expressed the hope that the results of the elections in the US will bring Ukraine support.”

From 2014 forward, Ukraine’s constant lies about why it is constantly attacking civilians in Donbass needs to be revisited. This atrocity was a preplanned IO line item on the to-do list.

We started by showing spreading the lie about an invasion became the biggest money and political game in Ukraine.

Why did the war in Donbass start? From the perspective of Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR) and DNR, it had nothing to do with politics. In the beginning, everyone was looking to maintain political representation in Kiev. That’s why even as late as May 2014, they were only looking to federalize the region. This was for protection they were never offered.

In early March-April 2014, people across the region started receiving SMSs and videos from Maidan groups showing them murdering civil officials. They were told this was their future. It was only later on April 12, 2014, that an organized defense from this and the attacks that were happening against civilians in the cities of Donbass formed. They took over the armories and control over weapons that were already in Donbass to protect their families from this.

That doesn’t begin to describe the horror of this video or the fear it generated or all the others like it that blanketed civilian Donbass in the late winter of 2014. When Azov took Mariupol and other places, women and girls were tortured, raped, and mutilated. For fun, Azov sprayed construction foam into every orifice.

I was in Donbass in 2014 and remember the horror and disbelief because people from their own country, their people were doing this. The videos are authentic and the crimes horrific. I understand what it’s like to be in an area overtaken by groups like this. I spent 2 months in an occupied area waiting for the cleansing that we were told at the end was about to begin.

This is a police chief who didn’t agree with what happened at the Coup in Kiev, only weeks before. The video is one of many authentic Maidan groups videos that were circulated to people and civic leaders in Donbass during the early spring of 2014. They made his wife watch.

How was this action seen by IO (Information Operation) coup leaders? They were heroes. After, when Pravy Sektor put the Ballad of the Green Berets theme to Pravy Sektor’s own lyrics, the coup organizer gushed over it.

It is also a wonderful tribute to all of the men and women who have risked their lives in combat, or perished in this unnecessary war. Probably the single most useful contribution made by the Right Sector militia to the war effort – lots of footage by Olinka Belozerskaya.- Joel Harding

Life in Mariupol under Azov Battalion

In 2014, I was able to do discreet interviews with Mariupol residents. It was time they said how they felt about the takeover of Mariupol and its aftermath.

Sergey In September 2014 a Mariupol resident “Sergey” wrote, “I don’t want to go to war, but I will go if my family is harmed. I didn’t go to Referendum in May because I didn’t think it was that serious. I saw what Ukrainian Army did to Mariupol citizens on the 9 of May. I used to work back then. People with Ukrainian flags and stripes on their sleeves opened a fire on defenseless people. The people they shot were mostly elderly. This was at the Memorial Day to commemorate Mariupol’s Liberation from the Nazis.

“People began to run and hide where it was possible. Some of them ducked in the shops and a nearby hairdressing salon. In the city center, the worst shooting occurred. I helped people to get to the hospital for free without any hesitation. I did five trips to the hospital and back. My car was full of blood. But that didn’t matter to me then. Now I hope that I saved some people’s lives.

“In spite of all this, I didn’t go to the Referendum. I wanted to live in Novorossia, but I don’t know anyone who I can trust really. For several years I worked as a taxi driver, now I don’t. It is entirely dangerous. I am talking not only about losing your car, it is a common practice for soldiers to take away cars they like for their own use. If I am not mistaken, it is legal now. I am calling it dangerous because you can be shot, blown up or you can witness a crime the Ukrainian Army commits and killed for it. In July in the morning, I was taking two young men from Melekino to Mariupol, and we were stopped at a blockpost by very rude young Ukrainian speaking soldiers.

“They asked to show us our passports. My passengers didn’t have any documents on them. So they were taken out of the car and soldiers beat them with the butts of their rifles. The soldiers shouted at those men and abased them. They made them get on their knees and threatened to kill them. I was left in the car. After about 20 minutes the soldiers let my passengers go. They promised to kill them next time if they did not have documents. Another time I saw one young woman that was grabbed out of her car. She was stopped at the Volodarskiy blockpost. She was about 25 or so. She was in jeans shorts and a sexy T-shirt. Soldiers began to flirt with her, invite her for a cup of coffee, but she refused and they grabbed her and threw her into a black car. I don’t know what happened later, but I can imagine.”

Ann, 42 years old in Mariupol said: “I am shocked because of all those things which are happening. This war broke my life. I was looking forward to the referendum very much. I was happy to go there to vote for our freedom from this crazy country “Ukraine”. I realized after watching what was happening in Slavyansk in April and here in Mariupol on the 9th of May that fascist (Kiev)government wouldn’t let us go without bloodshed.

“I thought I was ready morally for war, but no, I couldn’t even imagine the horror of the ATO. We have to live, work, and study surrounded by heavy weapons.

“I remember one day when my 13-years old daughter was at school and I was at work. The skirmishes and firing began in the city. At the same time, my daughter was supposed to come home, and I thought I would die while I didn’t hear her voice and she could tell me that she was ok.

“She saw a lot of armed people who shouted at several people to get on the ground. One of them was a woman. They pointed their guns at those people and all people near the soldiers. The traffic was blocked so my daughter came back home on foot. That happened in front of the tram station. After that, I didn’t allow my daughter to go to school for days. I was afraid that she could be killed in one of those military operations. There are a lot of them now as because our town is occupied by Ukrainian mercenaries (Azov is has a foreign mercenary component). There are many more operations and these actions are more dangerous, bloody, and unprincipled.

“Battalions like “Azov” are especially fierce and brutal. They kill people, ruin their houses, steal everything from household appliances to clothes and jewelry. We don’t go out in the evenings. The streets are almost empty. I am afraid even at home because soldiers can break into citizens’ houses at any time they want. They have permission to do it from the Ukrainian government.

“I lost my job. I worked as a dermatologist and cosmetologist in one salon. Now it is closed and I don’t know how I will live with my daughter.

“Every day we see new units of APCs, tanks, and trucks loaded with soldiers in the town. We hear different gossip about bombing. Every day we prepare ourselves to die. It’s the worst nightmare. But I hope that it will be the end of this mess.”

Since Azov Battalion is part of the Ukrainian army and in charge of special police under the Internal Affairs Ministry’s Arsen Avakov, refusing to comply with orders to pull back by Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy is mutiny in the time of war.

According to UAWire, On October 1, the Trilateral Contact Group agreed on the withdrawal of forces at Zolote and Petrovske. The synchronous withdrawal of troops should have begun on October 7 and end on October 11, but the ceasefire was not observed.

Instead of complying with the Minsk Agreement supervised by the OSCE, they are taking more neutral territory. Zelenskiy’s visit to the village of Zolote only shows that military and police groups under Ukrainian government control are not under government control. In every other country, the resistance he met would end up with disarming and arresting the mutineers and trials for them and their leaders.

According to the Kiev Post Andriy Biletsky, head of National Corps and the Azov Battalion threatened Zelensky on his YouTube channel that more veterans would head to Zolote if the president tried to evict them from the town. “There will be thousands there instead of several dozen,” he said.

Meanwhile, National Police Deputy Chief Vadym Troyan, who was previously Biletsky’s deputy in Azov in 2014, reported on Oct. 27 that the veterans had removed their weapons from Zolote. Troyan claimed the veterans had held the weapons legally, although military officials had previously stated the opposite.

Singer Sofia Fedyna, who is a lawmaker with the European Solidarity party of former President Petro Poroshenko, which has 27 seats in parliament, was particularly aggressive in her response. She issued physical threats against Zelensky.

“Mr. President thinks he is immortal,” she said in a video shared on Facebook. “A grenade may explode there, by chance.

Ukraine’s Zelenskiy went to Zolote to set the Azov battalion mutineers straight and instead, Ukraine’s strongman put on a grade school level dog and pony show complete with subpar acting.

At odds with groups that threatened his life, the president of Ukraine went into a house to look for weapons without his security detail. There were Azov members inside who until that point ignored his presence there. Why wasn’t he concerned given the level of threats he faces?

This excerpt is from nationalist volunteer effort supporting extremist battalions like Azov just as Azov was rejected for funding by Congress:

“As I’m sure you know, these three Magiare not only our lovely commanders of the volunteer battalions Donbas, Myrotvorets, and Dnipro-1, they are also newly-baked parliamentarians from Samopomich and Narodny Front. And they are in DC this week to meet with congressmen and military officials and talk about how to defend Ukraine. At this very moment, Russia is training a 30,000 army in the occupied eastern territories and stuffing the region with its weapons, and Semenchenko asks for OUR HELP!”

“Remember, Ukraine is not only defending itself but also peace in Europe, and the alliance between the US and its biggest friend, Europe, as well as international law.”

This is a facebook post from the UCCA when they were lobbying for Azov. But what are the UCCA Ukrainian-American politics like? They led the charge to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016. Are they Democrats? Democrats don’t worship Nazi mass murderers.

Accordingly and in the UCCA’s own words the mass murderer and Nazi war criminal

“Stepan Bandera remains a symbol of strength and righteousness for his followers, and his political ideals, his loyalty to his nation and to the principles of freedom continue to inspire Ukrainians today.”

American Ukrainian nationalists don’t like democracy. They don’t understand the concept of it and don’t care to learn. But they do understand nationalist fascism where only the top of society matters. They are behind the actors of the Intelligence coup going on in the US today.

The attitudes they share can be best shown through US Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. Congresswoman Kaptur is known to be a progressive on domestic issues. The table turns as soon as anything touches her Galician roots. Although she claims Polish nationality, she visited her family’s homestead with her mother in W. Ukraine.

The following article’s title says it all. Congresswoman Kaptur is a Ukrainian nationalist. Ukrainian nationalists joined ISIS battalions in Syria and brought them back to Ukraine. She knows this. She celebrated her ISIS heroine live on C-SPAN.

Democrat Says Americans Owe Nazis for Suffering and Gives ISIS Eulogy on C-SPAN

She is not alone in Congress, policy, or advisory positions in the US government. Ukrainian nationalists subscribe to a two-tier nationalism in which while they work to gain the positions they do, their first priority is maintaining a nationalist Ukrainian people. They serve any country they belong to until they feel their “Ukrainian-ness” is threatened, which is against their real political life, language, and since 1991 it’s their right to remake Ukraine in their image.

Since the 2014 coup, they’ve found they can remake their host countries into their image too, thanks to the IO they’ve been taught. Ukrainian nationalism was designed to inculcate all the Diaspora children into worship of the Bandera cult. From the end of WWII until today, children are brought up to model their lives after this monster to defend Ukrainian-ness or Ukrainian nationalism. They are better than citizens in their host countries.

In 1936 the OUN publication, The Nationalist, stated its position pretty clearly about the United States to the native groups that revolved around the UCCA after the war as well as the position they deserved in society.

“Nationalism is the love of country and the willingness to sacrifice for her…A person brought up as a Ukrainian Nationalist will make a one hundred percent better AMERICAN CITIZEN than one who is not.

Was it Nazis or Fascism that guided Washington, Lincoln, or other statesmen to make the U.S. a world power? Or was it American Nationalism?”

This was literally 3 years after Stepan Bandera ordered the attempted assassination of a sitting president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt for rejecting Ukrainian nationalist groups and his lack of willingness to support Adolf Hitler.

The last living WWII Ukrainian nationalist leader ruled the Diaspora until her death in 2003. Her life was a model for all Ukrainian Diaspora children. The import of how all this relates to Azov Battalion and Donbass will be clear soon.

“The goal of the ABN,” she (Stetsko) said, “is to pressure the U.S. government toward a “liberation’ policy aimed against the USSR, with ABN leaders as the liberators. Although ABN members say they only need technical assistance from the West, they want the U.S. military to put them in power in Eastern Europe and the USSR. This is the formula they tried under German Nazi sponsorship.”

Jumping to 1988, an article in the Jewish Weekly forced the resignation of six Republican leaders from George HW Bush’s campaign, because of their Nazi ties. All of them were members of the Republican Heritage Groups Council.

In a May 1988 interview, Mrs. Stetsko was asked: “What do you hope your impact to be in the U.S. on the elections coming up this November?

Slava Stetsko: “Our people here are not electing a Democrat or a Republican. They are electing a man or woman who has some kind of integrity. They try to learn what ideas he or she represents and stands for. Men or women of great caliber and values we are giving our votes in the U .S. We consider that the U.S. needs great men, strong men, for the benefit not only of the U. S. but for all countries of the world. It is our interest to support good and strong people, and have them in Congress and in the government.”

Slava Stetsko never had US citizenship. She was the leader of the ABN and OUN (b).

The importance of this background is understanding phrases like “a man or woman who has some kind of integrity” is someone that won’t get in the way of their Ukrainian nationalist-ness and support them to achieve their political goals. This was the payoff they were going to get supporting Hillary Clinton. They were able to set up soft nationalism in Ukraine under Bill Clinton.

According to Wikipedia, Mrs. Stetsko returned to Ukraine in July 1991. The following year, she formed and became a chairman of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (CUN), the political party that was established in Ukraine on the basis of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which she also led for the last decade.

This is where the Azov and Pravy Sektor story starts. In 1994 Dimitro Yarosh formed Tryzub as the militant wing of Slava Stetsko’s party. In 2014, he incorporated many of the other nationalist groups into Pravy Sektor.

Today, Yarosh is the commander of the all the volunteer army groups. Sanctioning just Azov leaves the principal criminal groups untouched.

When Slava Stetsko moved to Ukraine, she took her husband’s (Yaroslav Stetsko) secretary Roman Zvarych with them.

Zvarych is a Ukrainian-American Diaspora transplant and only living link to the Stetskos today. Born in Yonkers, New York to Soviet émigré parents that came to the United States during World War II, he grew up steeped in 1930s political nationalism.

To attain that position in the Diaspora culture, Zvarych’s family is at the top of Diaspora royalty along with the Paslowskys, Chalupas, and Banderas.

According to former Defense and State Department advisor during the George W. Bush administration, Kristofer Harrison in 2015 Zvarych appeared as “Azov Battalion’s spokesman.”

On 15 March 2018 to take the place of Valery Pakzkan who had just been elected head of the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine for Petr Poroshenko’s bloc. Poroshenko is a longtime friend and ally. He was also entangled deeply with Slava Stetsko.

This brings us back to the Intel coup going on in the US. When Congress initially rejected funding Azov back then despite its neo-nazism and real Nationalist ties, the IO planner pleaded that his little group be reinstated. Harding works directly for and with the Ukrainian American Diaspora which is trying to depose the sitting president, Donald Trump.

Congressman, the Azov battalion uses symbology reminiscent of Neo-Nazis, but the Azov Battalion is neither full of Neo-Nazis nor do they engage in Neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic or Racially prejudiced behavior, and I have watched them, consistently, for close to 18 months. If you were to apply the same logic to Russia, much of the Russian Army are Neo-Nazis.-Joel Harding

The obvious point is Azov battalion is a symptom of a much deeper problem in the US and Ukraine. Voting to allow funding or training to “volunteer” armies is funding Dimitro Yarosh and his ambitions.

This is the mentality and politics the Diaspora is pushing into American politics today. Hillary Clinton and the DNC is surrounded with this infection which even includes political advisors.

Rest assured they all the related Diasporas are in a fight for their political lives. If Donald Trump wins, their ability to infect American politics might be broken. Many of the leadership will be investigated for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States.

This is all or nothing.

Any Congressman who supports this is showing their hand and that they are against American Democracy just as the Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America (UCCA) was set up to be.

All funding to Ukraine needs to be put in check until the lobby groups with ties to Ukraine’s volunteer armies and Congressional junkets and PAC donations are investigated. This should be done everywhere a new Color Revolution pops up.

Why is Ukraine’s new president allowed to blatantly lie about the current situation in Ukraine?

When an investigation is done, even topical facts show Ukraine provoked the Donbass region to split so Ukraine could start its halted genocidal action against the eastern side of the country. Taking up arms was the only way to stop this. Forming LNR and DNR was the only way to get any political representation against an enemy that was formed in the bowels of the Ukrainian Diaspora’s rancid politics.