Russia's one of the main reason for attacking Ukraine is the development of Nazism. How far it is correct has been explained below:
In Luhansk, pretty much everyone is a NAZI sympathizer, so to speak, but you have two brands. On the one side, you have Russian-speaking immigrants to the region who moved there in the Soviet era. On the other side, you have bi-lingual residents who are basically Ukrainians who were part of the Russification of the region but held onto their Ukrainian culture.
The Russian speakers that moved in the last generation have politicians that support Russia. The natives support Ukraine.
The form of kleptocracy practiced in the region is outright fascist oligarchy and both sides follow the political practices.
Both sides have a religious dogma that makes them anti-Semitic. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) in particular is a serious force with the Russian emigrants to the region being pro-Russian, anti-Semitic, and pro-integration. During the Soviet hold on the area, the church aided Sovietization. Ukrainian nationalists hate these people and their priests but have their own set of anti-Semitic priests. To an outsider, it can be very confusing as to which patriarch chain group belongs to, and those chains change hands sometimes — at one point Moscow-Ukrainian was a Serbian prefectural connection. Ukrainian chains reached Kyiv and Odesa. So you have a religious, ethnic, social, and linguistic quagmire and basically, everyone in the region is unhappy with everyone else.
Most Luhansk citizens of either group have no wish to be part of the new Russian empire. None of this would have been an issue except the Russian invasions of 2014 seriously set the sides feuding again in a biblical manner. And as expected the newly formed Azov militia went off the rails just as the Russian-backed separatists did, and war crimes were the result on both sides. There was a difference though, the Russians felt they could use a unit willing to kill everyone in a village, while Ukrainians did not want to have this problem to deal with - they killed selectively. Both are crimes and should be condemned.
The GOP congress in 2014 was anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine, and willing to overlook the NAZI background of the Azov, while the democrats wanted to block funds. So there was a point when the US was of two minds on Azov. Nowadays the so-called Freedom Caucus is pro-NAZI, pro-Russia, and anti-Democratic, and thus use Azov as their kicking boy, but neither Matt Gaetz nor Taylor Greene was able to find Luhansk on a map and none could name the main religion of Ukraine, ignorance runs deep as Taylor Greene mumbled that they were a bunch of NAZI Jews, which is absurd. The irony of American fascists complaining about a country they call “Ukraine” claiming that Ukrainian speakers are fascists and Russian speakers are “MAGA believers” (MUGA?) has been noted often by watchers.
Ukraine had a problem that was pretty complex. They needed Azov to fight. If Ukrainian closed out the Azov “brigade”, the bad actors would simply become independent criminals and commit the same atrocities on the Russian speakers as the Russians were doing to Ukrainians. However, the unit was hurting relations with the US in 2014–2015, so Ukraine compromised and tried to keep them on the straight path. They converted the unit to part of the territorials (national guard), pulled them from the front lines, replaced their leaders, and moved them to fight Russian-funded Titushky away from their home region. Being bilingual and able to tell a Russian speaker from someone who learned Russian in school, the unit began to throw off its images as a NAZI group and even was trained by US and Canadian special operations troops. The current CO of the now brigade size unit estimates about 20% of the new recruits each cycle are NAZI, so the unit holds special classes for members to convert hard-line fascism to the appreciation of the Ukrainian democracy, which has seemed to work.
Recently they captured a group of Russian commandos who were murdering college students because of their knowledge of the language (the Russian accent Ukrainian was obvious to them) and they have been able to move into Russian-held-back areas and ambush Russian units because their facility with idiomatically correct Russian and Ukrainian. They have not been implicated in atrocities for years, and are just another professional territorial unit, although extremely motivated.
Like all units with a fascist background, they have to be monitored to make sure their cadre keeps them properly on the democratic track.
During the administration of Viktor Yanukovych there was growing unrest among the general population of Ukraine. Russia, who supported Yanukovych financially, was insistent on a three-phase control of Ukraine. Basically, Russia insisted on a set of policies from the Soviet Period where there were strict legal separations between Ukrainian speakers, Russian speakers, speakers of other languages, and speakers of both languages. The goal of the Soviet period was to assure that Russian speakers, considered ethnic Russians, were always provided superior economic, political, and social control of regions considered to be populated by minority groups. This was maintained with the rise of Putin.
At the same time though Russian and Ukrainian speakers in Ukraine began to feel more “Ukrainian nationality” than “Russian ethnics” or “Ukrainian ethnics.” This process was very subtle, but was seen with alarm by Yanukovych who knew that only by maintaining the Russian Federal policy could he stay in power. As an aside, this process of awakening in Ukraine would lead to the election of Zelenskyy who is a Russian-speaking, Jewish, educated urbane man from Kryvyi Rih - which is an expression of pluralism and democratic spirit that was amazing to me when it happened and showed that Ukrainians saw themselves as Ukrainians no matter what their religion or ethnicity was.
With the rapid pluralism, Yanukovvych put money into a Russian-speaking police force that was called Titushky, whose goal was to track down and arrest so-called “liberal intellectuals.” What actually happened was violence that shocked Ukrainians and further alienated Yanukovych, who was locked into a hard line by Russia's demands on his solving the issue with an iron fist. The Titushky who were Russian speakers but bilingual (with a peculiar accent that Azov is famous for being able to detect), operated in plain clothing and used their bilingual skills to infiltrate and disappear people in the various college communities in central and eastern Ukraine. They were recruited from the east from exactly the same regions as Azov.
Along comes, Maidan and the Titusky are no longer officially sanctioned, but they grow especially violent and start to specialize in false flag terror attacks with the loss of government sanctions. Their special skill was killing Russian speakers and leaving evidence that it was Ukrainian speakers who did it, attacking Jews and placing blame on Ukraine speakers, and killing Ukrainians and placing blame on Jews. During Maidan, their funding from Ukraine ended and they were paid by Russia and operated as a mercenary unit.
For several years efforts to end their violence were ineffective, however, their own efforts to create false flag outrages were likewise seen by the local populations as a reason to band together as Ukrainian rather than by ethnic identification. My friend who worked for Interpol called it a growing “Jeanne d’ Arc” movement where people became intensely patriotic and suspicious of the motives of Russia, especially when Titushky under orders of Moscow elevated their outrages to kidnapping and torture of children. A dead Russian speaking child dumped in a field with words carved in its body in Ukrainian was just to far for the people of Central and South Ukraine, although the press at the time, recovering from the Yanukovych era rarely reported these deeds in a clear manner.
During the 2014 invasion of Ukraine by Russia what would be the Azov Brigade rose from an anti-Semitic, bilingual, anti-Russian orthodox, group in the east who were essentially marked for ethnic cleansing by Russia, who saw their unwillingness to focus on Russian and their hatred of the Moscow / Ukraine orthodox church patriarchy as a non-starter for the Russian model that the Kremlin was working toward. The Azov fought savagely, brutally, and with no human concern for the carnage they caused— exactly how Russian-backed forces did to them. This led to two issues for Ukraine. They were incredibly effective at what they did. They were also absolutely against the new Ukraine ideal of multicultural pluralism. The first was ok, but the second had to change.
What was done with Azov was genius. Its leaders were mostly sacked and replaced by Ukraine patriotic hardmen who had academic backgrounds and were themselves bilingual. The soldiers in Azov were then required to go through ethnic sensitivity training that was about as granola and hippy as you can imagine. One of their touchstones was weirdly enough James Mattis, a USMC general who emphasized cultural training for soldiers. Azov brigade went from being an out-of-control war crime unit to slowly becoming an elite special operations light infantry unit.
To get them away from where they had conflicts, they were transferred to the same region Russian -backed Tishtusky terror cells were operating, and they tore these terrorists apart. They worked with Canadian and United States special operations soldiers to hone their infantry skills, but what they had naturally was an amazing ability to detect a person who was not who they said they were by language and culture. American trainers reported that they were like a really sharp scalpel in the hands of a dedicated surgeon. They would seem like a bunch of college kids, but when they found someone they would follow them and develop information on them until they captured them suddenly. If they resisted, they died. Otherwise, they used their captures to find the next cell and wrapped up Tishtusky.
It should be noted that Azov today works all over Ukraine and scare Russia absolutely shitless. They captured and killed a Wagner assassination team aimed at Zelenskyy, killed a set of Spretznaz trying to capture air defense assets to shoot down an international airplane and literally killed them in a high-speed chase. They decimated several Chechen units, and now have this specialization of killing generals. An operation outside of Kharkiv saw them destroy several security platoons and kill an entire brigade command post.
As for Tishtusky, rumors are it still exists, but if they do they are not very effective, and two possible members were caught calling in fire missions on Lviv.
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