Vladislav Davidzon
Tablet, July 11, 2023
“So it needs to be stated outright in an unambiguous and axiomatic fashion: There exists no serious neo-Nazi threat in Ukraine. None at all.”
It was deeply exasperating and disappointing to read the latest screed published in The Forward regarding neo-Nazi influence within the now-infamous Ukrainian Azov battalion. The article, from Mr. Lev Golinkin, was necessarily both exasperating and disappointing to anyone who cares about these issues, and about Ukraine. It was, however, especially disappointing to me, a onetime contributor to The Forward, where I published my first reviews as a fledgling literary critic. The unceasing attacks on the heroic defenders of Ukraine in the midst of the Kremlin’s genocidal war are merely the latest indicator of its protracted decline into irrelevancy.
As multiple Ukrainians and Ukraine experts, including me, have tirelessly explained, the independent Azov battalion was indeed founded a decade ago by some very unpleasant men with often-questionable politics, at the moment when the basically defenseless Ukrainian state desperately needed to mobilize volunteers to fight the regular Russian army. The volunteer battalion would be very shortly assimilated into the Ukrainian armed forces. Doubtless, there still exist characters within Azov’s ranks with all sorts of unsavory beliefs, and some of them will be very happy to roll up their sleeves and to flex their pagan rune tattoos if you go drinking with them, as they have for me. But the battalion has long since been domesticated and taken under the firm supervision of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.
Though the name of the fighting force remains, it is now a professional and elite special force that is led into battle by officers selected from the regular army recruitment pool. Those officers rise through the army ranks based not on ideology but rather on strict fidelity to the chain of command, which ends at the desk of Ukraine’s Jewish commander in chief.
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