The Biden administration has lifted a ban on arms shipments to the Ukrainian military unit known as the Azov Brigade, a former militia with ties to far-right hate groups. The State Department said Tuesday a thorough review turned up no evidence the brigade’s members have committed human rights abuses. The Azov Brigade was founded in 2014 by a self-avowed neo-Nazi and white supremacist. Meanwhile, delegates from 90 nations are set to gather in Switzerland this weekend for a Ukraine peace summit, though Russia and key nations, including China, will not be participating. Swiss President Viola Amherd on Monday outlined the summit’s goals.
President Viola Amherd: “We want to discuss ways for a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine based on international law and the U.N. Charter. We want to develop a common understanding for a possible framework to reach this goal. And we want to decide on a schedule together how both parties can be tied into a future peace process.”
It’s a bad article anyway. It’s not wrong in the words it uses, but they purposely left out most of the political dynamics after 2014. Context and full history is important.
The Volkswagen is of actual Nazi origin, but that doesn’t seem to ruffle any feathers these days.
Now, if you really want to hear something confusing, there are Russian citizen units that actually are fully far-right, are open about it, are fighting against Russia and using Ukraine as a staging point for incursions into Russia.
There is plenty of things to complain about in that part of the world, for sure. Considering Ukraine is being invaded, we can put some political gripes on pause for a second. Ukraine needs every person it can get right now as long as they are fighting for similar enough causes. The past can be addressed soon enough but it won’t matter if there is no Ukraine left to resolve those issues.
It’s also worthy of note that this specific messaging has been amplified 10x by Russian media and I am sure plenty of half-truths have been implanted as fact in many articles and stories. Unless I missed something, there wasn’t a listed author for that article. Given that it is essentially a cherry picked blurb out of Wikipedia, makes the actual purpose of it suspect. (However, I have seen many times where author names are left off of controversial articles. It’s likely a safety thing.)