German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.
I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?
Have you any pictures of Azov with swastika, black sun, or such after they got integrated into the national guard?
Or is that just a convenient propaganda line to make you support an imperial aggressor fielding tons of fascist militias, itself being a mafia state slowly but surely turning fascist?
Have you any pictures of Azov with swastika, black sun, or such since 2014?
The Black Sun and Wolfsangel have been right on their fucking shit rag of a flag until last year, you fascist turd.
JFC the entire first page of your comments is nothing but nazi apologia, fick dich du kranke Faschosau.
Hey rember when they just got those new leopard tanks and some rascal painted a bunch of iron crosses on them, which libs insisted was from obscure world War 1 battalion and not where literally everybody knows the iron cross from, to the point the German government said they weren’t gonna keep giving them weapons if that shit didn’t stop
Leopards come with iron crosses by default, it’s the fucking signet of the fucking Bundeswehr. This is a Bundeswehr tank. These are three Bundeswehr tanks.
Cossack crosses are very similar.
It’s not just iron crosses, he’s thinking of the balkenkreuzes that are being painted on tanks. The symbol Germany stopped using after WWII.
Yeah that’s an IFF symbol. The Russians aren’t doing calligraphy with their Zs either. It’s something that soldiers paint with a brush in the field.
Zs aren’t an old Nazi symbol. The balkenkreuz is.
The Balkenkreuz goes back to the Teutonic Order. The Nazis used it a lot which is why the Bundeswehr didn’t, but that doesn’t mean that painting a cross in a rush makes you a Nazi.
Seriously, what do you think soldiers in the field trying to not get shot at by their own guys are thinking about. I’ll give you a hint: Whether it’s more important to be camouflaged to the enemy or identifiable for friendlies, that’s it. Ukraine is using a simplified version of the Cossack Cross for that purpose, it’s a native part of their symbolism and easily distinguishable from the stuff Russians use. If everything that looks like a cross is now a Balkenkreuz and therefore Nazi you might want to take it up with various Christian Churches.
Oh and just for the record you’ll get arrested in Germany for showing the Z in a Russia/Ukraine context, including as a St. George Ribbon.
The Balkenkreuz goes back to the Teutonic Order. The Nazis used it a lot which is why the Bundeswehr didn’t, but that doesn’t mean that painting a cross in a rush makes you a Nazi.
This is “swastikas are Buddhist symbols” level of mental gymnastics.
Lmao this response is up there with “the black sun isn’t nazi it’s an ancient symbol” and “azov’s wolfsangel is actually an N and an I which stands for ‘Idea of the Nation’”.
You’re a fascist mate and should stop fucking pretending otherwise. You’re the worst crypto-fascist I’ve ever seen.
The black sun got removed in 2015, this is the new one. But, go on, spin random bullshit.
JFC the entire first page of your comments is nothing but nazi apologia
Yeah I happen to be arguing with another fascism-trivialising hexbear idiot in another thread.
Bruh that’s basically a swastika
Why carry water for a fascist group just do the lib thing and call them bad apples and move on ffs
It’s really sus
Have you gone to an optometrist lately. It’s a Wolfsangel.
Here, another swastika. Notice the three hooks pointing counter-clockwise?
ah yes, the wolfsangel… about that…
Haha, have you gone to an optometrist lately?
That’s not a symbol of racism, that’s the confederate battle flag, you blind fool, lol.
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/wolfsangel
Wonder why a Slavic army unit is using SS division tags with German roots
Yawn
I don’t care man you can keep huffing paint if you want you’re still carrying water for fascists
Can’t you hexbears read the thread before you’re posting. Double-posting, even.
You didn’t answer it then either.
Why would someone move from the swastika to another German symbol used by the SS?
There are infinite symbols and they chose that one.
Are you just that gullible to believe that’s innocent or what? Actually don’t answer, we both know this is a game to you.
They didn’t move from the Swastika the Wolfsangel was part of the Azov logo from the very start.
Pre-integration: The letters “Azov”, Wolfsangel, black sun, some waves, and the Ukrainian trident.
Post-integration: The letters “Azov”, Wolfsangel.
…the trident also vanished, presumably because it’s already on the other patch they’re wearing, anyway. Inb4 “waah that’s a torch Nazis used torches the Ukrainian National Guard is Nazis”.
PS: the Aryan Nations use this exact same symbol.
I wonder why… must be unrelated, right?
The black sun got removed in 2015, this is the new one. But, go on, spin random bullshit.
The Azov Brigade’s official magazine is titled “Black Sun newspaper” which it produces and distributes to several tens of thousands within the Ukrainian military still uses the black sun, because it’s literally the fucking name of the publication.
Some but not all of them are available here: https://archive.org/details/black_sun/
Given that this archived collection goes up to 2017, you are full of shit.
Yeah no that’s indefensible and the original editor in chief is nuts (google translate from the Ukrainian wikipedia page):
This is an old Ukrainian sign, which means a force aimed at destroying all the old and restoring the new. There is another version of its origin: the black sun is the period of the year when water acquires special life-giving qualities. This usually happened at night, when there was no sun, but since the nutritional properties were always associated only with it, our ancestors nicknamed this time the black sun. There is no hint of hostile ideology here, this is our Ukrainian symbol, which has a sacred meaning.
— Mark Melnyk (“Viry”), editor-in-chief of the publication
Couldn’t find out when it was discontinued, the azov.press domain certainly is dysfunctional. Azov’s official news feed seems to be here.
Could neither find out how official the whole thing was, either, and especially not in the crucial post-incorporation times. They might just have continued to operate independently.
Still, though: Is current-day Azov out there doing Nazi things? Ultimately that’s the only question that matters. Of course from the Russian perspective yes it is according to Russian propaganda everyone opposed to Russia (and that includes being opposed to being invaded) is a Nazi.
Couldn’t find out when it was discontinued
The magazine is produced by Azov’s political wing, the National Corps as of 2016, which has currently suspended activity during the war. It will spin up its political wing again afterwards. Links and references in the other comment I sent here.
the azov.press domain certainly is dysfunctional
This started redirecting to Nackor.org in 2016 when the National Corps was started.
Oh and I can prove Azov are still distributing this free taster archive of the magazine via nackor.org, which is where the previous azov.press site migrated to later on. Here is a January 2022 archived page where you can see Azov are still giving away that selection of the magazine for free via their political spinoff the “National Corps”, this is one of several of their party websites: https://web.archive.org/web/20220409062917/https://nackor.org/ru/z-dnem-sobornosti-ukraini
Reference for National Corps being directly linked to Azov: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/13/ukraine-far-right-national-militia-takes-law-into-own-hands-neo-nazi-links
It is the regiment’s official political wing and has only suspended political activity during wartime.
nackor.org, which is where the previous azov.press site migrated to later on.
nackor.org is a gambling website now it seems. Certainly not a news outlet, certainly not from the outside.
Reference for National Corps being directly linked to Azov
Wikipedia. Yes they’re certainly linked the National Corps is the home of Azov’s Nazis.
…squinting at things and considering that National Corps ceased activity in 2022 (to go to the front) it doesn’t seem too unlikely that they gave up on nackor.org and the successor to the Black Sun. I guess (really, guess) that it was run by National Corps for the longest time after Azov got integrated.
Anyhow are you seeing those election results. I can’t blame Ukrainians for not being too worried about them getting into power.
nackor.org is a gambling website now it seems. Certainly not a news outlet, certainly not from the outside.
This is just a landing page that is displayed by the server host when a site can’t be accessed. It’s probably just down, wayback has archives as recently this month.
Anyhow are you seeing those election results. I can’t blame Ukrainians for not being too worried about them getting into power.
This is an american’s childlike view of politics, in particular it is one that has no understanding of political vanguardism and how absolutely tiny quantities of people can have incredibly outsized influences politically. The UK was pushed into leaving the EU by a political party with 0.2% of the seats that year on year received just 3% of the vote.
What you need to do is not view fascists as one political party, they’re several spread out over multiple channels performing vanguardism through multiple methods because it has a far stronger effect. The goal is not to win elections. The goal is to create political forces in motion that move fascists through positions of power in all ways. Liberals think of institutions in the form of “win election and then you get to do your manifesto” but power doesn’t just come from elections. Power comes from all elements of a state. The police. The administrative positions. The civil service. The judiciary. The businesses. Small local electoral positions. The media. The military. Etc etc etc. All of these elements can be hijacked without winning any major elections in any way whatsoever. They allow you to turn a country into whatever you want to turn it into because you are the voice of the country regardless of what you consider to be the intended “power” positions.
In essence, if you control the zeitgeist it doesn’t matter who wins elections, all politicians are stuck following the zeitgeist, they are subservient to it. If they do not serve the zeitgeist then they simply get tossed out… or killed.
Instead of leaning on these metrics I suggest an alternate method for getting a picture of the influence that fascists currently have in Ukraine and that is looking at the opinions of the total population now vs historic on various topics. One in particular I think you’ll find quite alarming is the shift in public opinion of Bandera, who I reckon you’re quite familiar with. See this article from a major Ukrainian polling agency. It finds that in 2012 support for Stepan Bandera was only 22%, this is a very good measure for us for what kind of influence the fascists had in Ukraine pre-2014 when the Maidan revolution occurred. Today, after the changes and promotion of his fascist beliefs, the lionisation of him and the remaking of Ukraine that has been underway since Maidan, that support is now 74%. Quote:
In particular, the attitudes that gradually improved are the ones towards Ivan Mazepa (44% in 2012 and 76% in 2022), Simon Petliura (26% in 2012 and 49% in 2022) and Stepan Bandera (22% in 2012 and 74% in 2022).
For any bystanders interested in why this metric is valuable. Stepan Bandera was leader of the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), this organisation collaborated with the nazis in ww2 and killed tens of thousands of jews during the holocaust, it was regarded by the Nazi SS as extreme and particularly brutal even by their standards and I should not need to explain to anyone how evil the SS were.
This is what vanguardism can achieve. You do not need elections to become the dominant ideology of a country. You take over various non-electoral parts of the structure and become the zeitgeist itself and this is all while ignoring the fact that fascists exist within the main parties as well, you see this with your own eyes in America where people at all levels of the structure are having a major influence in the fascist direction, in both electoral and non-electoral positions.
You need to reassess in your head what power actually means. There are many ways to wield it. Liberals often have a misguided perspective that politics = elections when the reality is quite different, elections are a steam valve for society to let off what would be revolutionary energy every few years through a process of giving people “choice”. They’re not what power is though when the choice is created through far greater forces of influence developed across society on multiple fronts. For a more marxist interpretation of them as a whole this is a strong video.
I additionally strongly recommend the (now suppressed and hard to find) documentary Ukraine on Fire (not to be confused with the propaganda film created to drown it out, Winter On Fire) which released before the war so it’s largely free of the fog of war propaganda. It’s not marxist but gives a fairly good overview of Maidan and influences within it.
There’s another documentary I want to re-find too but am struggling with, might edit if I do find it. There’s also another video I wanted to include in this of the far right occupying the rada, locking the doors and refusing to leave until the vote they want is performed. I can’t find this but if I mention it here someone might remember what it’s in, it’s a good example of what power you can have without electoralism.
This is just a landing page that is displayed by the server host when a site can’t be accessed. It’s probably just down, wayback has archives as recently this month.
Domain registrant is Domains by proxy, nothing to get there. The logo though is favbet which is a Ukrainian gambling company. Seems like they took over the domain to direct traffic their way, it’s exactly the kind of slimy but legal thing you’d expect gambling companies to do.
Last magazine landing page on wayback is June 2022, first gambling landing page June 2023. Domain must’ve lapsed somewhere in between, which tracks with National Corps getting out of politics.
This is an american’s childlike view of politics, in particular it is one that has no understanding of political vanguardism and how absolutely tiny quantities of people can have incredibly outsized influences politically. The UK was pushed into leaving the EU by a political party with 0.2% of the seats that year on year received just 3% of the vote.
Dude calling me a yank was uncalled for. I’m German, have a look at the AfD when you want to know what having issues with Nazis looks like. (Or, for that matter, the Republican party). And Ukraine, much unlike the UK (or USA) doesn’t have a FPTP system, it’s proportional so poll numbers actually mean something. Also that vanguard that pushed for Brexit was Etonians not wanting to declare their taxes, the EU had new rules on tax havens coming up.
Also as a body politic the Brits are muppets. They fucking had a referendum on introducing proportional representation and voted against it, can you believe that. Egged on by Russian assets when it comes to Brexit I wouldn’t deny it but they’re perfectly capable of being bellends all on their own.
In essence, if you control the zeitgeist it doesn’t matter who wins elections,
And, do they? Svoboda, Right Sector, all are deeply unpopular in Ukraine. The people’s consensus is some liberal democratic EU-aligned thing, and safety from Russia, not a far-right resurgence. Poroshenko types, that is, electable kind of ring wing, is limited to “gays are icky church good” type of conservatism, but without wanting to murder them. And the SBU currently has its hands full sniffing out Russian collaborators so they’re probably not very interested in what a splattering of Nazis with close to zero public backing do at the printing press.
Stepan Bandera
Bandera is a complicated topic, and not distinguishing between Bandera the Nazi (collaborator) and antisemite and Bandera the national hero is disingenuous. Ukraine also has the lowest rate of antisemitism among eastern European states and a Jew is President, witch actually higher approval ratings than Bandera. But yes I’d very much prefer Makhno… alas he wasn’t terribly successful and whose fault was that, I give you a hint: That of a vanguard.
I kind of view Bandera in the same way as Churchill who, by all means, was a monster of a politician. And not in the positive way ask e.g. Bengals. Or take the founding fathers as worshipped by Americans, (nearly? not sure about the details) all of them slave owners in one way or the other yet we don’t commonly call people with a Washington boner advocates of slavery. Stauffenberg was a monarchist yet he’s getting honoured by the Bundeswehr, trying to assassinate Hitler washes over his iffy politics.
You need to reassess in your head what power actually means.
You’re talking to an Anarchist. And recommend Marxist analysis. I think I’ll pass on being educated by a Marxist on, of all things, power.
Last magazine landing page on wayback is June 2022, first gambling landing page June 2023. Domain must’ve lapsed somewhere in between, which tracks with National Corps getting out of politics.
None of this really matters. You’re overly focused on “they stopped”. The fascists haven’t disappeared nor have they stopped promoting their views within society. Moving to different tactics isn’t a win for anyone, it’s like a person playing peekaboo by hiding behind their hands but somehow liberals actually think they’ve disappeared.
Also as a body politic the Brits are muppets. They fucking had a referendum on introducing proportional representation and voted against it, can you believe that.
Yes. I was there. The liberals caused it by calling for it immediately after Nick Clegg betrayed their voters on his one and only promise of not fucking over student fees, with students making up the majority of the base. The response to the proportional representation vote was largely coloured by the response to Clegg.
Egged on by Russian assets when it comes to Brexit I wouldn’t deny it but they’re perfectly capable of being bellends all on their own.
Nah not really. Libs love this shit but both we marxists and conservative eurosceptics had been promoting euroscepticism for 30+ years. The greatest foreign influence was american capitalists seeking to strip the country, which they’re still doing.
And, do they? Svoboda, Right Sector, all are deeply unpopular in Ukraine.
No. Again you are making a mistake. Votes are not popularity. 35% of people here in the UK support socialism (not social democracy, socialism) but that doesn’t translate to a socialist party getting those votes. Not because of a lack of popular but because there is considerable complexity in who gets those votes. If you’re German you know this, you know the voters leaving SPD for AfD aren’t doing so because AfD they agree with all of its politics but because they don’t see any other viable options to use and they want to punish the major parties to send a message.
Bandera is a complicated topic, and not distinguishing between Bandera the Nazi (collaborator) and antisemite and Bandera the national hero is disingenuous.
No it’s not. You are literally falling for the fascist propaganda now. This is one of many methods the fascists in ukraine have successfully laundered his image. You should be very concerned that if it is possible for the Ukrainian nationalists to do this with Bandera it is also possible for the German nationalists to do this with Hitler.
Ukraine also has the lowest rate of antisemitism among eastern European states and a Jew is President, witch actually higher approval ratings than Bandera.
Again irrelevant. Ukrainian fascism isn’t nazism. Much like Italian fascism was not, nor was Spanish nor Chilean, nor Indian etc etc. Fascism conforms to the national conditions and presents itself differently each time. The use of the word “nazis” here is just to communicate the level of threat really. Their main concern at the current point in time is eliminating the Russian ethnicity alongside the Roma, whose camps they have consistently destroyed and murdered throughout this war. Moving onto other targets like the high proportion of greeks in Donbass would follow, there have been a number of Greeks in donbass who have spoken out about the Ukrainians attacking them, particularly in mariupol they did not like them (you don’t need to watch all of this it’s just the only place I know of for this particular clip from Greek tv I wanted to share, the first 5 mins or so is worth your time though).
I kind of view Bandera in the same way as Churchill who, by all means, was a monster of a politician. And not in the positive way ask e.g. Bengals. Or take the founding fathers as worshipped by Americans, (nearly? not sure about the details) all of them slave owners in one way or the other yet we don’t commonly call people with a Washington boner advocates of slavery. Stauffenberg was a monarchist yet he’s getting honoured by the Bundeswehr, trying to assassinate Hitler washes over his iffy politics.
Churchill is a monster who should have been regarded as one, but was not because war. There’s a considerable difference between laundering someone without a reason and this.
If anything if you want a hero of Ukrainian nationalism then the real hero of Ukrainian nationalism is Lenin who created the country entirely.
Stauffenberg was a monarchist yet he’s getting honoured by the Bundeswehr, trying to assassinate Hitler washes over his iffy politics.
You’re being naive again. This is an excuse to honour him, because the people pushing the honouring know what kind of laundering effect it has on the figure and the ideology that figure represents.
You’re talking to an Anarchist. And recommend Marxist analysis. I think I’ll pass on being educated by a Marxist on, of all things, power.
I grew up in squats and spent 30 years of my life as an anarchist. We probably don’t differ politically as much as you think. I am an ML because we have a timelimit from the climate crisis that is going to see millions of refugees pour into europe very soon. The destabilisation this will cause will be on the scale of nothing we’ve ever seen before and only ML theory has the track record of revolution needed to save at least a some people in the coming chaos when the opportunities to seize states begin. You saw what just tens of thousands of Syrian refugees did to stability in Europe with your own eyes, in particular you must have seen this in Germany. You should know as well as I do exactly what tens of millions will cause. As an anarchist I could not sit by knowing my ideological toolkit was not equipped to try and deal with the death that is coming, and I could not sit around and think myself a moral person knowing exactly what the future holds yet not doing everything in my power to help people. The correct toolkit for the time limits we have is marxism leninism. Will I go back to the black afterwards? Possibly. I’ll cross that bridge when it comes as we have no idea what things will look like in the aftermath of it all.
I know full well why you’re an anarchist. But I really do ask you to wrestle with the question of what is equipped to save the most lives in all of this. States suck, we all dislike them, we’re all in the left because we want them abolished, marxists and anarchists both. But lives are what matter here.
It’s pretty obvious you’re talking to a Nazi, not an anarchist.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
If you’re German you know this, you know the voters leaving SPD for AfD aren’t doing so because AfD they agree with all of its politics but because they don’t see any other viable options to use and they want to punish the major parties to send a message.
Yeah and we don’t consider protests votes to be Nazis. 2/3rd of the current AfD poll numbers are protest votes btw, 47% want the party outlawed (and among the 47% who don’t are plenty saying “they should be dealt with otherwise”), and 10% of people polled to vote for the AfD want the AfD outlawed.
Back to Ukraine: Svoboda has exactly one seat. They can’t really be hateful Nazis people don’t like that, and they can’t go undercover as patriots either because being a patriot really isn’t a distinguishing factor while the whole democratic spectrum from left to right is fighting at the front.
No it’s not. You are literally falling for the fascist propaganda now. This is one of many methods the fascists in ukraine have successfully laundered his image. You should be very concerned that if it is possible for the Ukrainian nationalists to do this with Bandera it is also possible for the German nationalists to do this with Hitler.
I’ll be concerned if those 70% percent actually come even close to expressing fascist ideas. Again, back to the founding fathers: How many percent in the US see them positively, how many advocate for slavery?
You’re falling in a type of “big man” trap. Just because there was a (or more) big men in the past, and they did stuff, and now their memory is recalled, doesn’t mean that all of their memory is recalled. This is not Bandera controlling people, it’s people looking for some figure to represent national identity and, well, Bandera very much was a nationalist. Currently alive people project things into the past, not the other way around.
Back to Hitler and Germany: No. The conservatives have Bismarck and also Stauffenberg and such, leftists, if patriotic at all, are regionalists.
The use of the word “nazis” here is just to communicate the level of threat really.
No. The choice of words is due to Russian narratives saying “Anyone who opposes us is a Nazi”. I’ve seen too much Russian talking points being uncritically parroted by hexbears to believe otherwise. You know the type, “Kiev is ruled by Nazis” stuff.
Again irrelevant. Ukrainian fascism isn’t nazism.
Svoboda in particular was deeply anti-semitic before they toned it down because nobody liked it. Non-Antisemitic fascists also don’t tend to don Germanic symbolism, but that’s circumstantial.
Moving onto other targets like the high proportion of greeks in Donbass would follow, there have been a number of Greeks in donbass who have spoken out about the Ukrainians attacking them
From all I know that could be a Golden Dawn guy hating Ukrainians. The plural of anecdote is not data and that’s not even a plural. Generally speaking the idea of Ukraine as a multiethnic, and naturally multiethnic state, is very solidly anchored in Ukraine.
…even among the right. Which is why Svoboda and their more ethnophobic lines don’t fly well at all, attracting if at all protest votes. The consensus enemy is the Kremlin, and with the Kremlin actually attacking the previous split between ethnic Russians (“we need to try harder to be friends with them”) and the rest vanished. The Kremlin, unsurprisingly, interprets that as everyone being Nazi because if you’re marching on Moscow (figuratively speaking) you’re a Nazi because that’s what Nazis do.
If Ukraine is oh so Russophobic why do they have a Russian president, and why are very large portions of the army speaking Russian? Including Azov, btw.
You’re being naive again. This is an excuse to honour him, because the people pushing the honouring know what kind of laundering effect it has on the figure and the ideology that figure represents.
Nah it’s choosing an actual patriot over a madman, and giving cultural legitimisation, within the Bundeswehr, to, if need be, assassinate a mad man at the top of the chain of command as an extreme but justified way of fulfilling their oath, to valiantly defend justice and the freedom of the German people. There’s no suitable democrat who, in a position like Stauffenberg’s, tried a similar thing otherwise that guy would be honoured. Bundeswehr tradition is anything but random.
You saw what just tens of thousands of Syrian refugees did to stability in Europe with your own eyes, in particular you must have seen this in Germany.
Syria had little to nothing to do with it things have been brewing in the east for quite a while now. Remember Lichtenhagen? Among other reasons naive eastern Die Linke politicians saying “fascism can’t reach the east because we’re all good socialists”. Prime Marxist analysis, right there, we’ve been telling them from the start that they’re full of shit and got called Besserwessis for it. The issue with the east is that they don’t have decades-long civil society experience combatting fascists because back in the days all politics was party matter, and the party said there were no fascists. The percentage of people with closed right-extreme world view is actually higher in the west than in the east, yet in the east they’re making political inroads (and yes Bernd Höcke is a Wessi. Westphale).
The black sun got removed in 2015, this is the new one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-National_Party_of_Ukraine
Panzergrenadierbattalion 13 of the Bundeswehr (1980-1992, dissolved because cold war over). You’ll find it in more insignia not to mention coat of arms of towns but that one is closest to Azov in the sense that it’s simply a singular Wolfsangel. At least among the ones I could find within 10 seconds of googling.
The Wolfsangel is not a Nazi symbol as such. If you want to outlaw everything the Nazis ever used then nothing would be left, including the Antifa flags because they totally did try to appropriate those. They’re getting off on that shit and you seem to be willing to play right into their hands.
Weird how they only use symbols that are widely used by neo-Nazi groups.
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/wolfsangel
Arguing “well actshually they used a bunch of different symbols” is more Nazi apologia since very few symbols were used as widely by the Nazis as the swastika or the wolfsangel. There’s a reason you don’t see neo-Nazis tattooing antifa flags on their bodies.
In the US, that might be true. Germany doesn’t recognise it as such (page 82, “only illegal in connection with outlawed organisations, otherwise legal”), and neither does Ukraine. Context matters.
You can consider it more akin to the Iron Cross, just less common, which the ADL has a much better take on: “[…] an Iron Cross in isolation (i.e., without a superimposed swastika or without other accompanying hate symbols) cannot be determined to be a hate symbol. Care must therefore be used to correctly interpret this symbol in whatever context in which it may be found.”
So they change their flag from one symbol widely used by Nazis to another symbol widely used by Nazis, but somehow that doesn’t make them Nazis.
Care must therefore be used to correctly interpret this symbol in whatever context in which it may be found
The context is it’s a widely-known Nazi symbol on a flag for a battalion whose members frequently express neo-Nazi views. What other fucking context do you need?
No the interior ministry kept the non-Nazi part of their emblem. They also kept the name, which also isn’t Nazi but the name of the Azov Sea (east of Crimea, north of the Kerch straight). When Azov got integrated into state structure tons of Nazis left because they didn’t want to be under state control and be told what they could and couldn’t do politically etc, some stayed but the state imposed strict “don’t do Nazi things” controls. In the beginning (2016 or such) it was about 20% Nazis left over so even back then a minority, there’s been churn and growth since then so it should be quite a bit lower by now.
The old pre-national guard Azov was definitely a Nazi cesspool, yes, and alas one of the very few capable fighting forces at the start of the Russian invasion (for the record, that’s 2014). Then regular people joined because they also wanted to fight and could look past the iffiness, that’s why Azov already hadn’t been purely Nazi at the time the Ukrainian state integrated and denazified them.
But all that nuance is lost in both Russian propaganda and also western media, where some libs found themselves a juicy topic to sell clicks with.
