Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the far right is alive and kicking in Ukraine today. Ranging from militant nationalists to white-power-loving neo-Nazis, extremists have a significant presence. Even if they don’t run the country, they wield a disturbing amount of political and cultural influence and, in particular, have infiltrated the military and security forces. Their breed of historical revisionism and present-day belligerence is well-connected internationally and extremely media savvy.
A good example of its up-to-date knack for selling itself far beyond Ukraine has come in the wake of the current war scare (or really hysteria?) over American allegations of an impending large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. When the Azov Battalion, a powerful and well-known far-right outfit, organized what seems to have been a media spectacle under the pretext of training civilians in basic military skills, many Western media made useful idiots for Neo-Nazism of themselves. Instead of either ignoring the stunt or reporting its nasty politics, they fell for it.
In this way, New York’s “Eyewitness News” program on ABC7NY showed footage from the training that clearly displays an instructor’s arm patch with the “Wolfsangel” symbol, a Germanic rune used by the Nazi SS and adopted as well by Azov. Yet the program offered zero comment on that, really, stunning and offensive image.
Britain’s Daily Mail fudges the issue. Coyly noting, very much as an aside, that Azov has “previously faced accusations from Western journalists that they are a neo-Nazi group,” its report is resolutely focused on one of the civilian participants, Valentyna Konstantynovska, a plucky granny of 79, who is learning how to shoot a Kalashnikov. With illustrations, including social media screenshots, outweighing text, readers nonetheless learn that her neighbors and Ukrainians in general consider Konstantynovska a hero and an “exemplary Ukrainian.” What could be more “human-interest” and cutely appealing? No questions asked about the remarkable circumstance that the “exemplary Ukrainian” feels no compunction about getting her training from an instructor wearing a retooled SS insignia that, in particular, used to decorate the tanks of the SS Panzer-Division “Das Reich.”