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 abuse...
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.)
Yeah, like it never happened thar US weapons send somewhere to fight Russians were then used for even worse purposes
Besides, is killing Russians a good thing? I mean fighting back the invasion is necessary, and it will cause deaths in russians troops but we should wish for a minimum of casualties, we are talking about human lives
Whenever I comment on the relationship between that brigade and neo-fascism, someone points out that I am repeating Putin's rhetoric, so I wonder why there are those who are so interested in dispersing attention from a neo-fascist alliance.
Because the political leanings of a combat unit has zero bearing on anything. They are not in charge. They are not being allied with. They have aligned interests in fighting a greater evil.
So any attempts to pretend it matters does clearly, nakedly, come from a place of wanting to push back against supporting Ukraine's defense.
There is no doubt about this relationship, but highlighting it by zooming into it and ignoring the broader context is effectively doing what putin is doing
While I agree on the hypocrisy, there actually isn't any evidence this unit is a problem. There was a significant reform process that changed much of the leadership and the die hard members left to form another militia unit.
Personally I find it insulting that it took this long after the reform process to green light this unit while Israel is given a blank check to MICmart.
It would be pretty hypocritical to give a Israel a genocide hall pass and then give Ukraine a full audit. So I'm not surprised.
Edit to add - Because the comments are already a dumpster fire, let me be clear. The Azov brigade was reformed years ago at this point. I'm mad that they're still getting this level of scrutiny while we give Israel a pass to treat the Geneva Conventions like a checklist.