Azov rising
'We’re being deliberately ground down. Lives are spent like spare change at a party.' Ukrainian liberal media glazing Azov vs Zelensky. More corruption in the 155th brigade. Fortification schemes
Ne tak stalosya, yak hadalosya
— Ukrainian proverb, meaning ‘Things didn’t happen as planned’
1933. German’s traditional bourgeois parties are hopelessly outgunned in parliament. They make a coalition with Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party. They make him chancellor. It’d be easy for big business to control this hotheaded petit bourgeois intellectual and his lumpen followers.
2013. The anti-nationalist, NATO-neutralist, Russia-friendly president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych funds west Ukrainian ethnonationalists in the Svoboda party. They were a good electoral foil, convincing southeastern Ukrainians tired of Yanukovych that supporting him was the only way to avoid a fascist takeover. It’d be easy for Yanukovych to manipulate these peasant yokels.
2019. The archetypally cunning tycoon Igor Kolomoisky does everything in his power to bring his employee to power - the comedian Vladimir Zelensky. Kolomoisky was tired of the pressure on his business empire being exerted by both the IMF and rival oligarch president, the pro-western Petro Poroshenko. It’d be easy for the all-powerful Kolomoisky to control this air-headed showman.
Except Hitler dragged the German bourgeois into an unwinnable war, Svoboda and its sister organizations toppled the Yanukovych government in the bloody winter days of the Euromaidan revolution, and Zelensky imprisoned his former employer and supposed puppetmaster in 2023.
And now, 2025.
Ukraine’s pro-western liberals and media thought leaders are tired of Zelensky’s geopolitical antics and the corruption of his entourage. Representatives of the largest pro-western opposition party, ex-president Poroshenko’s ‘European Solidarity’, worry openly that the US is ‘washing its hands of Ukraine’ - they blame Zelensky’s incompetence. Another European Solidarity MP stated on May 20 that US military aid to Ukraine will end in the summer, since Trump hasn’t decided on any new shipments.
As the front continues slowly but steadily crumbling, the only thing Zelensky can state is his unwillingness to entertain Russia’s demand Ukraine abandon its constitutionally fixed desire for NATO membership. The western media is also hardly confident in the clown-in-chief.
If this continues, Ukraine is doomed. This is the message the liberal nationalist segment of Ukrainian media constantly repeats. But it also has an answer.
There is a unit of the army which is uniquely talented, technologically advanced. It is constantly held up as the antithesis to the corruption endemic to the ‘old, Soviet’ Ukrainian army and the Zelensky entourage. (Formerly) USAID-funded liberal media like Ukrainska Pravda or Bihus constantly put out stories about the corruption of other military units, or the corruption of officials close to Zelensky like Tatarov, Tymoshenkov or Reznikov, but never about this unit.
And this unit of the army is not just a unit - it is a ‘movement’, a ‘family’ as it calls itself. It is at the forefront of the reformation of the army along NATO organizational standards. It is led by a charismatic leader who is constantly given glowing interviews by the liberal media.
Of course, this is Azov.
Today’s article is about the influential liberal forces in Ukraine and abroad agitating for the neo-nazi Azov movement to take full control of the Ukrainian army. And the way they glaze its leader, Andriy Biletsky, and rail against Zelensky, it seems hard to believe they want anything other than for Azov to take full control of politics as well.
No doubt they think they will be able to ride the tiger. Indeed, Azov and Ukraine’s liberals have plenty in common. Both are made up of Ukraine’s small ‘middle class’, which sees itself as fighting a holy war for ‘civilization’ against both the uneducated, easily manipulable Ukrainian masses and the Russian ‘asiatic’ threat. Ukraine’s liberals call for increased censorship of anti-militarist censorship just as much as Azov’s nazis do.
And the German big bourgeois also made plenty of money off war, both before and after 1945. It goes without saying that the same wasn’t quite true of the people.
I’ve also written in the past on the conflicts between the liberal ‘Sorosites’ and the Azovite nationalists. But for now, they have a clear tactical alliance against a greater enemy. Who knows what the future holds, whether their paths will diverge.
Today, we’ll have a look at what’s been happening so far. On the one hand, liberal media has been glorifying Biletsky and Azov as possessing the unique answer to all Ukraine’s woes - if only they are given the keys to the castle.
On the other hand, the same liberal media has been on the offensive of late against the dismissal of ‘patriotic, new elite commanders’ by the ‘old corrupt Soviet generals’. The ‘patriotic new elite commanders’ - symbolized by Azov - want to minimize casualties by fighting a ‘high-tech war’, while the ‘old corrupt Soviet generals’ waste endless lives and care only about the division of rents.
Zelensky is sometimes named as the one responsible for these senseless losses, but he is even more directly responsible for yet more recently uncovered corruption in the construction of fortifications. Finally, the usual questions have been raised by the latest mass casualty event of newly mobilized Ukrainian troops.
The media
But before we dig into all this, a few words on the journalists and media groups I describe as ‘Ukraine’s liberal media’.
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