'Currently we are losing this war. It's obvious.'

Commentary on Azov leader's June interview. Aryan-Hyperborean thousand-year war. Why Ukrainian nationalists idolize Russia's Prigozhin. Mobilizing prisoners.

This post will continue analyzing the long interview given to Ukrainska Pravda by Dmytro Kukharchuk on June 19. Kukharchuk is a commander in the neo-nazi Azov batallion, and member of the Supreme Council of its political wing, the National Corps party. I wrote about him here as well.

Given that Kukharchuk was originally a football hooligan Ultra (like many Ukrainian rightwingers), I can’t help but share this video of him from his Cherkasy Ultras days. The first 54 seconds are of the 2019 Azov protests against the Minsk agreements, where Kukharchuk played a major role:

A critical moment

Like so many interviews given by bitter neo-nazi fighters to Ukraine’s neo-liberal media (see my articles on Right Sector Dyky’s interviews), Kukharchuk is filled with hatred at most Ukrainians’ unwillingness to die in his war. According to him, this war didn’t start in 2022, nor in 2014, or even when Ukraine willingly became part of Russia in 1652.

In his words, ‘this is a war that has lasted thousands of years and will do so in the future as well’. Clearly he has some quite interesting hypotheses about ancient Hyperborea and Scythians, all the sort of stuff that eastern european ‘afficianados of paganism and ancient slavic symbolism’ love. Check out my article on paganism and slavic esoteric hitlerism here.

Hyperborea is a ‘hypothesised’ Aryan-Slavic civilization. Such flights of fancy became very popular in the 90s and 2000s, and still continue among certain groups.

Anyway, back to boring reality. One of Kukharchuk’s main arguments is that without ‘cardinal changes, we will lose the war’. He qualified the current state of affairs as one of obvious defeat:

Now we are losing this war. It is obvious. We are losing territories, we are losing the best people. If no conclusions are drawn, if mistakes are not corrected, we will lose this war,”

The fall of the Valkyries

This pessimism about the war is constant when you check nationalist telegrams or instagrams - ‘destroying the best of us and enriching the worst’, one could put it. For instance, on June 10, Mykola Kokhanyvsky, a leader of the ‘OUN volunteer movement’ died in a trench near Volchansk. OUN stands for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and is one of the various ideologically committed ultranationalist groups. Kokhanyvsky was a well-known ‘political activist’ in the post-2014, pre-war years.

Kokhanyvsky took visible part in torchlit marches celebrating nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, and the 2019 far-right (cheerleaded by liberals) protests against implementation of the political parts of the Minsk Agreements, the stillborn peace agreement between Ukraine and its separatist eastern regions. Naturally, Kukharchuk was also a major figure in both events.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read my four part series on the Minsk agreements, which I would say is the most important work I have on this substack. Moss Robeson’s substack also has a fantastic series of articles about the role of Washington-centered far-right networks in pressuring Zelensky away from peace.

Back to Kukharchuk’s interview. According to him, the current moment is “the most critical stage of the war” because the “moment of relaxation” has arrived.

“Now people will once again think that the situation at the front has been stabilized, well, where will they go, at most maybe they will conquer somewhere in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, somewhere else a little, but let’s negotiate, let’s do something else. There is no unity in society, unfortunately,”

The current result is “achieved solely on the enthusiasm of the people in the trenches,” who are “very exhausted.” “Unfortunately, the result shows that things will only get worse if there are no changes,”

Kukharchuk drew attention to the fact that Ukraine has little chances in the war of attrition that has been chosen by the Russian Federation:

“Chasov Yar, Volchansk, the Zaporozhye direction are the enemy’s tactical offensive operations, which are aimed at the complete destruction of first the left bank, and then all of Ukraine…. This creeping offensive that they have chosen, and which they are doing well, can have not just unpleasant, but critical consequences for us.”

The degenerate masses

Kukharchuk dwelled extensively on societal indifference to the war. This distinction between ‘khokhols’ (a derogatory term for Ukrainians) and ‘Ukrainians’ was even the title of his interview, as uploaded by the oh-so-liberal Ukrainska Pravda.

‘70% of people in this country are Khokhols who don’t care about the war, and only 30% are true Ukrainains’.

As usual, the brave defenders of the Nation are filled with hatred and scorn towards the majority of their fellow citizens. Not for nothing they worship Bandera and his co-conspirator, Roman Shukhevych. Shukhevych was originally a CO in the Wehmacht’s Nachtigall Batallion, where his mainly Ukrainian unit took eager part in murdering thousands of Belarussian villagers considered to have helped anti-fascist partisans. There’s a great article on it you can read here.

Pro-Shukhevych graffiti in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro which appeared in 2020. ‘Roman Shukhevych - wise, honest, strong. Untrickable, unbuyable, unbreakable’, This was a praised public event, and the man behind it - Andrii Kulish - said it was his attempt to memorialize ‘a great Ukrainian with a complicated and dramatic life… a successful businessman and one of Ukraine’s first PR-managers’. The regional news article on the topic describes Shukhevych as a ‘warrior for Ukrainian independence’. In 2007, Shukhevych was officially made a hero of Ukraine by president Yuschenko, about whom I wrote here.

Shukhevych then became leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought the Soviets alongside the Germans (ignore their occasional half-hearted attempts at claiming to have fought the Germans too) and took even more enthusiastic part in the holocaust than the Germans, as well as having their own claim to fame in committing genocide against the Poles in Ukraine in 1943-4. Anyway, Shukhevych said this about fellow Ukrainians in during the extremely bloody war he led against the USSR from 1945-1954, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians:

Not a single village should recognize Soviet authority. The OUN should destroy all those who recognize Soviet authority. Not intimidate but destroy. We should not be concerned that people might damn us for brutality. Nothing horrible would happen if only half of the forty million Ukrainians survived’ [if Ukraine got independence as a result] - Statiev, Soviet Counter-Insurgency in the Western Borderlands, 131

Back to the present. Unfortunately for Kukharchuk, it isn’t just traitorous politicians and feckless citizens that have incorrect opinions about the war. On June 11, Andrii Krivushchenko of the national guard stated that it wouldn’t be worth the blood to retake Crimea militarily:

Crimea will be a difficult story to reclaim. If Donbas and Luhansk regions were occupied purely militarily, I believe that Crimea was surrendered politically. Therefore, we have the legal right to forcibly take back the territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, and all occupied regions, except for Crimea. Because there was an internal political decision made there, saying "We want to become part of Russia." It is clear that this was propaganda, involving planted people.

Prisoners

Recently, Ukraine has legalized the mobilization of prisoners. Though it must be said, plenty of imprisoned nationalists were able to get their ticket to freedom through the war anyway. Back in 2022, several figures including the leader of the infamous Tornado battallion were released to fight. The Tornado batallion was imprisoned in 2015 for its habit of extorting Ukrainains in the warzone through torture and sexual violence. But as I’ve written here before, what was really at stake was Tornado trying to take over smuggling flows monopolized by Azov and its curator, minister of interior Arsen Avakov.

Kukharchuk spent a great deal of his interview talking about his role in mobilizing prisoners. He compared himself to now-deceased (…) former leader of PMC Wagner, Evgeny Prigozhin, who he called ‘our most talented enemy’, an assessment his Ukrainska Pravda interviewer agreed with. Kukharchuk happily admitted that he often watched the famous videos of Prigozhin’s monologues at Russia’s prisons for inspiration.

However, when asked whether the mobilization of prisoners would make a difference, he categorically answered in the negative. He claims that while Russia was able to draw on a prisoner population of 700,000, Ukraine only has several tens of thousands.

Interestingly, Azov refuses to follow the law on mobilized prisoners - it will not create a separate batallion for them, as demanded by the new legislation. Kukharchuk stated this back in June 8, claiming that doing so would result in lower morale in the prisoner brigades. In his interview to Ukrainska Pravda, he argued that prisoners must be given the same training as other soldiers, otherwise they will feel excluded and exploited.

He also spent quite a lot of time emphasizing that plenty of those imprisoned are not so morally repugnant as it may seem. Given the fact that so many in the ranks of Azov are quite successful mafiosi themselves, as I wrote here, such an empathy is not so surprising

How effective are these prisoners on the battlefield? Well, just as omnipotent as the Ghost of Kiev.

By the way, the pilot who supposedly was the ‘model’ for the Ghost of Kiev ‘symbol’, or however you want to call it, was given a funeral on June 18 in the capital.

Kukharchuk and his Ukrainska Pravda interviewer discussed a strange media event - a day after the law on mobilization of prisoners was announced, state media declared that mobilized prisoners had already taken over Russian trenches. But this begs the question - either they were given none of the requisite training and sent straight to the front, or the mobilization of prisoners had already begun before the law was passed? Or, perhaps most likely, state media simply made up another frontline victory.

There are also questions to be raised about the impact of mobilizing prisoners for rule of law, so to speak. Russia and the parts of Ukraine controlled by it has seem a spike in violent crime committed by mobilized prisoners. And Ukraine itself doesn’t lack veteran-committed violence, as I wrote here and here.

Telegraf,ua reported on June 25 that six mobilized prisoners that were training near Kiev ran away with their weapons. The army denied these reports. On that matter, it’s worth remembering the figures I laid out in my last post about the scale of desertion, which nationalist Ukrainian journalists argue exceeds 130,000. Deserted soldiers are often armed, and I wrote about the dramatic case of deserters who murdered a policeman to cover up their large-scale arms-smuggling operation here. It looks like these entrepreneurs will be getting some experienced colleagues.