Let me set aside the usual pieties about Ukraine for a moment and talk about what’s actually happening in the information space.
The Atlantic Council and its various affiliates are working overtime right now to rehabilitate the Azov Battalion. You’ve seen the talking points. They’re not Nazis, just earnest nationalists. They’re not extremists, just patriots. The whole Nazi smear is a Russian information operation, a propaganda trick designed to discredit brave Ukrainian fighters.
One of the people pushing this line is Oleg Atbashian, a Ukrainian emigre who’s written a piece shopping for publication. I’ve seen it. The argument goes like this: Azov was formed in 2014 because Russia’s aggression left Ukraine defenseless. A Jewish industrialist named Igor Kolomoisky funded them. Their symbols are just traditional embroidery. The Nazi comparisons are absurd—it’s like Hitler calling Patton a Nazi.
This is not serious analysis. This is apologetics dressed up as argument.
Let’s talk about what’s actually true.
The Azov Battalion did not emerge from nowhere in 2014. It emerged from a specific tradition—Ukrainian ultra-nationalism with deep roots in Nazi collaboration. The unit’s first commander was Andriy Biletsky, who led the neo-Nazi Social-National Assembly and the Patriot of Ukraine. These are not neutral descriptions. These are self-descriptions. Biletsky has written about the need to lead Ukraine in a “holy racial war” against the “Judeo-Mongols.” His groups used Wolfsangel symbols—the same ones adapted by SS divisions.
But that was then, the apologists say. Things have changed. The unit has been reformed, mainstreamed, absorbed into the National Guard. Kolomoisky’s involvement proves they can’t be Nazi—a Jewish oligarch wouldn’t fund Nazis.
This is where the argument collapses into absurdity. Kolomoisky is an oligarch. His interests are financial, not ideological. He funded armed groups because armed groups were useful to him in a chaotic moment. That doesn’t sanitize what those groups believed or what they did. And it certainly doesn’t erase the videos of Azov members celebrating the SS Galicia Division, or the marches honoring Bandera, or the political parties with explicit neo-Nazi platforms that operate openly in Ukraine.
The BBC documented this years ago. Not RT, not Sputnik—the BBC. They showed neo-Nazis playing a key role in the 2014 coup. They showed the paramilitaries, the symbols, the ideology. This isn’t Russian propaganda. It’s footage.
And last year, far-right activists in Ukraine celebrated the 78th anniversary of the SS Division Galicia. Not a fringe group meeting in a basement—a public commemoration, with participants openly honoring Ukrainians who fought for Hitler. The video exists. You can watch it.
So when Oleg and the Atlantic Council say this is all a Russian smear, what they’re really saying is: don’t believe your own eyes. Don’t trust the footage. Don’t read the history. Just accept our carefully packaged narrative.
I’m not a Putin puppet. I’m not on anyone’s payroll. I’m just old enough to remember when propaganda had to at least nod at the truth. Now it just asserts whatever serves the cause, and dares you to fact-check.
Here’s what I actually care about, and what I wish our politicians cared about: our own border.
While we’re being asked to care deeply about every inch of Ukrainian sovereignty, fentanyl is killing young Americans by the tens of thousands. Nearly 79,000 people between 18 and 45 died of fentanyl overdoses in 2020 and 2021 combined. That’s more than we lost in twelve years in Vietnam. More than we lost in four years in Korea.
We have monuments for those wars. We honor the dead, tend the graves, tell the stories. The fentanyl dead get a statistic and a shrug.
The same politicians who demand we defend Ukraine’s borders refuse to defend ours. The same pundits who moralize about Russian aggression are silent while cartels flood our country with poison. The same Republican senators who vote for Ukraine aid have done nothing meaningful to secure the southern border.
Why? Because the border is hard. Because fixing it would require confronting things they’d rather ignore. Because it’s easier to beat the drum for a war far away than to solve a problem at home.
I’m not suggesting we ignore Ukraine. I’m suggesting we apply the same moral clarity to our own country. If sovereignty matters, it matters everywhere. If borders are sacred, ours should be too. If protecting civilians from violence is the goal, start with the ones dying in Philadelphia and Phoenix and Portland.
The Azov Battalion is what it is. You can call them nationalists if that helps you sleep. But the symbols they wear, the leaders they follow, the history they celebrate—that’s not a Russian smear. That’s a fact. And facts don’t care about your narrative.
Neither does fentanyl. It just keeps killing Americans while we argue about someone else’s border.
