Neo-Nazi Azov Regiment Takes Their Act to Israel

Dec. 26, 2022 (EIRNS)—Now that’s chutzpah! The neo-Nazi Azov Regiment (in Ukrainian) sent a delegation to Israel last week, and the leader of the delegation, Lt. Ilya Samoilenko, had a photo op on Dec. 17 at Masada, even while wearing his modernized swastika.

Now, of course, one is supposed to look the other way. As Samoilenko explained to the Dec. 20 Jerusalem Post: “The battalion has changed. It has purged itself of its dark past. The only radicalism we embrace today is our radical will to defend Ukraine.” Samoilenko, one of the holdouts at Mariupol’s Azovstal in May, would know of that “dark past,” as he went to join Azov in 2014 (though delayed until 2015). But how does he explain that Wolfsangel insignia he still displays? The standard cover story—that the neo-Nazi founder of the Azov Battalion, Andriy Biletsky, put an “I” inside a roman “N,” and it accidentally resembled a swastika—is pretty hackneyed. Then there are all those actual Nazi swastikas tattooed on his Azov buddies, revealed in Mariupol last May—perhaps just too difficult to ignore.

Worse, the Times of Israel joined in with Samoilenko’s race-hatred. After Samoilenko told them that Ukraine was a “beautiful civilization,” while Russia was a land of “medieval cavemen,” the daily explained to Israelis: “He sees Israel and Ukraine on the same side, the civilized battling the uncivilized in a struggle for the future of humanity.” Assumedly, since Israel is not shooting as Russians, the reader need only replace “Russians” with either “Palestinians” or “Arabs.”

Samoilenko is a war hero in Ukraine, having blown off his hand, mishandling explosives in the Donbass five years ago. He was accompanied by Yulia Fedosiuk, whose husband Arseniy Fedosiuk was in the Azov Brigade from the very beginning. According to Yulia, her husband was heavily involved in the physical violence at the Maidan, which immediately gave rise to the Azov, and Arseniy Fedosiuk was a founding member.

The trip was organized by the Israeli Friends of Ukraine, funded by the Nadav Foundation, which was founded by the dirty money of Russian-Israeli oligarch, Leonid Nevzlin, the partner of the infamous Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. When they weren’t asset-stripping Russia’s Yukos Oil company, they co-authored a book, whose English title would be Man With a Ruble. They hate Russian President Vladimir Putin because, he ended their looting of Yukos. Khodorkovsky was convicted of tax evasion and fraud, Nevzlin convicted of conspiracy to murder. Nevzlin moved to Israel in 2005, where the Israeli Justice Ministry lost their case to throw him out of the country.

Now Nevzlin, who took Israeli citizenship, is the co-owner of Ha’aretz daily, and installed his daughter to run his Nadav Foundation. So, why not use his ill-gotten gains, extracted from Russia, to bring an Azov Regiment delegation to Israel, to degrade his fellow Israelis into “kissing the ring of the emperor”? If he also gets to thumb his nose at Putin, so much the better.