Increasingly, the war looks like an indefinite hellscape, though there have been bright moments of hope. U.S. President Donald Trump has at times seemed sincerely committed to ending the war. In August, he hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin at a diplomatic summit in Anchorage, Alaska. It was encouraging to watch an American leader at least treat the head of a state which possesses 6,000 nuclear weapons with basic respect.
Unfortunately, Trump and his administration either don’t fully grasp the fundamentals of the conflict or have deemed it politically unacceptable to base their policy on that reality. Part of that reality involves the presence of actual Nazis within the upper echelons of the Ukrainian military, something that is intolerable to Russia and may prove deeply problematic for Washington.
The White House has settled on demanding Russia accept an immediate ceasefire and have promised to continue funding and arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia until it submits. On Oct. 22 the U.S. Treasury Department announced new rounds of sanctions:
“Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire. Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine.”
Of course, it may be unadvisable for Russia to agree to such a ceasefire, something that could amount to just a Minsk 3-style new course stabilization and rearming period for Ukraine. Russian officials have repeatedly made this clear. On Oct. 21, a day before the new sanctions were imposed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said there would be no cessation of hostilities until the “root causes” of the conflict are addressed:
“I mean ensuring Ukraine’s off-bloc, neutral, nuclear-free status, which means abandoning any attempts to drag it into NATO. I mean ending the actual genocide of the Russian and Russian-speaking population the Kiev regime has been practicing since even before Mr. [Vladimir] Zelensky came to power, when it banned all potential rights of the national minority Russians are formally recognized in Ukraine. As a matter of fact, most of Ukraine’s population speaks and thinks in Russian, but the Russian language has been banned in all spheres of life. An absolutely Nazi regime.”
Accusing Ukraine of being a Nazi regime has been a consistent Russian talking point since 2014, when D.C. engineered a coup in Kiev. As Russia escalated the conflict with its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin said one of the “special military operation” objectives was “to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”
Unfortunately for the West, this Russian talking point is not mere propaganda. Ukraine is filled with Hitler-loving, racial “social nationalists” who descend both biologically and ideologically from men who directly collaborated with the Third Reich, participated in the Holocaust, and sought to create a fascist Ukrainian state. Many of them have prominent positions within the current government and are celebrated figures within Ukrainian society. Let’s catch up with some of these celebrity Nazis.
Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky (Commander of Ukraine’s Third Army Corps “Azov,” [formerly known as the Azov Battalion, Azov Brigade and 3rd Separate Infantry Division] 46 years-old).
Andriy Biletsky is known as “White Leader” or “White Chief” by his men. He is Washington’s latest version of a “moderate rebel,” an anti-democratic, Nazi warlord who the West pretends is defending democracy against autocracy.
This is propagandistic fantasy. Biletsky once gave a speech entitled “Ukrainian Racial Social Nationalism” in which he declared:
“The main mystical idea of Social Nationalism is the creation, instead of a bunch of disparate individuals, mechanically united by the name ‘Ukrainians’ and the presence of a Ukrainian passport, the National Supercommunity – a single biological organism that will consist of New People – physically, intellectually and spiritually developed persons. From the mass of individuals should appear Nation, and from the weak modern man – the Superman.
“Social-Nationalism relies on a number of fundamental principles that clearly distinguish it from other right-wing movements. This is a kind of triad: sociality, Racial, Great power…
“The historical mission of our Nation, in this turning point, [is to lead] the White peoples of the whole world into the last crusade for its existence against the Semitic-led untermenschen.”
Biletsky founded the Azov Battalion at the outbreak of the civil war in 2014. A Nazi militia that recruits from the most far right elements of Ukraine and beyond, Azov has remained an all-volunteer force even as Ukraine has relied on brutal conscription tactics to fill its army ranks. It has grown in respect and power and now has an official unit within the national guard and one within the army, which Biletsky commands.
The authors devoted a recent article to Biletsky and view him as one of the most likely men to cause major trouble in the coming post-war Ukraine, with the potential of even seizing the presidency for himself.
Vladyslav Sobolevsky (Co-Founder and Leader of the Snake Island Institute, approximately 37 years-old)
Vladyslav “Borisfen” Sobolevsky is a former deputy commander of the Third Army Corps “Azov,” where he served under Biletsky. He also previously served as deputy chief of staff to Biletsky when the White Leader led the National Corps, a social nationalist political party that suspended its operations after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
The Snake Island Institute (SII) is an Azov aligned think tank. Founded in 2024, the SII states its goal is to “forge a Ukraine-rooted international security ecosystem to convert battlefield-proven expertise into shared standards, training, joint programs, and policies that fortify the free world,” and its mission is to “advance Ukraine in the West by building and scaling strategic security cooperation — convening trusted partners across government, industry, and civil society.”
Snake Island a “rocky, Black Sea outcrop” that has tremendous symbolic power within Ukraine’s public sphere.
As the author (Horton) reported in his 2024 book Provoked:
“The Ukrainians came up with a fantastic story about how a few of their soldiers stationed at tiny Snake Island had bravely taken on the Russian navy, telling them, ‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself,’ and fighting until the bitter end. The men ‘died heroically,’ President Zelensky said. The story was a hoax. Never happened. They just surrendered. But what great war propaganda. The papers and cable TV news loved it and repeated it to their credulous audiences. Truth is the first casualty in war, as they say.”
So, basically the perfect name for a think tank. In September and October, Sobolevsky led SII staff (many of them conspicuously young and female) on a public relations and lobbying trip to the United States. According to journalist Moss Robeson:
“On their first day in the United States, they all took a meeting at the State Department with Kevin Covert, the Director for Eastern European Affairs. This year, Covert has also met with one of Zelensky’s chief political rivals, his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, as well as Oleksiy Goncharenko, a famous parliamentarian from Poroshenko’s party, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine (2014-16)…In the coming days, Snake Island Institute visited the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and perhaps some other DC-based think tanks. (They already made friends at the American Foreign Policy Council.)”
The SII also had a meet and greet with retired general Michael Flynn, co-hosted a private event at Washington’s Army and Navy Club with the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), gave a guest lecture to students at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, visited the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and hosted a “Defense Cooperation Forum” in Los Angeles.
A proud Nazi like Sobolevsky being feted throughout America’s government apparatus and defense industrial base partners is nothing new, especially since Russia’s escalation in 2022. On one deeply surreal night in 2023, Azov members were extolled in person by neoconservative thought leader Francis Fukuyama and former Obama-era Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul during an event at Stanford University, complete with their Nazi symbols projected onto the wall. What made this night truly off the wall bizarre was that weeks earlier, the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation released a study warning of Azov’s azism. But Sobolevsky isn’t just looking for support in the current war. He is working to create a permanent Ukraine lobby that will be fully embedded within the imperial structure of the United States.
Azov’s profile was later quietly removed from the Stanford website, which is funny because if one searches the term “Azov” on the site, it still returns hits for the Rise Above Movement (RAM), Misanthropic Division, C14, Right Sector, Atomwaffen Division, the Nordic Resistance Movement and Russian Imperial Movement — all of them Nazis, and all of them, still according to Stanford, close with their associates in Ukraine’s Azov movement.
Denys Prokopenko (Commander of the 1st Corps “Azov” of the Ukrainian National Guard, 34 years-old)
Denys Prokopenko is Biletsky’s Azov counterpart within the National Guard. He oversees five brigades, including the 12th Special Forces Brigade “Azov,” originally created at the same time as Biletsky’s’ Corps.
Like Biltesky, Prokopenko is regarded as a war hero. He joined the Azov Battalion as an anti-tank rifleman in 2014 and quickly rose through the ranks. In 2022, he famously led the defense of Mariupol for 86 days before surrendering to the Russians. He was released through a prisoner exchange a few months later and exiled to Turkey, where the U.S. and presumably Russia believed he would remain for the duration of the war. But, in a classic Minsk-style move, he was brought back to Ukraine and put back in charge of troops.
Prokopenko’s men display Nazi symbolism on their flags, their uniforms and tattooed on their bodies. They are proud adherents of the ideological framework developed by Biletsky. If Biletsky has Prokopenko and his men on his side as the domestic struggle for power unfolds, his path to the presidency will be much smoother.
Andriy Parubiy (Assassinated on Aug. 30, 2025, at age 54)
Andriy Parubiy was one of the key players in the 2014 Ukrainian coup, commanding thousands of far-right militants who gave the protestors at the Maidan their lethal edge. In 1991 he founded the Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine (social-nationalist, get it?), which was rebranded as Svoboda in 2004. In 2007, he hosted the unveiling of a massive statue of Stepan Bandera in Lviv. During World War II, Bandera was the leader of the OUN-B, a militant wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists which collaborated with Nazi Germany in implementing the Holocaust.
After the 2014 coup, Parubiy was made secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. He joined Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party and became speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada. He pushed for Ukraine to join NATO, advocated a military solution to dealing with separatists in the East and consistently portrayed Russia as the source of all problems in Ukraine.
On Aug. 30, he was gunned down in Lviv. Initial reports suggested a lone Ukrainian gunman had murdered Parubiy as revenge for the death of his son, a Ukrainian soldier killed in the war. On Oct. 3, however, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) claimed the man acted on the orders of Russian intelligence. For all we know, the SBU ordered the hit, or he was taken out by a rival ideological actor.
There are obviously reasons for everyone to lie about what happened, but the Nazis have dragged Ukraine into a catastrophic struggle that has killed at least hundreds of thousands of soldiers and threatens to kill the nation. Meanwhile, Russia has vowed to denazify the place. A perfect “stabbed in the back” narrative is in the works for Ukraine’s Nazis. They certainly have an existential reason to shift blame from themselves, continue demonizing Russia, and maybe even turn on the United States. And as they vie for power among themselves, we should anticipate lethal fallout.
Oleh Tyahnybok (Major in the 128th Separate Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, 57 years-old)
Oleh Tyahnybok became leader of the Social Nationalist party in 2004 and presided over its rebranding as Svoboda (“Freedom”). Softer name. Same fascist ideology. Svoboda’s website declared:
“We are not America, a mishmash of all sorts of people. . . . The Ukrainian needs to stay Ukrainian, the Pole—Polish, the Gagauz—Gagauz, the Uzbek—Uzbek.”
This becomes a bit more ominous when we consider that Tyahnybok’s adviser Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn claimed the Holocaust was “a bright episode in European civilization.” Or when we consider that as a member of the Rada in 2005, Tyahnybok wrote several “open letters” to President Viktor Yushchenko demanding he crush the “criminal activity of organized Jewry,” within Ukraine. Or that he consistently invoked the threat of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” to the Ukrainian nation.
Since 2022, he has served as a major in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to Tatyana Karmazina in Telegraf, he serves in the 128th Separate Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, is the deputy commander of a separate battalion and his only son has become a war hero in the struggle:
“The 28-year-old son of the ‘Svobod’ Gordiy Tyahnybok also joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the beginning of the war and fought in the ‘Force of Freedom’ battalion of the 4th Brigade of the National Guard ‘Rubizh.’ In May 2024, Gordiy was wounded in the Bakhmut direction and was evacuated for treatment to Dnipro.”
The elder Tyahnybok was one of the single most important individuals in the 2014 coup. He is discussed by name in the infamous, leaked, 2014 “F the EU” phone call between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. In the call, in which Nuland and Pyatt discuss the contours of the post-“transition” Ukrainian government, Tyahnybok is viewed as an important ideological and mentor figure adjacent to the new regime.
While he certainly might have presidential ambitions, it would be more natural for him to take on a similar senior role within a new fascist government. He is approximately 10 years older than Biletsky and he has been keeping a much lower profile than the White Leader. He doesn’t have entire metro cars in Kiev dedicated to his deification, as does the younger man, for example. If he throws his support behind Biletsky, Ukraine might get “an absolutely Nazi regime” that even Washington objects to.
Dmytro Yarosh (Commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, 54 years-old)
Dmytro Yarosh was a founding member of Right Sector, which provided violent thugs for the 2014 putsch. In 2015, he founded the Ukrainian Volunteer Army (UVA). By all accounts, the UVA is not an Orwellian appellation and does seem to rely exclusively on volunteers. Ukraine’s regular army relies on a conscription regime that involves ripping young (and even not so young) men off the streets of Kiev, Lviv and elsewhere. The Nazis want to wage war on Russia, and they are good at recruiting like-minded radicals.
Yarosh was one of the Nazis who openly voiced death threats at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Back in 2019, Zelensky had been elected on a platform of peace and was interested in implementing the Minsk agreements. Yarosh and the boys would have none of it. As Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Ted Snider reported in 2024:
“Ultranationalist leaders defied Zelensky and warned that a ceasefire and fulfillment of his campaign promises would lead to protests and riots. More seriously, they threatened his life. Dmytro Yarosh, the founder of the [Right] Sector paramilitary organization threatened that, if Zelensky fulfilled his campaign promise, ‘he will lose his life. He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk boulevard if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War. And it is very important that he understand this.’”
Yarosh has been killing Ukrainian separatists and Russians ever since. We should not expect him to be ideologically softer when the time comes to replace the Zelensky government.
Yevhen Karas (Commander of the 413th Separate Battalion of Unmanned Systems “Raid,” 37 years-old)
Yevhen Karas was the leader of C14 during the 2014 coup. What is C14? It’s a Svoboda Party militia that takes its name from the infamous “14 words” of white race enthusiast David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Karas had no illusions about D.C.’s agenda. He understood there was a geopolitical chess game being played and this, not any concern for Ukrainians or their sovereignty, was the reason for the influx of cash and weapons. The Nazis (or Ukrainian Nationalists as he prefers) were good at killing Russians:
“We were now being given so much weaponry, not because … they want the best for us, but because we perform the tasks set by the West, because we are the only ones who are prepared to do them.” He explained, “[W]e have fun killing and we have fun fighting. And they are like, ‘Wow, let’s see what’s going to happen.’”
As the commander of RAID, Karas is crucial to Ukraine’s drone warfare, which continues to strike deep within Russia. As such, Karas is possibly one of the most likely people to provoke a nuclear strike on Kiev. And while assassinating people with rifles is still en vogue, the future of assassination is clearly drone-centric. We might just see that future manifest in the upcoming struggle for power within Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia is fully committed to victory in Ukraine on its terms. The nation recently shifted to a year-round conscription model. It is not even officially at war based on its own internal, legal and mobilization categories. But that could change. The denazification campaign has, being a government project, further nazified Ukraine. Given the stress being exerted on Ukraine by the Russian military, the increasing radicalization of Ukrainian Nazis through bloodshed, and the West’s mercurial approach to the conflict, we have the makings of a downright powder keg in Far-Eastern Europe.
Source: AntiWar.com.
