|
Media Hide Fascist Ideology Of Ukrainian Militia Which Visit Congress
'Western' media continue to denazify Ukraine by pretending that the Nazi formations in that country, which they had long decried, are now a harmless collection of celebrities.
One could follow those changes along various pieces in the New York Times:
Mar 15 2019:
On his flak jacket was a symbol commonly used by the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization.
Feb 11 2020:
Defenders of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which the F.B.I. calls “a paramilitary unit” notorious for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology,” accuse us of being part of a Kremlin campaign to “demonize” the group.
Mar 17 2022:
Facebook last week said it was making an exception to its anti-extremism policies to allow praise for Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion military unit, “strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard.”
Apr 29 2022:
These scenes are from videos shared online in recent days by the Azov regiment, a unit in the Ukrainian military, which says they were taken in the mazelike bunkers beneath the sprawling Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine.
As I had written previously:
What was once "a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization" which even the FBI said is notorious for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology” was first relabeled as merely "far right" before it became a normal "unit in the Ukrainian military".
Today the New York Times topped that evolution by turning a Ukrainian government press release into a tear dripping story about the reunion of freed Azov losers with their families:
Released Azov commanders have an emotional reunion with family members in Turkey.
Commanders of Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion have held an emotional reunion with their families in Turkey, Ukrainian officials said, honoring the fighters released from Russian confinement last month as part of the largest prisoner swap since the start of the war.
Among the 215 Ukrainian prisoners of war released in the exchange were 108 members of the Azov Battalion. The group’s defense of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol — the southern port city decimated by Russian forces in the first months of the war — has become a powerful symbol of the suffering inflicted by Russia and the resistance mounted by Ukraine.
Under the terms of the swap, the commanders of the battalion must remain in Turkey — which brokered the exchange — until the war ends. After months of waiting, they were reunited with family members on Monday, according to a statement from the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and photographs distributed by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Service.
“There are many emotions,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, who attended the meeting, said in a post on Telegram. “The road to this moment was long and difficult. Finally they were able to hug.”
…
Ms. Zelenska said she gave the Azov Battalion members “thanks from Ukraine, from the president and all the people for whom they are fighting.”
How can anyone working at the New York Times not be ashamed of this whitewash of a deeply fascists organization.
The NYT is far from the only 'western' media doing this. I was easy to find some 40 stories in main stream media which between 2014 and April 2022 which critically discussed the 'controversial' Nazi ideology of Azov and other Ukrainian militia. Then the coverage abruptly changed turning those fascist groups into harmless patriots.
Others have done similar analyses:
In order to get a better sense of how Canadian media’s approach to reporting on the Azov Regiment (formerly the Azov Battalion) has changed over the years, we searched for every mention of the group in the archives of the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and National Post. We also searched through the CBC News website, as well as some of their broadcasts. All of the 90 unique mentions we found (as of August 10) were compiled, with the description of Azov provided in said article or broadcast being noted for comparison.
We found that these news outlets (and the wire services much of their coverage relied upon) went from directly acknowledging Azov’s neo-Nazi ideology to suggesting that the group is merely “controversial” or has a “checkered past.” Some reports included no qualifiers at all, and simply presented the group as just another Ukrainian military unit fighting against Russia.
It is not just the media but also politicians who have done a U-turn from condemning Azov and other Nazi groups to welcoming them as guests in Washington DC.
On March 27 2018 The Hill reported:
Congress bans arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis
A little-noticed provision in the 2,232-page government spending bill passed last week bans U.S. arms from going to a controversial ultranationalist militia in Ukraine that has openly accepted neo-Nazis into its ranks.
House-passed spending bills for the past three years have included a ban on U.S. aid to Ukraine from going to the Azov Battalion, but the provision was stripped out before final passage each year.
This year, though, the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill signed into law last week stipulates that “none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.”
“White supremacy and neo-Nazism are unacceptable and have no place in our world,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), an outspoken critic of providing lethal aid to Ukraine, said in a statement to The Hill on Tuesday. “I am very pleased that the recently passed omnibus prevents the U.S. from providing arms and training assistance to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine.”
A year later that language was again stripped from the omnibus spending bill.
Three years on and the very same Nazis are greeted by prominent members of Congress:
bigger
California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff, who pushed the Trump-Russia hoax as hard as anyone, invited neo-Nazis serving in Ukraine’s Azov Battalion to the U.S. Capitol and met with them on Monday.
“The American Left is openly aligning itself with Nazis while painting its domestic political opposition as Nazis who present a danger to democracy,” Sean Adl-Tabatabai noted in a Sept. 27 News Punch analysis.
How quickly they seem to forget.
Just three years ago, 40 U.S. senators signed a letter demanding that the Azov Battalion be added to a list of terrorist organizations.
…
When it was reported that the Azov Battalion was in the thick of the fight against Russia’s invasion this year, however, Democrats and their legacy media allies treated them more as heroes than terrorists, critics say.
…
During their visit, the Ukrainian soldiers reportedly thanked the U.S. Congress for the billions in aid it has approved thus far … and then asked for more.
There is whole series of pictures of Democrat congressmen and senators meeting such groups posted by Daria Kaleniuk, the assistant director of a Ukrainian activist group called Anti-Corruption Action Centre. The Anti Corruption Action Center is a U.S. government financed non-government organization in Kiev. Together with Ukraine's controversial National Anti-corruption Bureau it is a political enforcer which accuses anyone in Ukraine of 'corruption' as soon as they divert from the U.S. dictated line. Back in July it even took on Zelenski:
[M]any political experts and anti-corruption activists viewed the removal of Ivan Bakanov, head of Ukraine’s state intelligence service, the SBU, and Iryna Venediktova, the country’s prosecutor general, by presidential decree as Zelenskyy taking advantage of extraordinary wartime authority to consolidate his own power.
“It’s not a move to do the right thing. It’s a move to gain more control over our top law enforcement bodies,” Tetiana Shevchuk, a lawyer and activist at the Kyiv-based Anti-Corruption Action Center, said in an interview.
The U.S. financed Anti-Corruption Action Center is now promoting the visits of fascists to the center of U.S. power. Democrats are welcoming them. Their hate of anything Russia allows them to ally with even the worst people one can think of while main stream media provide cover for those people's hateful ideology.
An analyst’s view of the Ukraine conflict…
https://cont.ws/@Severro/2390143
From Monday to Saturday noon, 121 units were destroyed. vehicles (armored vehicles, pickups, special equipment of various types), 89 AFVs (of which at least 30 tanks), 1 air defense system, 13 MLRS (including at least 2 Himars batteries of an unknown number, presumably 2-3 units each), 24 units . artillery, 8 aircraft, 39 drones, 30 ammunition depots (including at least 3-4 really large ones), 39 command posts and locations, 5 factories for the repair of military equipment (they have at least 90 tanks under repair only in Kharkov, at least 10 pieces of artillery in Zaporozhye and an unknown number of tanks in Dnepropetrovsk and the Mykolaiv region), 1 ground control station of the Bayraktar unmanned aerial vehicles complex, 2 radar stations of the S-300 air defense system. All artillery
During the week, at least 10 units of various types of military equipment and at least 100 prisoners were captured. There were reports of the defeat of the Zelenodolsk (Krivoy Rog) TPP, but without details. In addition, attempts to attack the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Experienced, Kurdyumovka, Belogorivka, Vuhledar, Kupyansk (2 attacks) in the Zaporozhye region and Kherson region were suppressed. The Andreevsky bridgehead near Ingulets was almost completely destroyed. The Russian army is advancing in the areas of the settlement. Zaitsevo, Mayorsk, Veselaya Dolina, Bakhmutskoye, Otradovka, Kurdyumovka, New York, Pervomayskoye, Vyemka, Pavlovka, Bezymyannoye, as well as in Artyomovsk and Soledar. There are fights near Seversk.
This is a 5 day summary. Moreover, judging by the comparison of figures, Konashenkov’s reports do not include a considerable amount of liquidated equipment as part of the offensives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and our defensive battles. They seem to appear in text summaries, but they are clearly not taken into account in the overall figures. So, according to reports of defeats of accumulations of manpower and military equipment, 30 tanks and 21 infantry fighting vehicles were eliminated, that is, only 51 pieces, and the total losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were declared at 89 units of armored combat vehicles. That is, defensive battles account for a total of only 38 vehicles in 5 days, although according to video summaries and reports of military correspondents, there are much more of them. Only according to confirmed footage, video materials and reports of military correspondents in the framework of such skirmishes and our defense, 21 tanks and 28 infantry fighting vehicles have been eliminated from the Armed Forces of Ukraine since Monday morning. There is more evidence, but let’s leave it. That is, the real losses are about 110-120 AFVs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, taking into account what was hit and captured “at the front”, but without taking into account what burned down in the shops. No less important is the fact that the reports have never yet featured the defeat of Ukrainian targets by Geran-2 drones, of which there were already quite a few.
According to all the critical numbers of equipment (not counting air defense systems and aviation, with which there is a separate conversation), from 10 to 15% of everything that the Armed Forces had on Monday morning was lost. And this despite the fact that the soldiers mobilized during this time have just begun to be transferred to the DPR and for additional training, and not immediately to the front. In manpower, the Armed Forces of Ukraine still have from 3 to 5 thousand killed, wounded and captured per day. This does not appear in the reports, but it is clearly visible, since within the framework of rocket and artillery hits alone, about 500 people are finished off in this way per day. As part of the defensive battles, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are much greater (in the morning today, Zaluzhny even woke up Zelensky with a report on completely disproportionate losses near Liman alone).
In parallel with this, NATO noticed that they no longer had tanks of the T-72 type, the M-55 (Slovenian modification of the T-55) was few and they needed shells. Other observers in NATO noted that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are switching to artillery of 105 caliber instead of 155, since 155 is not left in stock. The total assistance that has been allocated lately is 21 Himars (although only 18 have been confirmed so far), 150 old armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles from the United States, several dozen armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, as well as Gepard missile and gun systems from Germany. For a long time nothing has been heard about the supply of 777 howitzers, Caesars or German Panzers. We don’t hear about the supply of Javelins, for which the Ukrainians literally prayed for months for some reason, as well as about Nlaw and other nonsense. The west does not supply Ukraine with helicopters, something rarely and little flies there.
Judging by all these figures and trends, by the time all the mobilized are put into operation, they will be needed only for the rapid occupation of new territories. In October, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will lose about 600 AFVs (now they have from 900 to 1000 units in stock and about 200 more will probably be delivered to them), 100-150 pieces of artillery (the stock is about the same, a maximum of 200 units) and at least 50 MLRS of various types ( stocks are not really known, but also running out). Most likely, all remaining radars and almost all drones will lose. Planes have been flying for a long time in a single copy, maybe 5 more pieces will be shot down during this time. They will probably lose their U points and HARM missiles completely.
No less important is the information that almost all the reserves from the Kharkov region and from the Slavic garrison were thrown on Wednesday to storm the Liman, and in the afternoon there was information that, in order to speed up, they transferred part of the troops directly from Kyiv. Which indicates a total lack of resources of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In the evening, new reports came about the fighting in the Kherson region. According to preliminary data, crests already have at least 25 pieces of equipment and at least 10 tanks of them. They are met really hot and hard. Moreover, of these 25 units, 13 were thrown onto the battlefield during the execution of the Ukrainian column. They write that the meat rushes and dies in incredible quantities. And although the ukrams really managed to take a couple of villages and seem to be gaining a foothold in some places, the night promises not only surprises, but also the total destruction of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in these areas. What, in fact, is what all the commanders in the RF Armed Forces are striving for. Twenty-five pieces of equipment is already serious for some kind of evening. And this is despite the ongoing active strikes of our artillery, missiles and aircraft in all other directions. With new attacks on groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine already in Liman itself. Seems to be, the current throw is already really desperate. There is nowhere more desperate. Exactly as I wrote – now or never. And this most never rapidly advances on the remnants of Ukraine.
It seems that NATO has delivered a strict ultimatum – either the successes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the front will be significant (not taking the unfortunate Liman in 3 weeks of fighting) or the help is over. All NATO stocks on the fronts burn out too costly, too quickly, and NATO instructors themselves know better than we do. And there are already a lot of videos from near Kherson, different ones. And the losses there are fatal. If the Armed Forces of Ukraine cannot achieve anything here either and will not be able to continue the offensive after Liman, the front may begin to roll back towards Kyiv as early as next week, oddly enough. At what it is very fast and very hard. Now everything that is – goes into battle. Theoretically, they can throw in general the entire available reserve of about 1000 AFVs and all the artillery in order to somehow break through somewhere. They know that the chances are extremely small, but they no longer want to sit and die under shelling. Ukrainians have been wailing more than once about “victory on the battlefield”. And here it is, the very battlefield. In all areas. I’m sure ours will last. Yes, you may have to retreat somewhere else and somehow, just like in Liman. I do not exclude. But there won’t be many such points. And it is unlikely that the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be able to recover from the current losses in the coming months. If at all they manage to somehow recover from the current losses.
I translated this from the original Russian for the convenience of everyone here.
INDY
Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | Oct 5 2022 13:53 utc | 54
|
