»Ukraine über alles!«
Susann Witt-Stahl
Junge Welt
The Azov military claims to debunk Kremlin 'myths,' but in doing so, it reaffirms its Nazi legacy and highlights the contradiction between this tradition and German narratives of normalization.
The Azov military is gradually being integrated into the Western European security architecture. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion and escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the German media establishment has been presenting “emotionally touching” frontline reports of the individual fates of members of the “elite unit,” portraying them as “the nice guys next door.” Springer's Welt TV has now even served its viewers the first home story of a volunteer from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and his proud father, a former “Cheetah” tank driver in the German Armed Forces. The integration of the “Azov” units into the Ukrainian armed forces and their rearmament, primarily with German weapons, requires narratives that portray their warriors as sincere patriots and loyal allies of “defensive democracy.”
The “Azov” propaganda apparatus is apparently trying to provide the appropriate “historiography.” Leading the way is the Kiev-based publishing house Rainshouse, run by Olexij Reins, the new chief ideologist since the death of ‘Azov’ philosopher Mikola “Kruk” Kravchenko in March 2022. Reins, who also serves in the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade “Azov,” which forms the backbone of the 3rd Corps of the Ukrainian Army, is steadily intensifying efforts to whitewash the incriminating past—historical predecessor organizations, their leaders, worldviews, theories, symbols, rituals, and deeds. Reins’s English-language book aims to counter 'myths' about Azov by presenting its members as idealists, yet in attempting this, he inadvertently confirms Azov’s deeply problematic tradition—directly undermining efforts to normalize its image.
In the spirit of the OUN | The Insider portrait first traces the history of the Azov associations, highlighting that it was no coincidence that their paramilitary nucleus, also known as the “little black men,” formed in Kharkiv in 2014. The large city in northeastern Ukraine was the center of activity for “Patriot of Ukraine,” one of the most influential right-wing structures in the country in the 2000s, a youth organization and militant arm of the “Social-National Party of Ukraine” (SNPU), founded in Lviv in 1991. After it was renamed “Svoboda” in 2004, “Patriot of Ukraine” disbanded, but later reformed as the thug squad of the “Social-National Assembly.” The head of all the organizations mentioned, except for the SNPU and Svoboda, was Andriy Biletsky, who is now the commander of the 3rd Army Corps and an unofficial leader of the entire Azov movement.
Reins names Yaroslav Stezko as the historical mentor of the Azov military. Stezko was the deputy of Stepan Bandera, leader of the radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), and became his successor after his death in 1959. Reins describes Stezko and the OUN as “partisan fighters against the Soviet and Nazi German occupation” of Ukraine. Stezko “refused to cooperate with Adolf Hitler's regime” and was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for doing so.
Almost none of this corresponds to historical facts: apart from the fact that Ukraine had been a republic of the Soviet Union since 1922 and therefore could not be “occupied” by it, Yaroslav Stetsko expressly welcomed the German invasion: "With sincere gratitude and admiration for your heroic army, which has once again earned new glory on the battlefields in its clash with Europe's greatest enemy, Muscovite Bolshevism, we send you, the great leader, on behalf of the Ukrainian people and its government, which has been formed in liberated Lviv, our heartfelt congratulations on crowning the struggle with final victory," he wrote to Adolf Hitler on July 3, 1941.
Stezko and the OUN-B wanted a sovereign Ukraine as a satellite state of the “Third Reich” with “the possibility of limited collaboration.” According to Swedish-American historian Per A. Rudling, they had adopted the “National Socialist worldview” and the idea of a “fascist New Europe.” His German-Polish colleague Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe emphasizes that this was by no means a passive act, but rather that the OUN had created a “Ukrainian variant of fascism.” Unlike German Nazism, the OUN had to operate transnationally due to the lack of its own territory, was dependent on camouflage measures due to the lack of a power base, and presented itself as “Ukrainian nationalism” (a practice that continues to this day, including by “Azov”).
Stezko was sent to Sachsenhausen because, against Hitler's will, he had proclaimed Ukraine's independence on June 30, 1941, and appointed himself prime minister. In the concentration camp, he was given – like Stepan Bandera and other prominent OUN members – the status of “honorary prisoner,” his own apartment, controlled freedom of movement and travel, and even limited permission to continue his political activities.
What Reins completely ignores: In his “curriculum vitae,” which he wrote shortly after being arrested on July 9, 1941, Stezko propagated a one-party dictatorship and “ethnic ideology” that was “akin to the National Socialist program.” He was “fully aware” of the harmful role of the Jews, “who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine,” Stezko declared. “I therefore support the extermination of the Jews and consider it expedient to bring the German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine in order to prevent their assimilation and the like.” Stezko had already expressed similar views in May 1939 in a guide entitled “Struggles and Activities of the OUN in Wartime,” when he was not yet under German supervision. The OUN-B was no different, calling for the extermination of “Judaism” as well as other “enemies” such as Moscow, Poland, and Hungary in leaflets distributed in the early days of the German attack on the Soviet Union.
A pamphlet published by the OUN-B on June 10, 1942, in the Lemberg newspaper and addressed to the Jewish population states: "You welcomed Stalin with flowers. We will lay your heads at Hitler's feet in welcome." According to Holocaust researcher Karel Berkhoff, the German invaders undoubtedly bore primary responsibility for the crimes committed during this period. As evidence, he cites the order issued by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, to his task forces to support and intensify the “self-cleansing” efforts of anti-communist and anti-Semitic Ukrainians, but emphasizes: “The OUN-B played a key role in the pogroms in western Ukraine.” Quite a few Ukrainian fascists also collaborated with Nazi Germany by joining the Wehrmacht battalions “Nachtigall” and ‘Roland’ and the SS Grenadier Division “Galicia” – as well as, at times, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of the OUN-B.
As Olexij Reins, who chose Bandera's pseudonym “Consul” as his nom de guerre, explains in his book, the Azov military remains firmly rooted in the tradition of the OUN and UPA to this day.
“Social nationalism” | According to Reins, the theoretical foundation of the Azov military's worldview can be found in a “political science work” by Yaroslav Stezko entitled “Two Revolutions.” It was published in 1951, at a time when the OUN-B was already cooperating with the British, US, and West German secret services—the UPA continued to fight on their behalf as a stay-behind army against the USSR until 1953— and five years after Stezko had founded the “Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations” in Munich, the most powerful umbrella organization of Hitler collaborators worldwide. In “Two Revolutions,” Stezko developed a supposedly new ideology: “social nationalism.” This “doctrine, which was advocated by Azov's predecessor organization, Patriot of Ukraine, is based precisely on the programmatic principles of the OUN's chief ideologist,” Reins explains in the foreword to the new edition published by Rainshouse in 2023.
In his heroic and passionate text, Stezko invokes the fighting spirit of his ancestors—from ancient times to the emergence of the OUN in the 1920s and during World War II—including Simon Petliura, slayer of the Jews, and Roman Shukhevych, commander of the Nightingale Battalion and later of the UPA. He concludes: “Without a national-social revolution, there can be no Ukrainian liberation,” according to the basic thesis of his “social nationalism,” which – as Reins vehemently denies – proves to be, in parts, a version of German “National Socialism” tailored to Ukraine before the NSDAP came to power. “The national and the social are two sides of the same coin, of the same life,” Stezko continues. Another intersection with “National Socialism,” but also with all other forms of fascism, is his fanatical anti-communism and fetishization of violence. Stezko praises the Ukrainians as a warrior people who “sweep away everything that stands in their way like an avalanche” – to the last drop of blood: “Thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions will fall, but no one can stop the people who are on the march.”
What actually distinguishes Stezko's “social nationalism” from “National Socialism” and the ideology of the OUN and UPA until 1945 is the absence of overt anti-Semitism. After the defeat of Hitler's Germany and the beginning of its cooperation with its new Western masters, the OUN quietly and secretly disposed of it and simply denied its past – like the old Nazis, whose second careers under the banner of liberal democracy had been made possible by Adenauer's restoration.
This contrasts with the “social nationalism” of the “Patriot of Ukraine,” whose program, formulated by Andriy Bilevsky in 2008, draws on “National Socialism” and calls for a “racial cleansing” of Ukraine from the Jewish-led “subhumans” – an atavism that Reins completely ignores in his “historiography.” The “Azov” warriors, who were financed in 2014 by an ultra-right-wing Jewish oligarch and aspire to become “the best military unit in the world” as the future “SEALS” of NATO, refrain from such openly racist and anti-Semitic statements. However, as Reins' book on Azov reveals, they continue to refer to anti-Semitic thought leaders, such as Hitler's translator Dmitro Donzow and Mikola Michnowskij, and anti-Semitic ideologues of the OUN, such as Stepan Lenkawskij, author of the “Decalogue,” the “Ten Commandments of Ukrainian Nationalists,” which all recruits must recite like an oath of allegiance during the initiation ritual to this day, as well as Dmitro Miron, known as Orlik, whose work “The Idea and Role of Ukraine” is required reading for them.
“The Black Corps” | The Azov military continues to adhere to the OUN's idea of a Greater Ukraine modeled on Nazi Germany. “The nationalist movement is so powerful that we will soon witness the emergence of a great Ukrainian state stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Tatra Mountains,” predicted OUN official Roman Suschko as early as 1939. Azov pays homage to this megalomaniacal ideology, for example, with the “Great Power Falcon,” which can still be found on the flags and insignia of its units, as a symbol of the ‘vision’ of a “superpower of the future that will take the geopolitical lead,” as Reins explains. In addition, his publishing house has released a book on “Ukrainian imperialism” as “order, an act of leadership, and a beacon of civilization for others”; the cover features a map on which future conquests of Russian territories have already been marked.
The roots of the rituals, symbolism, and aesthetics of the “Azov” military culture, which are strikingly influenced by Germanic mythology and Nordic paganism and whose origins Reins traces back solely to “old European history” and the Ukrainian independence movement, can also be found in part in Nazi Germany: The wolf's hook as the trademark of “Patriot of Ukraine” and ultimately “Azov,” which according to Reins is nothing more than the combined letters “I” for “idea” and ‘N’ for “nation” (a protective claim, as research has shown), and the Black Sun, which has now disappeared from many, but by no means all, of its troop emblems, originate from the Waffen-SS. The wolf's hook and the Black Sun still adorn the battle axes that “Azov” commanders receive at their appointment during archaic rituals by the light of the fire. A special “Khorunzha” unit is responsible for organizing and conducting the ‘Azov’ rituals. According to Reins, the task of such masters of ceremonies is to “raise and maintain morale.”
Following the secretive example of the Waffen-SS, the Azov military considers “war not as a form of work or service, but above all as a calling.” The term ‘soldier’ is not used for its members, because only “existence as a warrior is eternal life.” This is particularly true in Rein's 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, where the neo-Nazi organization “Centuria” has risen to become a warrior super-elite – its motto is “Blood, Family, Fight” and “Ukraine for the Ukrainians!” – and conducts ideological training that is part of basic training in the “Azov” units.
Even the name of the paramilitary nucleus of “Azov,” “Black Corps,” was borrowed from the title of the “Newspaper of the Schutzstaffel of the NSDAP – Organ of the Reich Leadership SS,” which had been published as a weekly newspaper with a circulation of up to 750,000 copies since 1935. Along with insignia and slogans of relevant origin (e.g., “My honor is loyalty”) used primarily by subunits, this is further evidence of a shocking fact: Azov has chosen Himmler's “race warriors” as its idols and continues their tradition, at least in coded form.
The West's “Brother in Arms” | This continuity, objectively attested to by the chief ideologist of Azov, represents a new challenge for the Western “community of values” – a dilemma. It is growing with the increasing interdependence between the military-industrial complexes of NATO and Ukraine and with the rapid expansion of Nazi organizations.
On August 13, 2025, The Times ran the headline “Putin fears him – 20,000 Ukrainians want to fight for him” and had Andriy Bilezki, leader of “one of Ukraine's most formidable units,” explain the options available to NATO countries as a result of the increased power of the Azov military. “We grant unrestricted access,” he reported, referring to the opening of the Izium front sector controlled by his troops to Western arms companies. “Our great advantage is that we provide debriefings, test results, and actual data from the battlefield.” Without the Azovization of the Ukrainian armed forces, which have been ravaged by desertion, Bilezkij's goal of a “permanently militarized society” modeled on Israel, “which effectively becomes the army and arsenal of a Europe that has proven alarmingly slow in building its own armed forces,” is not achievable. The message of the Times article: Bilezkij and his “Azovites” — who recently received at least twelve AS90 self-propelled howitzers and 42 Patria armored personnel carriers from the UK and Latvia — have long since become the West's indispensable “brothers in arms” in its preparations for a major war against Russia.
Fighters of the past | The German Ministry of Defense is also aware of this. So far, it has remained largely silent about the Bundeswehr's relationship with the Azov military. In recent months, however, photos of high-ranking German officers with members of the fascist Azov units have repeatedly appeared on relevant social media channels. For example, on May 8, 2025, Major General Christian Freuding, head of the Planning and Command Staff of the Ministry of Defense and the Ukraine Situation Center, was photographed with a commander of the Azov assault brigade, to which Reins belongs (see Junge Welt; 12.5.2025). A photo from July 2025 shows Army Chief Medical Officer Johannes Backus awarding a medic from the National Guard's 1st Azov Corps the title of European Best Medic at the Combat Medical Care Conference in Blaubeuren. At least twice since 2024, the head of the medical service of the 3rd Azov Assault Brigade has been received by the senior physician of the Bundeswehr hospital in Berlin. The increased visits by Azov delegations to NATO facilities also suggest cooperation with the Bundeswehr.
The German government has ideologically preempted criticism of this toxic brotherhood in arms from the peace camp, academia, and society. Back in June 2022, the Federal Agency for Civic Education, which reports to the Ministry of the Interior, published this analysis: “The Azov Regiment and the Russian Invasion” by Ukrainian political scientist Ivan Gomza. While the formation of another ‘Azov’ special regiment, including members of “Centuria” and the neo-Nazi party “National Corps,” which a few months later became the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, Gomza claims that “most right-wing extremist fighters” had already left the ‘Azov’ military in 2014 with its integration into the National Guard.” Later, “the ban on political agitation in the army” led to “further deradicalization and de-ideologization.” This narrative continues to form the basic tenor of almost the entire “Azov” reception by politics and the media in Germany.
Like the claim made by the German government in September 2023 that the OUN and the UPA cannot be classified across the board as “right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic, anti-Gypsyist, or otherwise racist” (see Junge Welt, September 27, 2023), is exposed as a myth—by the chief ideologist of Azov himself, who wants his “insider” book to be understood as “enlightenment.” Olexiy Reins insists that fighters from the early days of the Maidan revolt are still at the helm of the Azov military – “the right people with the right views,” as he quotes his predecessor Mykola Kravchenko.
For Reins, this includes living by the imperative “Ukraine above all else!” In July 2025, he went even further and presented an ‘unshakeable’ Azov “pyramid of nationalism”: family, nation, state. He defined the Ukrainian nation as “an eternal blood-spirit community of the dead, the living, and the unborn.” He criticized the soldiers' oath, “I serve the people of Ukraine.” He emphasized that this was not the country “of the people,” but of a “specific nation.” “War is not waged for abstractions.” Reins recently announced the installation of symbols of the “idea of the nation” (Wolfsangel) and the SS Division ‘Galicia’ in various locations – “altars of our ideology” to mark territories where gatherings, military training, and rituals are to be held. His storm brigade had already announced on the 80th anniversary of the founding of the “Galicians” in 2023: “We honor the fighters of the past.”
By cultivating such traditions, the Azov military and its followers strengthen a historical bridge between National Socialism and NATO. This exposes an unresolved and revived strain of history that now entangles Western powers—particularly Germany—with forces they officially claim to repudiate.
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