When people said that the NGU Azov unit “shed any far-right associations,” that included the Azov movement led by Andriy Biletsky, who now commands the 3rd Army Corps in the Ground Forces. From 2023 until recently, Biletsky led the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade, which will continue to exist in the new corps, like the NGU Azov Brigade.

Certain “experts” argued before the war, such as Anton Shekhovtsov in 2020, that “the toxic far-right leadership formally left the [Azov] regiment and founded what would become a far-right party called ‘National Corps.’” The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko refuted this, also in 2020: “the available evidence indicates that the regiment remains joined at the hip to the internationally active National Corps party it spawned, and the wider Azov movement associated with the regiment.”

Shekhovtsov, a far-right activist turned “far-right expert,” was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by then-Congressman Max Rose (D-NY) and former FBI agent Ali Soufan, in which they called for the U.S. government to designate the “Azov Battalion” as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

In the spring of 2022, the Soufan Group, led by Rose and Soufan, made a U-turn and published a special report on Ukraine that claimed, “Azov has been largely regularized under the command and control of the Ukrainian armed forces, which has worked to winnow extremists from its midst. […] According to experts on the European far-right like Anton Shekhovtsov, the Azov of 2022 is nothing like the group from eight years ago.” Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at the Soufan Group, told the Washington Post that the National Guard “had to purge a lot of those extremist elements.”

Vyacheslav Likhachev is another “expert” cited by the media to downplay the far-right in Ukraine. He has echoed Shekhovtsov’s claim that Biletsky and the National Corps retained no more than a symbolic link with Azov, having tried and failed “to exploit the Azov ‘trademark’ in political life.” To be fair, the NGU Azov unit, wanting U.S. support, has paid lip service to this narrative. In a March 2022 statement to CNN, the Azov Regiment said it “appreciates and respects Andriy Biletsky as the regiment’s founder and first commander, but we have nothing to do with his political activities and the National Corps party.” However, as Oleksiy Kuzmenko wrote in 2020,

the role of the far-right leadership in the regiment remains evident. Both the National Guard unit and the political party admit to being part of the wider “Azov movement” led by the regiment’s first commander and current National Corps party leader Andriy Biletsky. The unit routinely hosts Biletsky (and other former commanders) at its bases and welcomes his participation in ceremonies, greeting him as a leader. Biletsky positions himself as the curator of the regiment, and has claimed to deal directly with Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on related matters — a claim that Avakov appeared to confirm in early 2019.

Shekhovtsov describes the regiment as a regular unit of the National Guard, but it is not. Regimental commanders have said that their unit owes its special status to being shielded from government interference. In 2019, the head of Azov’s military academy claimed Biletsky protected Azov from being “destroyed” by Ukraine’s leaders, while another commander described Biletsky as someone who “finds sponsors that really invest money.” Furthermore, Azov’s Kyiv recruitment center and military academy share a location with the offices of the National Corps.

The NGU Azov Brigade might have distanced itself from Andriy Biletsky in the past few years, but as deputy commander Illia “Gandalf” Samoilenko admitted in 2023, “Soldier to soldier and officer to officer, we have good relations with the 3rd Brigade [led by Biletsky].” In addition to the Yevhen Konovalets Military School, which unites the Azovite units and salutes Biletsky as their collective leader, the NGU Azov Brigade has a “standard-bearer school” named after Mykola Stsiborskyi, a fascist OUN ideologue who drafted an explicitly totalitarian constitution for Ukraine on the eve of World War II.

The Azovites have also called this their “Natiocracy School,” named for Stsiborskyi’s concept of nationalist dictatorship. Kuzmenko observed several years ago, this school trains “political-ideological officers” for the NGU Azov unit, and was “tied to the far-right National Corps party” since its establishment in 2017. He called this “another strong link between AR [the Azov Regiment] and the larger Azov movement.”