Azov Battalion

Azov Battalion is a Ukrainian military formation that began in May 2014 as a volunteer battalion under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and was integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine on November 11, 2014. Its first commander, Andriy Biletsky, had led the Kharkiv organisation Patriot of Ukraine and the Social-National Assembly. The unit is also known as the Azov Regiment and is now styled the 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov.¹²³

Patriot of Ukraine and the Social-National Assembly

Mapping Militants Project at Stanford University reports that Biletsky recreated Patriot of Ukraine in 2005 in Kharkiv and created the Social-National Assembly as an umbrella movement in November 2008.³ VICE reported that Biletsky stated in 2010 that it was the Ukrainian nation's mission to "lead the white races of the world in a final crusade... against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]".⁴ The Mapping Militants profile, citing Foreign Policy reporting by Michael Colborne, states that when Biletsky formed the National Corps in 2016 he toned down his rhetoric and began to deny some of his earlier white supremacist statements retroactively.³

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report of December 15, 2014 records that clashes on March 14, 2014 in Kharkiv between Patriot of Ukraine and the pro-Russian organisation Oplot killed two members of Oplot. It states that, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the investigation had stalled "as all the members of the 'Patriots of Ukraine' alleged to have been involved in the incident are inaccessible for the investigation, due to their participation in the security operation in the east as members of the National Guard Regiment Azov".⁵

Formation and Mariupol, 2014

The unit's own history gives May 5, 2014 as the date of its establishment "as a special forces battalion under the Ministry of Internal Affairs", and June 13, 2014 as the date of its part in the liberation of Mariupol. It states that the battalion became a special forces regiment of the ministry on September 17, 2014, and was integrated into the National Guard on November 11, 2014 as a separate special forces detachment within the 18th Special Forces Regiment, military unit 3057.¹ The OHCHR report of December 2014 describes the unit as "previously named the Special Police Patrol Battalion Azov", recently moved under the National Guard within the ministry's chain of command.⁵

Askold Krushelnycky of the Atlantic Council was embedded with the battalion in June 2014. He wrote that about 200 of its members, with army, National Guard and other volunteer units, made up a force of about 400 for the attack on Mariupol, that its commander was Andriy Biletsky, that the Radical Party politician Oleh Lyashko had aligned himself with it publicly, and that about three quarters of its members were Russian-speakers from eastern Ukraine.⁶ The battalion's patch combined a wolfsangel with a black sun; the Mapping Militants profile reports that the movement says the wolfsangel stands for the letters I and N, "Idea of the Nation".³

The author Denys Gorbach wrote in openDemocracy in February 2016 that the group "owes its rise partially to Arsen Avakov, Ukraine's interior minister".⁷ The Daily Beast quoted a 2014 BBC report that "The Azov Battalion was formed and armed by Ukraine's interior ministry".⁸

Meduza reported in July 2015 that until August 2014 the regiment was sponsored by the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, then governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast; that on August 2, 2014 his deputy governor, Boris Filatov, announced on Facebook that the funding had been terminated because of statements by the regiment's deputy commander, Ihor Mosaichuk; and that Mosaichuk left the regiment and the funding was restored. Meduza added that the regiment was also supplied with weapons and resources by the Interior Ministry, charitable foundations, volunteers and businessmen. The same survey states that Biletsky was arrested in 2011 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up a statue of Lenin in Boryspil, and that the new authorities released him and other group members from prison in 2014. It records that the regiment first became prominent in a confrontation in Mariupol on May 9, 2014, when fighters stormed a police station and one fighter was fatally shot.⁹

Biletsky in the Rada and the National Corps

Biletsky was elected to the Verkhovna Rada in 2014 for single-member district 217 in Kyiv as a self-nominated candidate. The civic watchdog Chesno records that a representative of the People's Front, Zorian Shkiryak, withdrew his candidacy and supported Biletsky, that Biletsky had been a member of the People's Front military council, that he was deputy chair of the Rada committee on national security and defence, and that he sat outside any faction for the eighth convocation of the Rada, from November 2014 to August 2019. Chesno's profile describes him as a political prisoner of the Viktor Yanukovych government from the start of 2012 until the end of the Revolution of Dignity, and records that in 2019 he stood second on the list of the party Svoboda and was not elected.² The Mapping Militants profile states that Biletsky left the unit in October 2014 to campaign for the seat.³

The Azov Regiment separated from its political leadership in October 2016, when a conference in Kyiv formed the National Corps and elected Biletsky its leader, according to Tim Lister, writing in the CTC Sentinel of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.¹⁰ The National Corps joined Svoboda and Right Sector in a 2019 parliamentary bloc that won "barely two and a half percent" of the vote.¹⁰

Human rights findings

The December 2014 OHCHR report states that the Office of the Military Prosecutor "has not reported of taking any steps to investigate the considerable number of allegations of human rights violations against civilians and violations of international humanitarian law in the east, including looting, arbitrary detention and ill-treatment by members of certain voluntary battalions such as Aidar, Azov, Slobozhanshchina and Shakhtarsk."⁵

The OHCHR report for November 15, 2015 to February 15, 2016 records extensive use of civilian buildings and looting of civilian property by Ukrainian military and Azov regiment forces in Shyrokyne, east of Mariupol, and states that in collecting information on the conduct of hostilities by Ukrainian forces and the Azov regiment around Shyrokyne from the summer of 2014 it documented mass looting of civilian homes, and targeting of civilian areas between September 2014 and February 2015. It records that four detainees held in Mariupol pre-trial detention for their alleged involvement in the events of May 9, 2014 "complained that they had been ill-treated by SBU officials and members of the Azov regiment in Mariupol, detained incommunicado for some time in September 2014". The same report records that a member of the Azov regiment captured by the armed groups at Shyrokyne in February 2015 was subjected to electric shock and had his teeth pulled out.¹¹

The State Department country report on Ukraine for 2016 states that on February 25 volunteer Azov Battalion fighters blocked journalists' access to the offices of the television channel INTER.¹² The report for 2017 states that in May a woman in Mariupol was lured to an Azov battalion position, blindfolded and transported to an unknown destination, where men struck her and threatened to bury her unless she cooperated.¹³ The report for 2018 states that "members of nationalist hate groups, such as C14 and National Corps, at times committed arbitrary detentions with the apparent acquiescence of law enforcement", and that on June 8, 2018 nationalists from the National Druzhina, "established with support from the National Corps", destroyed a Romani camp in Kyiv while police made no arrests.¹⁴

House amendment, June 2015

During the House debate on the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2016 (H.R. 2685), Representative John Conyers offered an amendment reading: "None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion." He told the House that it "limits arms, training, and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion", cited characterisations by Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Guardian and the Associated Press, said that "Ukraine's Interior Minister recently announced the Azov Battalion will be among the units to receive training and arms from Western allies, including the United States", and said that Biletsky had organised the Social-National Assembly in 2008. Representative Pete Visclosky said the committee would accept the amendment, and Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen said "we accept the amendment". The amendment was agreed to.¹⁵

The Daily Beast interviewed U.S. Embassy and Army officials in Kyiv and Lviv in 2015. The embassy press officer, Yaryna Ferentsevych, said that "our vetting screens for human rights violations, not for ideology. Neo-Nazis, you know, can join the U.S. army too", and that she could not say whether any Azov members were on the list of people being trained. Captain Steven Modugno, public affairs officer of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, said that no one from the Azov Battalion or Right Sector was being trained in Lviv. The acting head of the National Guard, Mykola Balan, said, "Azov hasn't been trained by the U.S. military", and Biletsky said that American army representatives "had never trained the battalion". Conyers told the Daily Beast that the Leahy law "takes the essential retroactive step of prohibiting assistance to units that are credibly alleged to have committed gross violations of human rights. The issue here concerns who is eligible for aid in the first place".⁸

The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016 (Public Law 114-113), the omnibus for that fiscal year, contains no reference to Azov.¹⁶

Appropriations language, 2017 to 2026

The sentence from the Conyers amendment appears, word for word, in the Defense Appropriations division of each of the following enacted laws.¹⁷

• Public Law 115-31 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017), approved May 5, 2017: division C, section 8131.
• Public Law 115-141 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018), approved March 23, 2018: division C, section 8129.
• Public Law 115-245 (Department of Defense and Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Act, 2019), approved September 28, 2018: division A, section 8130.
• Public Law 116-93 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020), approved December 20, 2019: division A, section 8124.
• Public Law 116-260 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021), approved December 27, 2020: division C, section 9015.
• Public Law 117-103 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022), approved March 15, 2022: division C, section 8141.
• Public Law 117-328 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023), approved December 29, 2022: division C, section 8138.
• Public Law 118-47 (Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024), approved March 23, 2024: division A, section 8107.
• Public Law 119-75 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026), approved February 3, 2026: division A, section 8105.

Public Law 119-4, the full-year continuing act for fiscal year 2025 approved on March 15, 2025, does not repeat the sentence. Its section 1101 provides amounts for activities under "the authority and conditions provided in applicable appropriations Acts for fiscal year 2024", among them the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024 (division A of Public Law 118-47), which contains the sentence.¹⁸ Denys Prokopenko, the commander of the brigade, wrote in Ukrainska Pravda on April 19, 2024 that "Since 2017, and to this day, a number of US Consolidated Appropriations Bills have contained" the amendment, called its existence "Nonsense", and said that it had been added without proof, on the basis of Western media influenced by Russian propaganda, and that it was the reason Azov was not equipped with the most advanced Western weapons at Mariupol in 2022.¹⁹

The Intercept reported on June 22, 2024 that the House defense appropriations language had been updated to read "None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to provide arms, training, intelligence, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion, the Third Separate Assault Brigade, or any successor organization", and that the language then in effect addressed only the Azov Battalion. The same report states that the congressional ban "has only been in effect since 2018"; the enacted text of Public Law 115-31 carries the sentence in an act approved May 5, 2017.¹⁷²⁰ The text of Public Law 119-75, approved February 3, 2026, reads "the Azov Battalion" only.¹⁷

Foreign volunteers and United States prosecutions

On October 20, 2018 Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Scott J. Bierwirth swore an affidavit in the Central District of California in support of a criminal complaint against Robert Rundo, Robert Boman, Tyler Laube and Aaron Eason of the Rise Above Movement for riot and conspiracy offences under 18 U.S.C. sections 2101 and 371. Paragraph 16 states that in spring 2018 Rundo, Benjamin Daley and Michael Miselis "traveled to Germany, Ukraine, and Italy to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday and meet with members of European white supremacy extremist groups, including a group known as White-Rex". Paragraph 17 states that an Instagram post of August 1, 2018 showed members of the group "meeting with Olena Semenyaka, the leader of the International Department for the National Corps, which is a political party in the Ukraine that was founded in 2016 out of a regiment of the Ukrainian military called the Azov Battalion". The affiant added: "Based on my training and experience, I know that the Azov Battalion is a paramilitary unit of the Ukrainian National Guard which is known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology and use of Nazi symbolism, and which is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations."²¹

Lister wrote in April 2020 that the founder of Atomwaffen Division, Brandon Russell, contacted an anonymous Azov representative through the Iron March forum in 2015, describing himself as "an avid supporter of the Azov Battalion"; that, according to Bellingcat, Azov was in contact with Andrew Oneschuk through its podcast in early 2016; that a member of The Base arrested in January 2020, William Bilbrough, had "repeatedly expressed an interest in traveling to Ukraine to fight with nationalists there"; and that the American writer Greg Johnson, invited by Semenyaka, spoke at the Paneuropa conference in Kyiv in October 2018, which National Corps officials helped organise. Lister wrote that, from reporting trips to eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, he would be surprised if the number of foreign fighters with Ukrainian units had ever exceeded the hundreds, once fighters of Russian origin were excluded.

In September 2019 the FBI arrested, and federal prosecutors in Kansas charged, Army Specialist Jarrett William Smith of Fort Riley, Kansas, with distributing information on explosives. The complaint states that the FBI learned in March 2019 that he had "spoken about his desire to travel to Ukraine to fight with the Ukraine-based violent far-right paramilitary group, Azov Battalion", that he had told Craig Lang, a man who fought with Right Sector in Ukraine from 2017 to 2019, in June 2016 that he was interested in joining Azov, and that Lang's Facebook messages showed "mentorship" of Smith.²²

The Misanthropic Division, a transnational neo-Nazi network, stated in March 2015 that its "main purpose" was to support the volunteer formations of Azov and Right Sector in Donbas. The Mapping Militants Project reports that some of its members fought within the Azov Battalion and that members from Italy and the United Kingdom tried to establish relations with the British groups National Action and Combat 18 to recruit volunteers for Azov.²³

The Tech Against Terrorism and CTEC report of June 2022 reproduces an Iron March graphic listing as "supported groups" the Nordic Resistance Movement, Golden Dawn, CasaPound, Serbian Action and Azov.²⁴ Meduza's English translation of an investigation by Andrei Soshnikov for the BBC Russian Service states that some ultra-right activists suspected that the Iron March administrator Alisher Mukhitdinov, who wrote as Alexander Slavros, had acted under pressure from the Russian government when the forum closed in November 2017, and that one rumour held that he had angered the Federal Security Service by raising money for Azov. It adds: "However, the BBC could not find evidence that any such fundraising took place."²⁵

Designation requests

On October 16, 2019, in a letter led by Max Rose, whom The Hill described as the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee's counterterrorism subcommittee, 39 lawmakers asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo why Azov, the Nordic Resistance Movement and National Action had not been placed on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. The Hill reported that the shooter in the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, Brenton Tarrant, claimed in his manifesto that he trained with the Azov Battalion in Ukraine.²⁶ Lister wrote in 2020 that Tarrant "implied he had been to Ukraine, though research by the author in both New Zealand and Ukraine suggests he did not", and that the manifesto was later translated into Ukrainian and printed as a book, according to Bellingcat.¹⁰ The State Department did not immediately respond to The Hill's request for comment.²⁶

Russia's designation and Mariupol, 2022

The unit's history states that Azov fought for 86 days in the encirclement of Mariupol at the start of the full-scale invasion of 2022.¹ The Supreme Court of Russia designated the Azov Regiment a terrorist organisation on August 2, 2022 on a request from the Prosecutor General's Office, banning its activities in Russia. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that about 2,500 members surrendered in Mariupol in mid-May, that relatives feared that those captured could be tried as terrorists, and that Russia "falsely claims that Ukraine is controlled by Nazis".²⁷

Leahy review, June 2024

On June 11, 2024 the State Department said, in a statement reported by NBC News and the Associated Press, that it had applied Leahy vetting to the 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade and found "no evidence of Gross Violations of Human Rights (GVHR) committed by the 12th Brigade Azov". The brigade said that embassy staff had confirmed that it had "passed the inspection required by U.S. law and has the right to receive assistance". Dmitry Peskov said that "ultranationalists" were involved and that the change in Washington's position suggested a readiness to "resort to anything".²⁸

The Intercept reported that a State Department spokesperson said, "There was a request for resources for the 12th Special Forces Brigade, which prompted a Leahy vetting process, in which they were found to be eligible", and that the department would not say whether a Leahy ban had been in effect. Two spokespersons gave different dates for the end of the battalion: one said "That militia disbanded in 2015", and another said "The Battalion was disbanded in 2014 and the United States has never provided security assistance to the 'Azov battalion.'" The Intercept also reported that the unit's own Telegram channel announced in March 2024 that its personnel had completed a civil-military cooperation course given by Special Operations Command Europe, with a photographed certificate dated December 2023, and that the State Department declined to answer questions about the training. Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, told The Intercept that he was not aware of any standing restriction on Azov and that the unit had to his knowledge been eligible for aid since at least 2022; the report adds that Prokopenko had written on X that "Azov is still blacklisted from receiving any U.S. aid".²⁰ Charles Blaha, a former director of the State Department's Office of Security and Human Rights, said that the department "ought to provide a more detailed rationale for the finding that the Brigade is eligible pursuant to the Leahy law". The Intercept reported that Prokopenko and his deputy commander Sviatoslav Palamar had served in the original battalion.²⁰