EMPR (an abbreviation of EuromaidanPR) Media — a Ukrainian, "self-funded, alternative news media outlet born on the barricades of Euromaidan" — reports that Andriy Biletsky, the commander of the Azov Battalion (about 1,000 strong) and political party leader, has made the questionable claim that the "Russians cannot start the battle for Donbas or they are just delaying it until they take Mariupol."
Biletsky added that with 9,000 troops, "We will be able to relieve Mariupol if we win the battle for Donbas. It is Mariupol that is delaying the battle for Donbas for Ukraine." A glance at this recent map (NYT) of the eastern front throws Biletsky's assessment into more than a touch of doubt. The red arrows are neon-blinking signs of a robust battle stretching hundreds of miles. The battle is also projected to consume weeks or even months. By battle's end, Mariupol's courageous defenders, hunkered down in a steel plant, will have been starved or bombed out. Nevertheless, Biletsky's optimism, while heartening, is misleading.
The colossal downside to his story? You may not know who this battalion commander and political party leader is, but his identity is less than admirable. In fact it is downright repulsive.
The political party Biletsky leads is that of the "National Corps," a far-right, white-supremacist organ founded in 2016. With the world's thanks, it failed to gain so much as one seat in the Ukrainian parliament in 2019, having won only 2.5% of the popular vote, thus also failing to reach the required, 5% threshold for a seat.
The party's far-right bona fides appear in its "principled" embrace of an all-powerful, combined presidency and prime ministership; the supreme commander-in-chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces. A strong president in times of war may be a necessity, but Teutonic or Stalinesque fascism is scarcely what Ukrainians' desire. They, and their friends throughout the free world, are quite pleased with the thoughtful, popularly endorsed, pluralism-driven Volodymyr Zelensky.
Biletsky's National Corps party also advocates Ukraine's revisited status as a nuclear power. This advocacy, of course, only serves to provide Vladimir Putin with the deceptive propaganda of Ukraine as a whole being desirous of nuclear weapons. Which it decidedly is not. But Putin needs to bamboozle the Russian people with scary tales and ghost stories about Ukraine's looming, thermonuclear threat to the motherland.
In addition, the National Corps is opposed to Ukrainian membership in either the European Union or NATO, which, paradoxically, is perhaps Mr. Putin's most fervent desire. This, he happily condones: to keep Ukraine entirely separated from Western influence and any politico-economic-military cooperation. And in the category of just plain weird, Biletsky's National Corps advocates the establishment of an old, post-WWI geopolitical scheme to unite Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia into one "superstate."
Now, though, in the category of the wholly repellent, Andriy Biletsky is nothing if not a grade-A bigot. In a 2010 speech he demanded the coming together of "the white races of the world into a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen" — a clarion call as Hitlerian as they come. The Guardian, that year, interviewed one of Biletsky's true believers, who obliviously said "there’s nothing inherently wrong with national socialism as a political idea. I don’t know why everyone always associates it immediately with concentration camps.” Could be because Hitler's national socialism was a race-based ideology that extolled the annihilation of Biletsky's latter-day "Untermenschen."
The Guardian also reported that the National Corps' leader has since "toned down his rhetoric." Three years earlier, Biletsky denied both his racism and having ever delivered racist speeches. It's telling that another true believer said, as The Guardian put it, that "the National Corps are not neo-Nazis and did not want to establish a white supremacist state, although he admitted that some members hold white supremacist or neo-Nazi views." They just happen to hold those views as National Corps members, no particular connection.
It's a damn good thing that Ukraine isn't full of Andriy Biletskys, as Putin insists it is. If Ukraine were full of them, then the world would say to Putin: "You can have it."