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52 I Eastern Europe bne September 2021
2014 when they began creating volun- teer battalions fighting Russia and its proxies in eastern Ukraine. This alliance appears to have remained in place, reports the Kyiv Post.
Under US pressure Zelenskiy launched
a campaign with an oligarch speech
in March and since then has passed a number of laws restricting their contacts with government as well as closing some of the loopholes that allowed them to run economic rent schemes that have made them fabulously wealthy. At the same time Zelenskiy appears to be trying to crack down on corruption in general as several middle tier officials have been arrested recently on corruption charges. Most notably several senior managers
of PrivatBank, that used to belong to Kolomoisky who is accused of stealing $5.5bn from the bank, were arrested or had arrest warrants issued in their names in February.
Far right and Belarus opposition
Azov is deeply entrenched in Ukraine. The group also has multiple ties with leading Belarusian opposition figures, many of whom have maintained close ties with Azov members in a fact
that the international media remains squeamish about reporting. The Kremlin’s claims that Maidan was a far right coup contradict the western
international press, or at best given a couple of column inches. This year it was not reported at all. Likewise, the ties between prominent Belarusian opposition figures and Azov have been sparsely reported.
As bne IntelliNews has reported there is a values fault line that runs down the middle of Europe to the right of which values are distinctly less liberal than to the left – including affiliation with far right ideas. For example, despite the Baltic states’ reputation for adoption of European values, the region remains
in Donbas and photos have emerged of him in uniform carrying a machine gun. Protasevich does not deny either serving with Azov nor being on the frontline in Donbas, but claims he was there exclu- sively as a photographer and did not fight. However, no photos or stories have been produced to support this version of events.
A man who bears a very strong resemblance to Protasevich appeared on the cover of the Azov recruitment magazine “The Black Sun” in uniform and carrying a weapon, in a photo that has been widely shared on Russian social media claiming it is Protasevich.
Vitaly Shishov, the head of Belarusian House, an opposition group that offers aid to Belarusians that flee to Ukraine, was found hanged in a tree in a Kyiv park on August 3. Shishov also had close ties to Azov via his fellow Belarus House partner Rodion Batulin and Sergey Korotkikh, a Belarusian with ties to Russia’s FSB and one of the founders of Russia’s largest neo-nazi platform before moving to Ukraine and joining Azov.
A day after Shishov was found hanged in a park, with bruises on his body, his partner Batulin, an MMA fighter and also an Azov veteran from Latvia, was banned from entering Ukraine by the SBU as a “threat to national security” but no further details were given.
“Azov has multiple ties with leading Belarusian opposition figures, many of whom have maintained close ties with Azov members”
narrative that Maidan was a popular uprising by regular Ukrainians yearning to join Europe and so the bulk of international reporting on Ukraine has become shy of the topic of Ukraine’s very obvious problem with far right affiliations.
Every year the far right stage a major torchlit march down Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main thoroughfare, attended by thousands of aficionados, some of whom are in full Nazi uniform, but the event is regularly ignored by the
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homophobic and also has Nazi sym- pathisers that regularly parade in public.
The former editor-in-chief of the Belarusian Telegram channel Nexta Roman Protasevich became a cause célèbre after Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko forced
a commercial Ryanair flight to land in Minsk and arrested Protasevich and his girlfriend on May 23.
According to creditable reports Prota- sevich served with an Azov battalion