“Ukraine über alles!”: Azov’s chief ideologue whitewashes Ukrainian fascism

Image via Junge Welt

By Susann Witt-Stahl. Junge Welt, 21 August 2025. Translation and notes by Helmut-Harry Loewen. [1]

The Azov military is gradually being integrated into the Western European security architecture. Since the onset 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 Gepard tank operator in the German armed forces. The integration of 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 our “well-fortified democracy” (wehrhafte Demokratie). [2]

The Azov propaganda apparatus is apparently trying to supply the appropriate “historiography.” Leading the way is the Kyiv-based publishing house Rainshouse, run by Oleksii Rains, the new chief ideologist since the death of Azov ‘philosopher’ Mikola “Kruk” Kravchenko in March 2022. [3] Rains, 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.

In his book “What Is Azov from Ukraine? Exclusive Inside Look,” published in English at the end of 2023 and tailored to a Western audience, he claimed to want to debunk ‘myths’ spread by Russia and other enemies and prove that the Azov units consist solely of nationally minded idealists. This mission failed miserably. Rains not only undermined almost all normalization narratives about Azov; he also, probably unintentionally, emphasized the very disastrous tradition he wanted to cover up at all costs. [4]

In the spirit of the OUN                      

The “insider” portrait first traces the history of the Azov associations and highlights that their paramilitary nucleus, also known as the “little black men,” did not form in Kharkiv in 2014 by chance. 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 fighting 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 commander of the 3rd Army Corps and unofficial leader of the entire Azov movement.

Rains names Yaroslav Stetsko as the historical mentor of the Azov military. Stetsko was the deputy of Stepan Bandera, leader of the radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), who became his successor after his assassination in 1959. Rains describes Stetsko and the OUN as “partisan fighters against the Soviet and Nazi German occupation” of Ukraine, claiming that Stetsko “refused to cooperate with Adolf Hitler's regime” and was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a result.

Almost none of this corresponds to historical facts. Apart from the fact that Ukraine had been a republic of the Soviet Union since 1922, meaning it could not be “occupied” by the latter, Yaroslav Stetsko expressly welcomed the German invasion. He wrote to Adolf Hitler on July 3, 1941: "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, heartfelt congratulations on crowning the struggle with final victory."

Stetsko and the OUN-B wanted a sovereign Ukraine as a satellite state of the “Third Reich” with “the possibility of limited collaboration.” They had adopted the “National Socialist worldview” and the idea of a “fascist New Europe,” according to Swedish American historian Per Anders Rudling. This was by no means a passive act, as his German Polish colleague Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe emphasizes, but rather the OUN had created a “Ukrainian variant of fascism.” Unlike German Nazism, it had to operate transnationally due to the lack of its own territory, was dependent on camouflage measures [Tarnmaßnahmen] given the absence of a power base, and presented itself as “Ukrainian nationalism,” a practice that continues to this day, including by Azov.

Stetsko 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 the status of “honourary prisoner,” like Stepan Bandera and other prominent OUN members, and received his own living quarters, some freedom of movement and travel, and even limited permission to continue his political activities.

What Rains completely ignores is that in a chronological account of his life, which he wrote shortly after being arrested on July 9, 1941, Stetsko 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,” Stetsko 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.” Stetsko 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” and other “enemies” such as Moscow, Poland, and Hungary in leaflets distributed in the first days of the German attack on the Soviet Union.

An OUN-B pamphlet published in the Lemberg (Lviv) newspaper on June 10, 1942, and addressed to the Jewish population states: “You welcomed Stalin with flowers. We will lay your heads at Hitler's feet when we welcome him.” According to Holocaust researcher Karel Berkhoff, the German invaders undoubtedly bore the main 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 [»Selbstreinigungs«-Bemühungen] of anti-communist and antisemitic 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 (Nightingale) and Roland, and the SS Grenadier Division Galicia, as well as, at times, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of the OUN-B.

As Oleksii Rains, who chose Bandera's code name “Konsul” 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 Rains, the theoretical foundation of the Azov military's worldview can be found in a “work of political science” by Yaroslav Stetsko 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 Stetsko founded the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations in Munich, the most powerful umbrella organization of Hitler collaborators worldwide. In “Two Revolutions,” Stetsko 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,” Rains explains in the foreword to the new edition published by Rainshouse in 2023.

In the text, Stetsko evokes the fighting spirit of the ancestors — from antiquity to the emergence of the OUN in the 1920s and during World War II — of the Jew-slaughterer Symon Petliura and Roman Shukhevych, commander of the Nightingale battalion, later the UPA, and concludes: "Without a national-social revolution, there can be no Ukrainian liberation,“ according to the basic thesis of his ”social nationalism,“ which, as Rains vehemently denies, proves in parts to be 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," Stetsko continues. Another intersection with “National Socialism,” but also with all other forms of fascism, is his fanatical anti-communism and fetishization of violence. Stetsko 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 Stetsko's “social nationalism” from “National Socialism” and the ideology of the OUN and UPA until 1945 is the absence of overt antisemitism. 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 career under the auspices of liberal democracy had been made possible during the West German restoration under Chancellor Adenauer.

This is in contrast to the “social nationalism” of the Patriot of Ukraine, whose program, formulated by Andriy Biletsky in 2008, ties in with “National Socialism” and calls for a “racial cleansing” of Ukraine from the Jewish-led “subhumanity” (Untermenschentum), an atavism that Rains completely ignores in his “historiography.” The Azov warriors, who were financed by an ultra-right Jewish oligarch in 2014 and aspire to become “the best military unit in the world” as the future “SEALS” of NATO, refrain from making such openly racist and antisemitic statements. However, as Rains' book on Azov reveals, they continue to refer to antisemitic thought leaders, such as Hitler's translator Dymitro Dontsov and Mykola Ivanovych Mikhnovsky,, and antisemitic ideologues of the OUN, such as Stepan Lenkavskyi, author of the “The Decalogue of a Ukrainian Nationalist” (1929), known as the “ten commandments of Ukrainian nationalists,” which to this day all recruits must recite like an oath of allegiance during the initiation ritual, as well as Dmytro Myron, 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,” proclaimed 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 Rains 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.” Its 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 Rains traces solely to “old European history” and the Ukrainian independence movement, can also be found in part in Nazi Germany. The “Wolfsangel” [5] as the trademark of Patriot of Ukraine and finally Azov, which according to Rains is nothing more than the combined letters “I” for “idea” and ‘N’ for “nation” (a spurious claim, as research has demonstrated), 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 “Wolfsangel” and the Black Sun still adorn the battle axes that Azov commanders receive at their appointment during archaic cult rituals by the light of the fire. A special Khorunzha unit is responsible for organizing and conducting the Azov rituals. According to Rains, the task of such masters of ceremonies is to “raise and maintain morale.”

Following the secretive example of the Waffen-SS, the Azov military “does not regard war as a form of labour 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 Rains' 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, in which the neo-Nazi organization Centuria has risen to become a warrior super-elite which conducts the ideological training that is part of basic training in the Azov units. Its motto is “Blood, Family, Struggle” and “Ukraine for Ukrainians!”

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 was published as a weekly newspaper with a circulation of up to 750,000 copies from 1935 onwards. Along with insignia and slogans of relevant origin (such as “My honor is loyalty” [»Meine Ehre heißt Treue«]) used primarily by sub-units, this is further evidence of the shocking fact that Azov has chosen Heinrich Himmler's “race warriors” (Rassekrieger) as its idols and continues their tradition, at least in coded form.

The West's “Brothers in Arms”

This continuity, objectively attested to by Azov’s chief ideologist, 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 Biletsky, leader of “one of Ukraine's most combat-ready units,” explain the options that the rise in power of the Azov military presents for NATO countries. “We grant unrestricted access,” he reported on the opening of the Izyum 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 plagued by desertion, Biletsky’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: Biletsky and his “Azovites” – who recently received at least twelve AS90 self-propelled howitzers and 42 armored Patria personnel carriers from Great Britain and Latvia – have long since blossomed into the West's indispensable “brothers in arms” in its preparations for a major war against Russia.

Fighters of the past

The German Ministry of Defence 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 Defence and the Ukraine Situation Center, was photographed with a commander of the Azov assault brigade, to which Reins belongs (see junge Welt, May 12, 2025). A photo from July 2025 shows Army Surgeon General Johannes Backus awarding a medic from the 1st Corps Azov of the National Guard as European Best Medic at the Combat Medical Care Conference in Blaubeuren, Baden-Württemburg. 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 federal government has ideologically pre-empted criticism from the peace movement, academia, and the broader society regarding this toxic brotherhood in arms. As early as June 2022, the Federal Agency for Civic Education, which is subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, published the “Analysis: The Azov Regiment and the Russian Invasion” by Ukrainian political scientist Ivan Gomza. With 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 when it was integrated into the National Guard.” Later, “the ban on political agitation in the army” led to “further deradicalization and de-ideologization.” This narrative continues to shape the basic tenor of almost the entire Azov reception by the German political and media system.

The German government claim in September 2023 that the OUN and the UPA cannot be classified across the board “as right-wing extremist, antisemitic, antiziganist or otherwise racist” (see junge Welt, September 27, 2023) is exposed as a myth by Azov’s chief ideologist himself, who wants his “insider” book to be understood as “enlightenment.” Oleksii Rains 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,” he quotes his predecessor Mikola Kravchenko as saying.

For Rains, this means living according to the imperative “Ukraine above all!” 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,” emphasizing that this was not the country “of the people,” but of a “specific nation.” “The war is not being fought for abstractions.” Rains 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 honour the fighters of the past.”

Not least through the cultivation of such traditions, the Azov military and its entourage are attempting to construct an historical link between “National Socialism” and NATO. Once again, the undead of a repressed history is compromising a German imperialism that today stands on the Eastern Front with the battle cry of  "Never again!"

Notes

[1] Link to the original German article, “’Ukraine über alles!” Das ‘Asow’-Militär will Kreml-‘Mythen’ entlarven. Dabei fundiert es seine nazistische Traditionslinie und führt deutsche Normalisierungserzählungen ad absurdum” ["Ukraine above all!" The "Azov" military wants to debunk Kremlin "myths." In doing so, it is cementing its Nazi traditions and revealing the utter absurdity of German normalization narratives]: https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/506646.ukraine-ukraine-über-alles.html

[2] Also translated as “defensible democracy.” The German federal government states the following: “When we talk about a ‘defensible’ democracy or a ‘combative’ democracy, we mean that the democratic state has the right and the ability to defend itself against its enemies. The enemies of democracy should never be given the opportunity to abolish democracy. One legal means of achieving this is, for example, the banning of anti-democratic parties or associations. However, before a ban is imposed, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution [the domestic secret service, BfV] takes action. This is an agency that … defends against attacks on democracy. It collects and evaluates information about individuals, groups and parties that are classified as enemies of the constitution [Verfassungsfeinde].” Federal Agency for Civic Education: https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/lexika/das-junge-politik-lexikon/321402/wehrhafte-demokratie/  Critics have shown that German governments and compliant academics and journalists obfuscate the role of Azov military units in Ukraine and are not forthright about such neo-Nazi units’ connections to the German military and international white supremacist networks.

[3] For an illustrated catalogue of Rainshouse books by Ukrainian fascists and a vast collection of neo-Nazi merchandise, see: https://rainshouse.com 

[4] Three books by Oleksii Rains have been translated into English, including “What is Azov from Ukraine? Exclusive Inside Look” (222 pages), published in 2023 by Kyiv-based Rainshouse Books. His second book, “History of the Forbidden Symbol ‘Idea of the Nation’” (2023), attempts to de-stigmatize Nazi symbolism and iconography deployed by Azov and other fascist groups. A forthcoming book, “Consul on Ideology,” is due to be published in October, 2023. The international outreach of Azov is a well-funded political project encompassing connections to “White Power” groups in the Fascist International, propaganda tours of Europe and the United States, a multilingual publishing program, ideological indoctrination and paramilitary training, and cultivation of a fascist intellectual culture.

[5] The “Wolfsangel”, also known as “Wolf’s Hook,” ”crampon,” and “Doppelhaken” (German: “double hook”) is an ancient runic symbol said to ward off wolves, and appeared in German regions over numerous centuries. The rune was appropriated by the Nazis and used on the divisional insignia of several Waffen-SS units. It was incorporated in the logo of the Aryan Nations and continues to be used by neo-Nazis in many countries.