Blitzkrieg Blowback: Nazi Warlord Primed To Lead Post-War Ukraine

Will Andriy Biletsky Be Ukraine’s Next Führer?

by Scott Horton and John Weeks, The Libertarian Institute

On February 19, 2021, almost exactly one year before Russia would invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden addressed the Virtual Munich Security Conference. He said:

“We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face—from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic—that autocracy is the best way forward, they argue, and those who understand that democracy is essential—essential to meeting those challenges.”

The struggle between democracy and autocracy became a central theme and talking point of the administration, with Biden repeatedly extolling the United States as the “arsenal of democracy.”

On February 24, 2022, when Russia escalated its conflict with Ukraine (which began in 2014) by rolling more than 100,000 troops into the country, their president, Vladimir Putin, said:

“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”

Now, after more than three years of war, during which time DC has backed Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars, sophisticated weapons, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance and a parallel economic war on Russia, and Russia has inflicted hundreds of thousands Ukrainian casualties, an autocratic Nazi is poised to become the next president (or fascist dictator) of Ukraine.

Andriy Biletsky was imprisoned in a Ukrainian jail as the “Revolution of Dignity” (aka the Western-backed Maidan Coup) played out on the streets of Kiev in late 2013 and early 2014.

Biletsky, a partisan of “Social Nationalism” and “all the ancient Ukrainian Aryan values,” was accused of participating in a terrorist plot to blow up a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Boryspil.

On February 21, 2014, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych fled the country, on February 22 his government collapsed and on February 24 a new coup-interim junta was created under Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. One of the new government’s first actions, that very day, was to pardon what it called “political prisoners” held by the deposed regime. On February 25, 2014, Biletsky walked out of prison and inherited the coup.

Biletsky founded the Azov Battalion out of his Patriot of Ukraine gang and fellow travelers from Right Sector, the coalition Nazi militia that had accomplished the street putsch weeks before, and quickly established himself as a man willing to lead men into battle against any and all perceived enemies, including Ukrainian civilians. Such enemy civilians immediately presented themselves in Ukraine’s east and south. Anti-coup protestors refused to recognize the new regime’s legitimacy and attempted to assert greater sovereignty for their regions. In response, and on orders from the United States, Kiev launched an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” against the Donbas. Many regular Ukrainian soldiers refused to wage war on their countrymen, with some even defecting to the rebels’ side. Biletsky and Azov, however, plunged into the close quarters, urban combat with alacrity.

Known as “White Leader” or “White Chief” by his men, Biletsky has become the Empire’s new version of a “moderate rebel,” an anti-democratic, Nazi warlord who DC is desperate to spin as a freedom fighter committed to Western values. All the hype in the world cannot change the reality on the ground revealed by his rhetoric and behavior.

In 2007, Biletsky was the leader of Patriot of Ukraine, a direct heir of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was the “institutional epicenter” of Ukrainian collusion with the Nazis during World War II. He gave a speech entitled “Ukrainian Racial Social Nationalism.” In the speech Biletsky declared:

“The historical mission of our Nation, in this turning point, [is to lead] the White peoples of the whole world into the last crusade for its existence against the Semitic-led untermenschen.”

He argued that Ukrainian nation must become:

“…a single biological organism that will consist of New People—physically, intellectually and spiritually developed persons. From the mass of individuals should appear Nation, and from the weak modern man—the Superman. Social-Nationalism relies on a number of fundamental principles that clearly distinguish it from other right-wing movements. This is a kind of triad: sociality, Racial, Great power.”

This kind of rhetoric could get an American citizen put in time out on X/Twitter, or a Western European time in the penitentiary, but Biletsky has become a darling of Western governments and weapons manufacturers. He recruits young militants, neo-Nazis and men of the very-far right from across Europe. He baptized his new battalion with fire and blood in the eastern city of Mariupol, killing dissidents and seizing the city from pro-Russian forces in June 2014. In August 2014, Biletsky was promoted to lieutenant colonel of police. In September, Azov was made an official regiment of the National Guard and Biletsky was promoted to commander.

Ten years later and Azov currently has two sections, the “The 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov” within the National Guard and “The Third Army Corps,” which Biletsky leads. The Third Army Corps has seen extensive combat and is responsible for holding down approximately 10 percent of the frontline. Biletsky, Grégory Priolon writes for Intelligence Online, “now appears in Azov’s communications without official uniform or insignia, but with a visual consistency that establishes his role: that of a warlord turned symbol.”

Judging by recent attempts to rehabilitate this Nazi and his friends in the London Times, and other outlets, it is clear that Biletsky has political ambitions beyond military service after the war.

Azov has embraced the role of ideological actor and political force within Ukrainian society. Given its popularity and its killing power, it probably has two options to take control of the central government: elections or a bloody coup.

Regardless of whether Ukraine’s war with Russia ends soon or grinds on, having a Nazi ascend to power in Ukraine would be humiliating (and possibly dangerous) for America and absolutely intolerable for Russia. It could provoke them to restart or expand the war to conquer or simply crush the entire nation. As is typical of government, DC and Moscow’s interventions have created massive problems that will in time be invoked to justify more interventions for years to come.

On the other hand, the other day some assassin just ran up on Biletsky’s Svoboda Party counterpart Andriy Parubiy and put the dirty s.o.b. right out of his misery.

Sometimes these things do have a way of taking care of themselves.