(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In March 2022, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security warned that white supremacists in the U.S. were joining the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine.
“Ukrainian nationalist groups including the Azov Movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist-white supremacists to join various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia,” the DHS bulletin said.
Two months later, Ryan Wesley Routh, the man who would go on to allegedly attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, appeared in a video promoting one of the groups the DHS warned about: the Azov Battalion. Routh reportedly went to Kyiv in early 2022 to protest the invasion. He later reportedly became a recruiter. It’s not clear how he wound up in a pro-Azov video.
“This video is a message to the world from the Mariupol defenders. They are grateful for our support and ask us to keep on fighting,” stated the May 2022 video, shared by the Twitter account “Save Azov.” The video shows Routh at the 1:50 mark.
The Azov Battalion’s allegiance to the neo-Nazi ideology is well- documented. Indeed, Azov’s former commander once called for Ukraine to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival,” and more recently its fighters were seen on a viral tweet from Ukraine’s national guard greasing their bullets with lard against the “Kadyrov orcs”— to be used against the Muslim Chechens fighting for Russia.
Arming Azov was once a cause for concern among U.S. lawmakers. In 2018, Congress inserted a provision in its defense spending bill that banned U.S. arms from going to Azov, which had already received U.S. training and weapons the year prior.
But after Russia’s invasion in early 2022, Azov again was embraced by the U.S. government. Earlier this year, the Biden administration lifted a ban on arming Ukraine’s infamous Azov Battalion after a review found “no evidence” that it’s involved in human-rights violations.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
