The 2016
Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law by US President
Barack Obama late last year, did not include a previously expected
ban against the funding of the Azov Regiment, a military organization
that originated as a volunteer militia in May 2014 and was
subsequently incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine.
The Azov
Regiment is notorious for the openly white supremacist and
anti-Semitic views of its members, and its use of the Wolfsangel, a
swastika-like symbol once used by certain divisions of the armed
forces of Nazi Germany, as well as its leading role in the Battle of
Mariupol in May-June 2014. The regiment’s leader is Andriy
Biletsky, a current member of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada
(parliament) and also leader of the neo-Nazi Social-National
Assembly. In a characteristic statement, Biletsky was quoted by the
UK Telegraph last August as stating, “The historic mission of
our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the
world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the
Semite-led Untermenschen.”
The 2016
Consolidated Appropriations Act includes a section entitled “Ukraine
Security Assistance Initiative,” which appropriates $250 million
“to provide assistance, including training; equipment; lethal
weapons of a defensive nature; logistics support, supplies and
services; sustainment; and intelligence support to the military and
national security forces of Ukraine.. .” Additionally, the US
is to spend at least $658.2 million on “bilateral economic
assistance,” international security assistance,” “multilateral
assistance,” and “export and investment assistance” for Ukraine
in 2016. All this follows nearly $760 million in “security,
programmatic, and technical assistance” and $2 billion in loan
guarantees that the US has provided Ukraine since the February 2014
Maidan coup.
In June last
year, the House of Representatives voted to amend the 2016 Department
of Defense Appropriations Act so as to include the text, “None
of the funds made available by this Act may be used to provide arms,
training, or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.”
Representative John Conyers, Jr. (Democrat-Michigan) had introduced
this proposal, pointing out that the magazine Foreign Affairs as well
as other leading media organizations characterized the Azov Battalion
as “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascist,” and arguing that “these
groups run counter to American values.”
According to
the Nation, the Defense Department subsequently began exerting
pressure on the House Defense Appropriations Committee to withdraw
the proposed amendment, arguing that the restriction was redundant.
According to this specious line of reasoning, funding of the Azov
Regiment should already be prohibited by the Leahy Law, which
establishes that “No assistance shall be furnished ... to any
unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of
State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross
violation of human rights.”
The
Department of State explains on one of its official web sites that it
“vets its assistance to foreign security forces, as well as
certain Department of Defense training programs, to ensure that
recipients have not committed gross human rights abuses. When the
vetting process uncovers credible information that an individual or
unit has committed a gross violation of human rights, US assistance
is withheld.”
Reports
published by Amnesty International in 2014 and 2015 gave evidence of
widespread torture and summary executions in Ukraine but did not
specifically name the Azov Regiment or its members as suspects. The
UN also issued a report in 2014 accusing both sides of the Ukrainian
civil war of committing acts of torture and attacks on civilian
targets.
While
Conyers’ amendment was widely reported in the media when it passed
the House of Representatives in June last year, it was never subject
to a vote in the Senate. The 2016 Department of Defense
Appropriations Act was incorporated into the 2016 Consolidated
Appropriations Act, which became law on December 18. The absence of
the prohibition on funding for the Azov Regiment was first noted in
the media by the Nation on January 14.
[...]
According to
an article published in the Daily Beast last July, in an interview
for that publication, Sgt. Ivan Kharkiv of the Azov battalion “spoke
about his battalion’s experience with US trainers and US volunteers
quite fondly, even mentioning US volunteer engineers and medics that
[were] still currently assisting them.”
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