The British military intelligence-linked private intelligence operation known as Bellingcat is a central part of the damage control operation in the Western corporate media intended to downplay the crimes of the neo-Nazi Azov movement in Ukraine. An April 6 Washington Post story, entitled “Right-Wing Azov Battalion Emerges as a Controversial Defender of Ukraine” is but one recent example of a story intended to minimize Azov’s Nazi proclivities by admitting that some of it is true, but in a way as to argue that the Russian objective of de-Nazification of Ukraine is not valid. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/06/ukraine-military-right-wing-militias/)
The Post article reports that “while the Azov is now fighting for a Jewish President whose relatives were killed fighting the Nazis, they have continued to be fodder for Russian propaganda as Putin seeks to convince Russians that his costly invasion of Ukraine was necessary.” The Post continues that interviews with Azov fighters and one of its founders, as well as experts who have tracked the battalion from its beginnings, provide “a more nuanced” picture of its current state, which is more complex than what is conventionally known.
One of the “experts” cited by the Post is a man named Michael Colborne who is identified only as someone who monitors right-wing groups and has authored a book on the Azov movement. “There are clearly neo-Nazis within its ranks,” said Colborne. “There are elements in it who are, you know, neo-fascist and there are elements who are maybe more kind of old-school Ukrainian nationalist,” he said. “At its core, it’s hostile to liberal democracy. It’s hostile to everything that comes with liberal democracy, minority rights, voting rights, things like that.”
A Google search, however, quickly revealed that Colborne is a researcher for Bellingcat and runs its far-right monitoring project called Bellingcat Monitoring. “My approach to the book is hugely impacted by the work I do at Bellingcat and particularly our far-right monitoring project, Bellingcat Monitoring,” he said in an interview published on March 29. “We use open-source research techniques to research the far right in Central and Eastern Europe. So much of my book, as the reader will quickly learn, is drawn from open sources—social media (especially Telegram), for example—and uses publicly available information to try and paint a picture of the Azov movement.”
Colborne calls Azov “a multi-pronged, heterogeneous far-right social movement that grew out of its namesake military unit, the Azov Regiment, and exert at least some influence on Ukrainian politics and society despite its small numbers (e.g., at most 20,000 members estimated at some points in the past). It continues, even during the current invasion, to evolve and grow and adapt, and is probably one of the most PR-savvy far-right movements I’ve ever seen. But it’s not some invincible far-right force—it’s had its struggles, its ups and downs, and isn’t about to take over Ukraine in some flight of Russian propaganda fancy or become some mass Fascist movement of hundreds of thousands like the 1930s.”
In an op-ed published on Feb. 22 in the New Statesman, Colborne declares: “yes, the far right is a problem in Ukraine, but it doesn’t in any way justify the actions of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as he threatens Ukraine with military intervention.” The Azov movement, he says, “is being more frequently dropped online by people who want to give Putin a free pass to do what he wants in Ukraine.”
