Now that’s chutzpah! The neo-Nazi Azov Regiment sent a delegation to Israel last week, and the leader of the delegation, Lt. Ilya Samoilenko, had a photo op on Dec. 17 at the Masada complex, wearing his modernized swastika. (https://t.me/AzovstalFamilies/1158 )
It sounds like a bad movie, yet in a world bent into submission in a ‘kiss the ring of the emperor” game, it was now Israel’s turn to pucker up.
Now, of course, one is supposed to look the other way. As Samoilenko explained to the Dec. 20 Jerusalem Post: “The battalion has changed. It has purged itself of its dark past. The only radicalism we embrace today is our radical will to defend Ukraine.” Samoilenko, one of the holdouts at Mariupol’s Azovstal in May, would know of that “dark past,” as he went to join Azov in 2014 (though delayed until 2015). But how does he explain that Wolfsangel insignia he still displays? The standard cover story—in which the neo-Nazi founder of the Azov Battalion, Andriy Biletsky, put an “I” inside a roman “N,” and it accidentally resembled a swastika—is pretty hackneyed. Then there are all those actual Nazi swastikas tattooed on his Azov buddies, revealed at the Azovstal last May—perhaps just too difficult to be “purged.”