Ukraine’s nationalists and the Azov battalion

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: Ukraine’s nationalists and the Azov battalion

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. In this week’s edition, we’re looking at Ukrainian nationalism. Throughout this conflict Vladimir Putin has insisted that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, has for his part accused Russian troops of repeating Nazi war crimes. It’s on a reminder of how deeply rooted this conflict is, not just in the cold war, but in the second world war. My guest this week is Professor Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University. So how did the Nazi invasion of the 1940s shape modern Ukraine? And how has President Zelensky changed his nation?

After many weeks of bitter fighting, this week has seen the evacuation of some of the Ukrainian fighters holding out in the besieged city of Mariupol.

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The steel factory was their last hold out, their Alamo. But it couldn’t last for ever. The fighters, including many seriously wounded, were bussed to a Russian controlled enclave in Ukraine. Ukraine’s President Zelensky said combat operations in Mariupol are over, for now. [Zelensky speaking in Ukrainian] Ukraine needs Ukrainian heroes alive. That’s our principle, he said.

To the Ukrainians and much of the watching world, the troops holding out in Mariupol were heroes. But the Russians have continually insisted that the Azov battalion, which organised much of the Ukrainian resistance, is a neo-Nazi group. That accusation was angrily rejected by one leader of the battalion.

Azov Battalion leader in Ukrainian via translator
The enemy is also doing everything in terms of propaganda. We in the Azov Regiment, are the military servicemen of Ukraine, of various nationalities. There are Jews among us, Greeks among us, Belarusians, Gagauz people, these are all Ukrainian citizens. We don’t have hired guns among us. We have different faiths and religions. We are multinational. So this Russian propaganda is working against us.

Gideon Rachman
Against the backdrop of a bitter war, Ukraine’s also received a morale boost with its victory in the Eurovision Song Contest

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Accepting the award, the leader of the Kalush Orchestra issued a now famous battle cry.

Oleh Psiuk
This victory is for every Ukrainian. Slava Ukraini!

Gideon Rachman
The Ukrainian Eurovision victory, based on votes from the European public, demonstrated the depth of sympathy for the country across the continent. But Russia continues to insist that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis. Kim Lane Scheppele worked in both Russia and Ukraine. So I began our discussion by asking her if this line of argument is simply cynical propaganda or whether on some level, Vladimir Putin genuinely believes that he is battling neo-Nazis.

Kim Scheppele
Well I think at some level he believes it. So you look at Putin’s age and you ask, what would he have learned growing up about Ukrainians? And one of the standard things that was in all Soviet textbooks was that a lot of Ukrainians, particularly in western Ukraine during the second world war, had collaborated with the Germans. And that was actually true of some Ukrainians, in particular, this organisation of Ukrainian nationalists led by a guy called Stepan Bandera. And that organisation had been responsible for, well, carrying out the Holocaust in Ukraine, massacring lots of Poles, but also crucially standing up to the Soviet Union. And so many Russians, many current Russians who were raised in the Soviet Union would have been raised with this thought that you couldn’t really trust Ukrainians because they were all Nazis, not neo-Nazis, but actual Nazis. So the problem has been when you fast forward to independent Ukraine after 1991, is that in general the population of Ukraine does not support rightwing nationalists. On the other hand, there is a group based also in western Ukraine that has resurrected the memory of the Stepan Bandera and resurrected the symbols and the slogans and the flags and the signs of this organisation of Ukrainian nationalists. And so it all came to a head in 2014, which was when Mr. Yanukovych, Putin’s buddy and heading Ukraine, fled after the Maidan demonstrations. And the provisional government that was installed to replace him had ten members of the cabinet who came from these two groups called Svoboda and Pravyi sektor, which are both descendants of this Bandera organisation. And I think Putin looked at that cabinet and freaked out and within two weeks he’d annexed Crimea, which is to say it played into a narrative that he knew from his youth about what Ukrainians do when left to their own devices. And it was true briefly that these groups had a big say in the provisional government of 2014.

Gideon Rachman
Presumably though, they would deny that they are neo-Nazis. They will have a different narrative about what Bandera was all about, yeah?

Kim Scheppele
Well exactly. So this is also what’s interesting. So who was Bandera? So Bandera leads this group. After the Banderas group goes over and collaborates with the Germans, Bandera, in 1941 . . . 

Gideon Rachman
And presumably they collaborate because they see Russia as the enemy and not just Germany.

Kim Scheppele
Yes, they see Russia as the enemy. They think Germany will give them their territory back. So Ukraine had been independent for one year at the height of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin cut a deal to get out of world war one, leaving all of the territories occupied by what were then called the central powers, so Germany and Austria. All those territories Lenin abandoned so that he could consolidate the revolution. And Ukraine was one of those territories that became briefly independent under German tutelage. So when the option came again to become independent, the Ukrainian nationalists then looked to Germany. This is in the second world war to say, aha, they helped us liberate ourselves from the Soviet Union.

Gideon Rachman
And of course the 1930s had been appalling in Ukraine under . . . 

Kim Scheppele
Right, of course. And so this Bandera organisation had actually risen up in the 20s and 30s to free Ukraine from Russia again, and they were willing to pay any price. Now after the Bandera group started collaborating with the Germans, suddenly Bandera inflicted a surprise on them. He declared independence. His group declared Ukraine independent in 1941. The Germans then arrest him, put him under detention. He’s under detention for much of the war. So the massacres that his group carries out happen while he’s in jail.

Gideon Rachman
These are massacres of Jews, Poles . . . 

Kim Scheppele
So this UPA group, that is the kind of paramilitary associated with this organisation of Ukrainian nationalists, they carry out essentially the Holocaust in Ukraine. They massacre lots of Poles and they’re, of course, willing to fight Russians as well. Now, remember, this is when Ukraine is still part of the Soviet Union. So this is a disloyal force within. So the Bandera defenders who come along now say, well look, we’re just in favour of Ukrainian independence and Bandera, our guy, was not involved in these massacres. And so there are these two different accounts of what Bandera’s about. Also, there’s something else that’s kind of funny that happens. I mean, it’s not funny, really, but it’s peculiar funny. At the end of the second world war, this organisation of Ukrainian nationalists, you know, after the Battle of Stalingrad, begins to realise they’re not going to win and they’re gonna have to somehow come to grips with being part of the Soviet Union again. So they start flipping their narrative and saying, oh, we’ve always loved Russians. This is really great. We’ve never actually said anything negative about Russians. And they create this fake document called The Book of Facts, in which they create a series of like alternative reality documents backdated to make it look like this organisation of Ukrainian nationalists had never been disloyal to the Soviet Union. And that book then emerges at the end of the war, particularly in the diaspora community, as evidence that Bandera was never associated with these massacres of Jews and Poles and others. And so that’s the version that the current group of Ukrainian nationalists wants to forward. And they resist the thought that this was a faked book of documents. So the legacy of Bandera is contested, you know, but what the Russians are now reacting to is the fact that the Ukrainian government has made Banderas birthday a holiday, the fact that actually “Slava Ukraini” the slogan that you hear, was the Bandera slogan. That some of the flags and the symbols and the symbols of Ukrainian nationalism date from the Bandera group and the Bandera era.

Gideon Rachman
And the Azov battalion is really the heart of Banderaism, is it not?

Kim Scheppele
Exactly. So this Azov battalion really gets going in 2014 and it puts out a call. In fact, I can show you advertisements that appeared in the European press saying, come fight Russians, you know, on behalf of Ukraine. And it’s got all of these neo-Nazi symbols. It recruits neo-Nazis from all over Europe to come fight in 2014 for Ukraine. So it was formed as a neo-Nazi battalion on its own. And then because the Ukrainian army . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Explicitly neo-Nazi?

Kim Scheppele
Explicitly at the beginning, explicitly neo-Nazi. OK. And it was all these foreign fighters, you know, together with Ukrainian neo-Nazis. And they were fighting in this disorganised fashion, kind of in parallel with the Ukrainian army. And then in 2015, the Ukrainian national guard annexes them as an official part of the Ukrainian national guard. And so once the Azov battalion is now in the Ukrainian military, it causes a lot of problems. So, for example, the US government was helping to train this military and when the American Congress discovered there was this neo-Nazi battalion, literally in the US legislation, it says, and no money shall go to this battalion. You know, so that has been the carrier of neo-Nazis. It’s not a very big one. And the Ukrainian public has rejected over and over again electing to the Ukrainian parliament anyone of this stripe. So it’s just a minoritarian group. And so when the new fighting started, you know, and here we are in 2022, the Azov battalion became the place where a lot of foreigners were put because it wasn’t a dominantly Ukrainian speaking division of the Ukrainian military. And so the neo-Nazi influence has now been very much diluted. Now, Mariupol was guarded by the Azov battalion, and this has been where obviously the Russian forces have concentrated their most brutal campaign. And if Putin is claiming to be fighting, you know, Nazis, the Azov battalion would be the place that he would double down. And I think that’s exactly what’s happened. Now, the current Azov battalion is much less of a neo-Nazi formation than it was, but there’s still remnants of neo-Nazis in that battalion. And that’s the one little tiny piece of Ukraine where this neo-Nazi sort of propaganda has a slight bit of truth.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And what is Zelensky’s relationship to this far-right group? Because you say that they do OK in some or they get up to about 10 per cent, I think, maximum in one election, but then they’ve been falling away. How does Zelensky relate to them?

Kim Scheppele
Yeah. So this is really, I think, important. So the height of support for neo-Nazis was back in 2010 when they won about 10 per cent of the vote in national elections. By the time Zelensky is elected in 2019, the neo-Nazis get zero seats in the parliament. So he enters the political stage when the neo-Nazis are basically not a force in national politics. That said, some pieces of this Ukrainian nationalist movement are still extremely important for Ukrainians. So Bandera becomes a national hero, even not among the neo-Nazis. The organisation of Ukrainian nationalists has been sort of whitewashed in Ukrainian history to be simply sort of nationalists and not Nazis. So that version of history he’s had to kind of go along with.

Gideon Rachman
And yet, you know, in a way, the Ukrainians ultimate answer to the accusation of neo-Nazis is, well, we have a Jewish president, which is something that Lavrov and the Russians have struggled with. You can’t really explain it. And it is a pretty good riposte, is it not?

Kim Scheppele
It’s a pretty good riposte. But what’s even more significant, I mean, is that Zelensky’s Jewish, but also that he’s from the east and he’s a native Russian speaker. He represents all of the things that Russia can’t explain, right? One of the things that I think Russia’s been terribly surprised by and I think Ukrainians have been terribly surprised by also is that intense loyalty to Ukraine that the Russian speakers have shown. I think Putin guessed and I bet even the Ukrainian military wouldn’t have actually known when it came to a fight between the Russians and the Ukrainians, what would the Russian oriented parts of eastern Ukraine do? And to a person, they have stood up with Ukraine against Russia.

Gideon Rachman
Why do you think that is?

Kim Scheppele
Well, because Russia has been bombing them and attacking them, for starters. Second of all, because they are led by a Jewish and Russian speaking president who knows exactly how to make the appeal in such a way that it’s not the western Ukrainian nationalist appeal. It’s an appeal to an image of Ukraine that is deeply multicultural. Because again we focus often on the Ukrainian-Russian divide, which is huge. But Ukraine is very multinational. So there are Polish parts, there are Hungarian parts, there are Romanian parts, there are Ruthenian parts, there are all kinds of ethnic groups that have concentrations within Ukraine because Ukraine’s borders have moved so frequently over the last 200 years, not to say anything about Crimea, which was Russian territory till 1954. So, you know, Ukraine has always been a multinational state and Zelensky has embraced that and made it more possible for the Russians to say, I am Ukrainian even if I don’t speak the language well.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. The paradox seems to be that Putin, his whole argument is based on the denial of Ukraine’s separate identity, has done more probably to create Ukrainian identity than anyone.

Kim Scheppele
Absolutely. And, you know, this is the first lesson of war, right? I mean, those of us who followed the Balkans war knows that all those Serbian liberals became nationalists overnight when they started being bombed, right? There’s nothing that creates national identity like having a common enemy. And so I think Putin really underestimated what that effect would be. And I think, frankly, many Ukrainians are so surprised at how unified the country has become. And this is the function of leadership. You know, this is a function also of, you know, having a president that has really tried to create a Ukrainian identity that isn’t tied to ethnicity or language. And that preceded this war by several years. And I think this war would have looked very different if there had been somebody other than Zelensky or a population willing to vote for Zelensky. And remember he gets 70 per cent of the vote, you know, which is not just a small majority, but, you know, overwhelmingly Ukrainians were rejecting these various corrupt governments of both Ukrainian and Russian orientation that had preceded Zelensky. So it’s a vote of confidence for this kind of leadership.

Gideon Rachman
It’s interesting, though, when I speak to people outside the west who often, as you know, have a very different view of this conflict. I’ve had Indians say to me, oh, well, you know, Ukraine’s not really democratic anyway. They sort of buy quite a lot of the Russian line, that Zelensky has been suppressing freedoms within Ukraine. You shake your head incredulously, but explain why that, in your view, is wrong.

Kim Scheppele
Yeah. So Ukraine’s had a very troubled democracy. I mean, it’s been plagued by corruption from day one. I think what we forget is that in the 1990s, Ukraine lost more than two-thirds of its GDP in that decade. It was a completely devastated mess. And of course, things were privatised irregularly. It was very difficult to get laws to function. So Ukraine has been building this very fragile democracy out of the rubble of the Soviet Union. And it hasn’t done all that well because basically every regime has gotten captured by corrupt oligarchs. It just has not been a robust democracy. And yet Ukrainians keep voting for non-corrupt democratic leaders. You know, if you can get things to an election, probably it’ll be OK, right? That’s not true everywhere. I mean, we’re in the UK, in the US and, you know, it doesn’t always work out that you get non-autocrats, you know, winning elections. But in Ukraine, the voters have consistently voted to kind of move their country in a more democratic and constitutional direction. It’s just that the leaders have constantly fallen victim to the corruption that’s just overwhelming.

Gideon Rachman
And the argument that Zelensky was actually showing autocratic tendencies himself, I mean, people point to the fact that Poroshenko was about to be put on trial when the war breaks out, the former president. So what was going on there?

Kim Scheppele
Yeah. So this is actually, this has all been forgotten now. So once Zelensky came in, he came in with this tremendous mandate to create a kind of anti-corruption programme which he got through his parliament and then the constitutional court, which had been captured by Poroshenko’s people. The constitutional court struck down this whole anti-corruption programme as unconstitutional. Zelensky did something very clever. He took their decision to the Venice Commission, which is this body of the Council of Europe that sort of helps liberal democracies get off the ground. And he said to them, what do you think of this decision? Is this the kind of decision a proper constitutional court would make. And the Venice Commission comes back and says, no, this is not a good decision. And in the view of the Venice Commission, it would be permissible if the Zelensky government didn’t follow it. Zelensky then fires the president of the constitutional court, and he was in the process of passing a law through the parliament that would have dissolved the constitutional court and created a different one in order to rid the judiciary of the supporters of corruption that had kept these regimes in place. That’s a very tricky thing to do and claim to be doing it in the name of the rule of law. It’s never acceptable to fire judges except when the judges are locking you into a corrupt system that is not democratic. And so Zelensky was using the Council of Europe institutions in partnership to kind of walk through how you do this. How do you dismantle the institutions that prevented democracy from functioning with the goal of setting up new democratic institutions? And it’s always possible for someone to say, as a leader does that, that they are just consolidating power for themselves. There wasn’t much of a sign that that’s what Zelensky was doing, but it’s possible. You know, those are the steps you take if you’re trying to create an autocracy, just as they are the steps you would take if you were trying to dismantle an autocratic structure that had no room for democracy.

Gideon Rachman
And again, you know, slight alarm bell. Former president is on trial. What was the story about Poroshenko?

Kim Scheppele
Yeah. So Poroshenko was clearly corrupt. I mean, the trial was going to produce the evidence that would show that he was massively corrupt. But I don’t think there’s much argument from anyone who saw him up close that he was a clean government kind of guy. Poroshenko was like all the other leaders of Ukraine, unfortunately, completely dependent on the set of oligarchs that kept him going and that he ran the government on a money for favours, kind of, you know . . . 

Gideon Rachman
So, again, you think that that was arguably, in fact, probably a legitimate process.

Kim Scheppele
Probably a legitimate process.

Gideon Rachman
It sounds like, you know, a lot of us who were coming relatively new to this said, you know, this guy is literally a comedian. And wow, he turns out to be this great wartime leader, very cast for it. But you were saying actually even before the war, he was a pretty serious leader. I mean, he was really trying to do deep structural reform.

Kim Scheppele
I think so. I mean, you know, it’s always hard to know. And also, wars make people into different kinds of leaders, right? So would he have been like this if it hadn’t been the war? Who knows? But, you know, I keep saying he wasn’t a stand-up comedian. He’s not the kind of guy who has his script and he stands up there making fun of everybody. He’s a sketch comedian. You know, for the Americans, it’s like Saturday Night Live or, you know, it’s these sketch comedians who literally have to get very used to listening to people in the moment and responding instantly to what other people are telling them. In other words, it’s an interactional kind of comedy. You saw it on display during the Trump impeachment when that phone call came out, you know, and you could hear Zelensky trying not to alienate Trump, but never to fully agree with him. And he’s constantly in the moment skirting in another language, right? Skirting that edge where he’s not alienating but not agreeing with Trump. Now, that’s what good sketch comedians do, right? They keep the play going. They keep the sketch going. But they have to do it by constantly being in the moment, reacting to what’s happening around them. And I think that’s not bad training actually, for a leader. Who knew? But you see that Zelensky can do this. And what he’s been so good at, right, as a national leader, is when he addresses each parliament, he addresses each parliament using the triggers of their own national memories. You know, so I work on Hungary. So when he talks to Viktor Orbán, he wasn’t addressing the parliament because Orban would never let him, but he’s addressing Orban and he says, you know, go down to the Danube and you’ll see these shoes, these bronze shoes, which are a Holocaust memorial in the Danube, where Jews had to take off their shoes before being shot into the Danube. And there’s this memorial right outside the parliament of all these bronze shoes. And he said, go down to that memorial and think about what it’s like to have your country occupied by a hostile force and your minorities treated in this way. This is how we’re all being treated now. Who would know that about the bronze shoes next to the parliaments, right? And every country he’s appealed to something . . . 

Gideon Rachman
So Britain, he refers to the Blitz.

Kim Scheppele
Refers to the Blitz. So he’s got, first of all, an excellent cast of, you know, writers. But he also realises that nationalism has to be translated not just literally into another language, but symbolically into another language. And he’s been making these appeals, which, again, is the art of the sketch comedian of saying, if I’m interacting with you, how do I create a mutual space in which we’re talking about the same thing, even if we’re coming from different places?

Gideon Rachman
And I thought it was so interesting on the May the ninth that Putin’s speech is from a podium, very traditional, and Zelensky shoots a video walking through the streets of Kyiv.

Kim Scheppele
Absolutely. So, you know, yeah, he shoots the video. But here’s the other thing that’s sort of genius communication. You can tell from the length of his beard that it’s happening in real time. Right? Like if you think about hostage videos where you have to show like the newspaper from the day that the thing is proof of life. His beard is like proof of life. Right? So you can tell he didn’t record this before the thing happened. It’s all in real time. He’s done a lot of things like that which are just subtly conveying: I am here. I am still here. And so when the war is over, he’s going to shave his beard. And that will be a moment.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Professor Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University, ending this week’s edition of the Rachman Review. Next week I’ll be in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and the Rachman Review will probably come from there. So please do join me.

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