Thread by @Parrots38

A lot has been written and said about Roman Protasevich, but the guy standing next to him in this image is possibly even more interesting. For a variety of reasons, including his tattoos.

His name is Stanislav "Stas" Goncharov, also known as "Terror Machine" and "the Belarusian" among his Azov comrades. He was known for his uncompromising ruthlessness and eventually became a platoon commander and/or machine gunner.

Stas went to Ukraine in 2014 and was arrested when he returned in 2016. Turns out he was already known to the authorities: 2013, with a group of football Ultras, he forced two 13-year-olds to perform a Nazi salute. The incident was filmed and posted online.

A bit about his tattoos (not the more obvious ones). The two hand grenades is the insignia of the Dirlewanger Brigade ("36. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS"), a unit that was recruited from criminals and notorious for its atrocities all across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

His back is dedicated to the "30th Waffen Grenadier Division" of the SS, also known as "Weißruthenische Nr. 1". "Weißruthenien" was the name given to occupied Belarus as opposed to the traditional German name for the Region, "Weißrussland".

It was led by the "Weißruthenischer Zentralrat", a collaborationist puppet regime which used the seal and white-red-white flag first adopted in 1918, when the short-lived Belarusian People's Republic was created by the Germans as a buffer state.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusia…

The same flag and seal were briefly used in post-Soviet Belarus 1991-1995 and later readily adopted by the anti-Lukashenko movement - which was reported about and apparently coordinated by Nexta and Protasevich himself.

Yes, the same flag that Latvian politicians a few days ago decided to put up at the hotel where the Belarusian ice hockey team was accommodated.
reuters.com/lifestyle/spor…

Here's some sources, in Russian.
dsnews.ua/society/mvd-be…
sb.by/articles/kleym…
naviny.belsat.eu/ru/news/otstan…
nn.by/?c=ar&i=168765…
world.segodnya.ua/world/sud-bela…

Forgot to actually include his back tattoos.