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Leonid Ragozin

11 Aug, 10 tweets, 4 min read

@barabanch

Story of a tablet left by a Wagner soldier on the battlefield in Libya. Great collaboration between Ibrahim Nader and ⁦@barabanch⁩. bbc.co.uk/news/extra/8ia…

Two features stand out on the photo of the Wagner combatant linked to that tablet. First is the logo of an Operational Support Service unit based in Grozny Chechnya. Russian media describe the service as an elite crack unit of the FSB.

Here is a 2006 publication in Stavropol Pravda which describes Operational Support Service as the most secretive unit of the FSB which deals with hostage situations, arrests spies and fights in conflict zones. stapravda.ru/20060906/Kruch…

The publication says that OSS units only existed in Krasnodar and Stavropol (two large cities close to the North Caucasus) at the time. The Chechen unit must have emerged around 2006 as attested by this medal minted on its 15-year anniversary. auction.ru/offer/sluzhba_…

The other feature is Mjöllnir or Thor’s hammer on the combatant’s neck. Matches neatly with Hitler’s Mein Kampf found by BBC journalist among various files on the tablet. This reflects the far right culture characteristic of Wagner Group and similar units in Ukraine.

A representation of Mjollnir is a regular feature at parades and other military rituals staged by Azov regiment, for example.

The fascination with Scandinavian mythology inside Wagner Group appears to be nurtured by the folks from Rusich, a neo-nazi unit set up by Aleksey Milchakov and Yan Petrovsky, who grew up in Norway. A typical Rusich post contains verses from Scandinavian sagas.

Milchakov and Petrovsky hail from the very same neo-nazi milieu in Russia as the ideologists of Ukraine’s Azov movement, Sergey Korotkikh and Aleksey Levkin (of Wotanjugend platform) who moved to Ukraine around the time of Maidan revolution.

Back in 2015, Azov Radio even staged a debate between Milchakov and an Azov-linked Russian neo-nazi Denis Vikhorev as to which side in Donbas conflict a Russian nationalist should take. Milchakov fought on the Russian side and had a penchant for documenting his own atrocities.

Russians fighting in Azov see Putin’s regime as Russophobic, neo-Communist and Jewish-backed. In reality though, the neo-nazis are simply interested in fomenting armed conflict. The choice of the side is more of a technical matter.

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Leonid Ragozin

@leonidragozin

10 Aug

Last night, Azov movement was expecting SBU to storm their main base at the Atek plant in Kiev today. The statement by National Corps (Azov’s political wing) hints at the possibility of armed resistance. So much happening in the wake of Vitaly Shishov’s presumed assassination.

Azov captured Atek in 2014 with the help of Ukraine former justice minister Roman Zvarych - a Ukrainian American who repatriated OUN(b) to Ukraine after independence. But later Korotkikh & Co fell out with Zvarych family and ditched them as business partners.

Among other things, Atek housed Azov’s own sergeant school, named after OUN founder Yevhen Konovalets. The school functioned outside Ukraine’s system of military education - one of many reasons to suspect that Azov was highly autonomous and never truly integrated in armed forces.

Read 4 tweets

Leonid Ragozin

@leonidragozin

7 Aug

THREAD on Azov movement personalities arrested in the latest SBU sweep in Kharkiv. Not among them, but worth mentioning first, is Artem Moshensky, who was shot in the neck on June 30 and transported in a private plane to a hospital in Israel.

Moshensky was one of the leaders of the East Corps, an Azov movement outfit in Kharkiv. The main leader was Oleh Shiryayev, who later split from Azov movement and formed the paramilitary force of Viktor Medvedchuk’s pro-Russian party OPZZh.

Azov movement leader Andriy Biletsky blamed Shiryayev for the assassination attempt. Shiryayev blamed Biletsky. Shiryayev got arrested on July 6. On Aug 2, SBU clamped down on his pro-Russian paramilitary force.
ssu.gov.ua/novyny/sbu-nei…

Read 11 tweets

Leonid Ragozin

@leonidragozin

5 Aug

THREAD: The scene of attack by members of Azov movement on the car of ex-president Poroshenko in 2019. The man in the green Reconquista T-shirt is Rodion Batulin who worked with the supposedly assassinated Vitaly Shishov at the Belarusian House in Kiev.

Next to him is Nikita “Odissey” Makeev, a Russia neo-nazi and a senior PR person at National Corps, Azov movement’s political wing. The reason for attack was Poroshenko’s failure to grant Ukrainian citizenship to Azov fighters.

But Poroshenko did grant Ukrainian citizenship to their boss, Belarusian/Russian neo-nazi Sergey Korotkikh. During his Belarusian years, Korotkikh was part of the local cell of Russian National Unity whose senior members were implicated in the murders of Lukashenko’s opponents.

Read 12 tweets

Leonid Ragozin

@leonidragozin

31 Jul

Not sure which sick mind is allowing Oleh Kustovsky’a cartoons on the US-funded RFERL website, but this level of dehumanizing xenophobia is simply mesmerising (and worth a thread). Here, Russian-speaking cockroaches are running away as Ukraine reads a book in Ukrainian language.

Here, a Russian-speaking untermensch insists on watching Svaty (a Ukrainian comedy series produced by country’s current Russian-speaking president) in Russian, while a healthy family watches all films with Ukrainian subtitles.

Here, the highspeed train of Poroshenko’s language law, aimed at squeezing Russian language out of public sphere, is taking over the ramshackle Russian steamer driven by Putin. Of course forced assimilation of minorities is the fastest and most direct route to the EU.

Read 7 tweets

Leonid Ragozin

@leonidragozin

4 May

Olga Misik, 19, made herself famous by reading the constitution to riot policemen. She is now facing two years in prison. Sentence due on May 11. In her final word, she says that she was inspired by Sophie Scholl, an antifascist executed by nazis in 1943.
docs.google.com/document/d/19v…

“The fascist regime [in Germany] fell, just like the fascist regime in Russia will also fall one day. I don’t know when it happens - in a week, in a year or in a decade. But I know that one day we will prevail, because love and youth always prevail,” writes Olga Misik.

Like everywhere else in Eastern Europe, Russian liberals and quasi-liberals have been flirting and continue to flirt with nationalism and US-styled right-wing populism. But there is a healthy strain that formulates things as they are - here is fascism and we need to fight it.

Read 5 tweets

Leonid Ragozin

@leonidragozin

14 Apr 19

https://twitter.com/andriyparubiy/status/1117355190414389249

Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, endorses an appeal by far-right politicians and activists to prevent Zelensky’s election win, which they see as a revanche for pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/andriyparubiy/status/1117355190414389249

Once a “social-nationalist”, Parubiy started his political career in Lviv’s far-right milieu. He later moved on to join Yulia Tymoshenko’s mainstream party, but old links remain as was evident during Maidan revolution and remains evident now.

There are many reasonable questions and doubts about Zelensky’s presidential bid, namely his oligarchic links and inexperience, but there is precious little to support the conspiracy theory about him being “pro-Russian”.

Read 5 tweets

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