Badlands Media - The Book of Trump - Chapter 49: The Azov Battalion

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Who funds a neo-Nazi militia? Apparently, Jewish oligarchs do. Ghost breaks down one of modern history's most paradoxical military units: the Azov Battalion. From its roots in Ukrainian soccer hooliganism to becoming a formalized regiment in Ukraine's National Guard, Ghost traces how a far-right militia bankrolled by billionaire Igor Kolomoisky became central to the 2014 Donbas conflict and beyond. He unpacks Kolomoisky's tri-citizenship, his Privat Bank money laundering network, and the strange web connecting Ukrainian oligarchs, Israeli weapons manufacturers, and the CIA's fingerprints on the Maidan coup. If you ever wanted a deep, uncomfortable look at who is really pulling the strings in Eastern Europe, this is your episode.

The Badlands, you're out of the Badlands. Explain those Badlands. That's a hell of their name. Good evening. Today is Black Monday, the day the Dow dropped more than 500 points. Please join me in welcoming George Soros. Please panic. Everyone's a wild.

I need to stand up and do something, become really engaged in the electoral process in this country. The best video from the Ukrainian side of this conflict comes from the Azov battalion. They understand the value of good PR and have been producing slick videos for years. They film themselves blowing up Russian tanks and generally tearing up the battlefield. Their biggest trophy so far is reportedly a Russian general, the fourth to be killed since Russia's attack began on February 24. Ukraine's military are proud to use their video as evidence of how well they're doing against much larger enemy. Given the threat from the Russians, it's perhaps understandable Ukraine

welcomes the Azov Battalion's help. But still, this is unique in Europe. No other country on the continent has a far-right unit like this. Its founder is Andrei Boleski, a 42-year-old native Russian speaker who was born in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine near the border where most people speak Russian. It's Ukraine's second city and has now been badly damaged by Russian bombers. He identifies not as a neo-Nazi, but as a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist. In an interview in 2010, he said Ukraine's national purpose was to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against the seymite-led UNTermension. He formed the Azar battalion in early 2014, enlisting extreme football hooligans or ultras to his group, which was originally called

Sector 82. It was a tumultuous time for Ukraine. There were huge protests against the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, pushed out of office, and then pro-Russian separatists rising up in the east. When the separatists in the Donbass region declared their independence from Ukraine in March 2014, it was the Azov battalion which went to fight them. The Ukrainian military was unwilling to do so. The fighting centered around Maripal, and they've been stationed. there ever since. Ukraine's new pro-Western president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, praised them, calling them Ukraine's best warriors. But rights organizations, including human rights watch, reported credible allegations of torture and other egregious abuses by Azov and other

volunteer units. UN report also detailed how Azov soldiers had allegedly raped and tortured civilians. At that time, they enjoyed the backing of Ukraine's interior minister, who recognized that government forces were too weak to fight the separatists. These forces were funded by a number of Ukrainian oligarchs, some of whom were Jewish, but put aside their usual fears about the far right, to ensure the sovereignty of Ukraine's heavily industrialized southeast. As the Azov battalion grew, it changed its name to the Azov regiment, and now it's known as the Azov's special operations detachment. It was officially incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard in late 2014. Today, the Azov Battalion, it's still most often referred to that way, is made up of around

a thousand fighters. Some experts believe its numbers may have grown since Russia attacked last month. In 2015, a battalion spokesman admitted that between 10 and 20 percent of its members were neo-Nazis or white supremacists. That may not be a lot of people in the country of over 40 million, But some Ukraine analysts say their power is also behind the scenes, their ability to influence and threaten government officials. For example, when the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky visited them on the front line in the east in 2019, he asked them to de-escalate the fighting. And Volinsky not only refused, but threatened to bring more fighters to the area,

leaving the president exasperated. I'm not going to be able to you, I said, I'm, and I said, I'm not going to, and you're not going to do you. You're not going to talk about you. I didn't have you, I've got to see what I'm but I've seen a man who has, but he said, and you'll read it on a other corner.

Judging by recent elections, Ukraine as a whole appears to have little time for the Azov battalion's broader ideology. Veletzky was elected as an independent candidate, to Parliament in 2014 off the back of Azov's performance in Mariupol, but he failed to win another term in 2019. In fact, Azov's political party, the National Corps, combined with all the other far-right parties in Ukraine, only won about 2% of the vote that year and didn't win a single seat in Parliament. Ukrainians just don't have the same priorities as the Azov Battalion,

even if they do celebrate their victories against the Russians. Journalists and experts, in the West have been warning for years that the far right poses a threat to Ukraine's democracy. But when Vladimir Putin used it as a justification to attack, they all agreed that this was just a pretext for violence and that nothing justifies the killing and destruction now being visited on Ukraine. Thanks for watching our program. If you like it, good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Book of Trump. I am your host, Gordon McClure. Cormick, the ghost of base Patrick Henry. This is Chapter 49, the Azov Battalion.

It's been a few weeks since we've done a show. I was on spring break with my kids, and then we were at Gart. So I had a lot of stuff going on. But you may recall, I think the last episode we did, it might have been the Mel Gibson episode, but that was kind of a little side quest. The chronology that we're running through, and it's not perfectly chronological, but we're trying to layer, you know, the history that we're understanding here. Because, you know, the point of the show, of course, is to try to understand the modern history that we're witnessing we're living through of the past 30, 30 to 40 years.

And the Azov Battalion seems like the next logical topic to conquer. So we covered, you know, that video that we put that I just played, obviously was talking about the presidency of Vladimir Zelensky the the second

Russian Ukraine war of 2022 but we're going to go back to 2014 when this all kind of started because the last I think three episodes we've done if I'm not mistaken all centered on that

time period we had the Maidon coup, right? That was January, February of 2014. So that was the, we had an election, right, where the, quote-unquote, wrong person won the election. The pro-Russian candidate won the election. And that was Victor Yanukovych, right? And then the, let's see. the CIA was not happy with that. So then they held protests, held a color revolution, accused Yanukovych of rigging the election. They held a new election.

And basically they drove them out. They scared, they drove them out of the country with violence and with destabilizing protests. And then this all culminated in the installation. of temporary installation of I'm sorry the

temporary installation of Alexander Tershanov and they just pull up my screen right so Tershanov is temporarily installed in February 2014 after Victor Yenukovitch

is removed from power he serves in office until I think it's until May of to, let's see. So he serves in, and he's in office until June of 2014 when Petro Poroshenko is sworn in as the Ukrainian president, right? And Olexander is important because he was connected to Ukrainian intelligence. He's connected to the Israeli mafia. He's connected to this guy down here, Simeon Mugulovic.

And Simeon Mugulovic, of course, is connected to Robert Maxwell and the economy of Ukraine. I'm sorry, the economy of Israel, as well as the Russia-Ukraine gas disputes. So going back to February 2014, right, we get Alexander Turchinov as president, as temporary president. That then leads to the legislature in Crimea going to Moscow and requesting in person that that, Putin annex Crimea away from Ukraine and make it a republic under the Russian Republic. I think there are now 21, if I'm not mistaken, republics operating under like the Russian umbrella. And then, of course, we see Russian soldiers appearing in Crimea. A referendum is held, I believe it was March 2017.

team that referendum passes by overwhelming support of Crimea to go to Russia. And then that leads to immediate conflict because you then get these other two countries or these other two districts in eastern Ukraine. Okay, so we saw in the video that I played in the Cold Open, the regions that are highlighted in red right here, the Dombos region. which is Donetsk and Luhansk. In March of 2014, we start to see protests, counter-revolutionary protests, pro-Russia protests, very unhappy with what's happened with the CIA color revolution.

And then at the same time, as the video explained, we get the rise of this militia group in Ukraine. That is financed by a number of oligarchs, right? So we have some of these guys right here. Igor Kilimoisky, this guy, is kind of the most, I think he's the most well-known, and he's certainly the most interesting of all of them in terms of his background, his connections to all of this, a Jewish billionaire financing a militia that is openly neo-Nazi, to the extent that he was wearing shirts at these rallies and protests,

the pro-the-pro-might-on coup protests, Midon Revolution, that openly, I think the shirt said like Hebrew Banderite, and Banderite's reference to Stepin Banderah, who was, you know, the video mentioned, I think mentioned to him, that worked for the Nazis and then turned against them. but definitely aligned with the Nazis during World War II and then had a falling out with them. And then, of course, after the war was, after World War II was hired by the CIA to be one of their most prolific color revolution experts in terms of the operative going around overthrowing governments across Europe in the mid-20th century. And so Sepin-Vandera, of course, is like a legendary figure now in modern-day Ukraine.

and that really speaks to kind of the cultural issues that are plaguing the country. So that brings us to the creation of the Azov Battalion. And the Azov Battalion is formed by, as it mentioned in the video, this guy, Andrev Boleski. He's a Ukrainian nationalist activist, military commander and politician, founded in command of the Azov Italian, later serving as the people's deputy of Ukraine from 2014 and 2019, and as leader of the far-right National Corps Party, since 2023, he has commanded the Third Army Corps in Ukraine's armed forces. So Azov is founded in May of 2014. It draws heavily from the nationalist and far-right activist networks. A lot of these groups had already been meeting.

It mentioned in the video The core group was actually like a soccer fan group You know diehard fans of one of a Ukrainian club soccer team And of course in Europe The fandom for a lot of these club teams is pretty hardcore Oftentimes there'll be violence in certain places When the team doesn't play well or when something controversial happens But rapidly mobilizes

to fight separatist forces in the Don't Ask region as we see separatist forces emerging in this desire in these two eastern regions of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, to follow in the footsteps of Crimea and leave Ukraine and join Russia. And then this Azov Battalion comes in and captures Maripul in June 2024. And so let's just look at a map. And so I figured that talking about the Azof Battalion first before we really get into the weeds of the war in Dombos and what was actually happening there geopolitically. I think it makes more sense that way as we talk up because we're not only going to talk about Azov Battalion for the war in Dombas. But we're obviously going to talk about it in relation to Vladimir, Vladimir Zelensky, Igor Kilimoisky, the 2022 Russia Special, Russian Special Military Operation. So they're going to be a recurring character, so to speak, group.

And so therefore, it makes sense that we understand them. All right. So here is the map of Ukraine, and here is Maripole. All right, so Maripole is captured by the Azavatalion, working with other militias and pro, and pro-Ukraine militias and Ukrainian armed forces. As the video noted, Ukraine does not have a well-funded or substantial military force, not one that can openly fight Russia and take them on head-to-head. So that's when these billionaires come in and start pouring money into these groups

to organize these smaller cells into bigger brigades, right, battalions. and that's where you get the Azot Battalion, as well as other groups that emerge. And maybe we'll talk about a few of those as well. Okay, so let's take a minute and kind of talk about Igor Kilimoiski. So I'm definitely going to do an episode that just focuses purely on Igor Kilimoiski. He's such an important figure. And I have a friend Warhamster who is, I consider him an expert on Kilimoisky. He's the one who educated me about him back in 2021.

and put him on my radar. And Warhamster has a background in finance, so he understands the financial side of Kilimoiski's background. And that's a really, really important part of it. So I'll get into kind of the high-level stuff here with him, specifically how it relates to Ukraine and the Azov Battalion. But basically, let's pull up the mine map. Okay. So Igor Kilimoisky, right, born in 1963 in Denepro, Ukraine, right, which is this city right here in this oblast, the Deneppro Petrovsk oblast, the one that's highlighted in red here.

He goes to a metallurgy, metallurgical school, you know, so he's learning about like aluminum and all. and the metals that are a big part of the Ukrainian economy. We talked about the aluminum wars on this show. That was an earlier episode of the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. So Kilimoisky is a big part of the aluminum wars. So in 1990, he hooks up with some friends who he met at school at this metallurgical school. this guy is one of them Genadiv

Bo Bogo I mean this name's a nightmare Bogov him and a few other people they create this bank called Prevot Bank in 1992 and Prevot Bank

they form an umbrella corporation called Prevot Group right and the Prevot it's all very ambiguous like a lot of this is pretty ambiguous like how the how the ownership structure um how this like corporation is structured again we'll probably get more into that when we talk to war hamster but the prevot group so the prevat bank is four banks that come together there are four groups

that come together organizations that come together to form a private bank prevaub bank right but it's not going to be a state bank like which is how these other banks and you and you're in Ukraine were functioning. It's going to be a private bank that's going to serve entrepreneurs. Now, Prevot Bank is ultimately nationalized by the Ukrainian government in 2016. And a big reason is because there is a financial crisis in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. A lot of that is triggered by Prevot Bank and the corruption that they were involved in in the Prevot group. The Prevot group, as it says right here, is a global business group based in Ukraine. It controls thousands of companies of virtually every industry in Ukraine, the European Union, Georgia, Ghana, Russia, the United States, and other countries, including steel, oil and gas, chemical and energy sectors.

That's their prime influence. They also own, you know, like media companies, specifically a television studio. And that's where Igor Kilimoisky is connected to Vladimir Zelensky. That's where Vladimir Zelensky, you know, gets his whole start, right? again that'll be a separate separate chapter separate separate discussion um but just kind of listing that out i mean how relevant is all of that now to what we're looking at in twenty 26 when we're looking at like the energy the energy stuff happening geopolitically um the control of resources the control of steel the control of oil the control of gas um these guys are are a major major player uh in ukraine

in the 1990s and 2000s. And that is how, um, that's how they basically start wrestling control of the Ukrainian government away from Russia. I guess the Ukrainian government, there's like this tug-o-war that's happening, right? Uh,

especially once Vladimir, once Vladimir Putin comes in in the year 2000, as president of Russia, a tug-of-war kind of begins. Um, we talked about the orange, the orange, uh,

revolution of 2000. That was kind of the beginning of the Maidan coup of 2014. And the tug of war is between the Russians, right, like Vladimir Putin and the government around him, and these Ukrainian oligarchs. These oligarchs that were, many of them were former KGB, you know, former Soviet Union officials who were well positioned at the collapse of the Soviet Union to exploit the situation. take advantage of the chaos to enrich themselves and position themselves as like the oligarchs moving forward and killimoiski as war hamster would tell you was just a just a straight-up thug i mean he was one of the guys like uh the the old cliche the old trope who would go into businesses with like baseball bats and like threatened people right um i mean he's just just a straight-up

gangster um and so that that was a big you know that was a way, one of the many ways that he consolidated his power and consolidated, you know, got controlled businesses. But come to find out that a lot of these businesses that are owned by, that are in the Prevot Bank records, right, actually don't exist. There's like thousands of businesses, but most of them are actually just made up their like money laundering fronts. there's a ton of corruption that's happening with Prevot Bank and Kilimoiski and in his partners. But again, some of the people he's connected to in the 2000s, he's connected to, remember, the people that we spoke of with the Orange Revolution and the Maidan Ku. That would be this woman, Yulia or Julia, what is it?

Tamashenko, Yulia Tamashenko, he's connected to her. he's connected to Alexander Tershanov. He's connected to a number of the players who are involved in first the failed Orange Revolution in 2004 and then the or you know semi-failier

of 2004 and then the Midanku of 2014 and so in Alexander Tershanov, this guy the guy that I keep referring to who's like the Israeli he's part of the Israeli mafia right here He becomes interim temporary president in, remember, in February of 2014.

He's only in that position for four months until Poroshenko takes over. But one of the things he does do while he's there while he's in office is he appoints Igor Kilimoiski to be governor of this same obelisk that he was born in, which is the Denepro Pets. Tchofsk oblast. So, Kilimoisky is in that role for, I think it's a year, might be two years. What is it? For about a year, okay, he's in that role. And that's what kind of positions him to set up the Azov Battalion. Okay.

So he's appointed as the governor. He has billions of dollars. He's an oligarch. He has lots of companies that he controls. He has lots of influence. He has lots of friends. And so he starts tapping into these networks that are already forming and already existing, these groups. And he starts arming them and giving them resources and giving them the tools to go from being basically like street gangs, like soccer hooligans to full blown militias.

And so here's some of the groups that he funded. And again, these groups are being created in response to the same. separatist forces that are that, uh, the pro-Russia separatist forces that are emerging in Dinesk and Luhansk, the Dombas region. And so the four most famous battalions that he funds, but it's not exclusively these, the Denepro one battalion, the Denepro two battalion, the Azov battalion and the Dombos, uh, battalion. Um, and he uses his wealth to provide salaries and stipends for the officers, um, in, in the militias. Uh, he buys them equipment. He buys them transportation. Um, uh, he, he, you know, he's giving them money so they can, uh, for recruitment incentives,

you know, bonuses, etc. Like they give people cash, guys cash when they sign up to join. Um, and he's also buying up local politicians so that local politicians are supporting these groups and giving them more resources and, um, political support. Um, so, let's see. So the Azov Battalion, um, The interesting, like, dynamics happening here because not only do they have, you know, they're being funded by Jewish billionaires. They have connections to, you know, to neo-Nazi groups. Here are some pictures that are pretty widely disseminated of the Azov Battalion. And it's, you can see here that there's a lot, like, there's a lot. of Nazi neo-Nazi imagery.

This sun in the background here is a Nazi symbol, a neo-Nazi symbol. They're obviously all doing the Roman salute, you know, the Hitler salute. You know, here's a flag, a Third Reich flag that is colored like the Ukrainian flag. So these guys are connected to the neo-to-like neo-Nazis. They're not all neo-Nazis, but a lot of them are. And certainly the guys who were in charge of it, the guys who founded it, Balinski, and his friends. And then the strange part is that the Azov Battalion, now going back to Igor Kilimoiski, Kilimoiski, because he starts Prevot Bank, that puts him in Cyprus, right?

So he goes to Cyprus in the 90s and sets up a second bank, a second branch of the Prevot Bank, right? And so I believe that bank, if I'm not mistaken, continues to operate after the Ukrainian branch is nationalized, is effectively seized and nationalized. But he gains Cypriot citizenship. So he gets citizenship from Cyprus. He also gets citizenship to Israel. So because he's Jewish, he has connections to Israel. And again, like the 90s and the 2000s are this time where a lot of Eastern European, there's waves and waves of Eastern Europeans. Russian, Ukrainian oligarchs fleeing to Israel to get citizenship protection from the state,

but also access to their financial system because they were using the Israeli banks to launder money, to launder money out of the collapsed Soviet Union. And the Israelis were open to this because their economy in the late 80s was failing. So they were happy to take the money of these Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish mobsters, oligarchs because the money was propping up the Israeli economy. And at this time, Israel was shifting from a closed economy, you know, what we would describe as like a socialist economy to a more open capitalist economy, which is more of what they have today. not a it's not nearly what we have here in america but uh it's still a very highly controlled highly regulated economy but far closer to what to uh what you know what we would describe as a free market now than it was 40 years ago um again that's another little little known fact so what's

strange and and i'm jumping ahead a little bit here but just to kind of give to provide some coloring on this. The Azov Battalion, the weapons that Igor Kilimooski is buying, he's buying from Israel. So they are Israeli-made weapons. Here are multiple articles that describe, this is from 2018, describing how the Israeli weapons, I think it's Israel weapons industry, I think it's the name of the company that makes the Tavor rifle, as you can see pictured right here. But Tavor rifle is supplied to the Azov Battalion.

And then all these human rights groups are demanding that Israel stop arming them. And there's all these Jewish advocacy groups that are questioning, why is the Israeli government giving weapons to neo-Nazi groups? And the answer is because, you know, in their eyes, they had a common enemy, and that was Russia. Right. But, you know, here you can clearly see there are Azov Battalion soldiers in Gaza, fighting alongside the IDF. Here's a picture of an Azov Battalion soldier hugging a, I don't know this is a rabbi, but a Jewish person in Israel.

And you can clearly see this is the Banderite flag. And let me just show you. That red and black flag is the Banderite flag, the flag of Stepan Banderah. And let's see. It's so funny because now they're they've kind of whitewashed this history to make it seem like it's more of a Ukrainian flag and not and not a flag from World War II. It's absolutely a flag from World War II. Right. And yeah, Google has really whitewashed this thing. Okay, so here you can see this is what the flag looked like originally, right? It was just a red field over a black field. And then now more recently, you're, you're going to see. You're They've been adding this trident, which is a symbol, you know, which is a, I think it's called a Tomga. It's a symbol of Ukraine, right? But then you can also see here, like one of the first images that comes up, it's like, here's a star of David.

Like, why is the star of David on a flag that was traditionally associated with Hitler, Stepan Bandera, who worked for the Nazis, right? It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. except when you consider that Stepan Bandera hated the Soviets, and that's one of the reasons he fought for Hitler for a while. And so if you consider that they hate the Russians, they hate the Soviets, that's kind of a continuation of that conflict. So, yes. Kilimoiski and his partners become the richest men in Ukraine, right? They control a significant amount of the natural resources, the refineries, which make up kind of the core of the Ukrainian economy.

And then they appoint themselves to political positions right after the Maidan coup in collaboration with the CIA, in collaboration with the Obama State Department, in collaboration with the Brennan and Class. and all those clowns. And they create, you know, Kilimoiski specifically creates the Denepro Battalion. He doesn't create the Azov Battalion, but he does create a DeNipro. He creates and funds the DeNepro Italian. The Azov Battalion kind of formed on its own, but he funds it. He throws money at it and makes it grow much bigger. And so, again, we get these militias participating in the capture of Maripole in May of, or I'm sorry, June of 2014.

And then by the end of 2014, we get, we get the Azov Battalion and these later militias are brought into the Ukrainian National Guard. They're kind of formally brought under the Ukraine, you know, so they join the chain of command, so to speak. So they become a more formalized group. And I suppose that probably has to do with, you know, receiving international funding, getting funding from the State Department, that kind of thing. But they formally become, you know, paramilitary groups operating under the Ukrainian military chain of command. Now, again, like just weird, weird little contradictions. Moscow, Putin, and his government are consistently saying throughout this whole time, but you really hear about it more during the Biden era, you know, between 2021 and 2024,

that Israeli mercenaries, IDF officers are all over the place in Kiev and Ukraine. Here's an article from May 2022. Moscow, according to Moscow, Israeli mercenaries are fighting with far-right Ukrainian unit leaning into incendiary claim that Jerusalem is backing neo-Nazis in Kiev. Russian foreign ministry alleges Israelis are practically shoulder to shoulder with the Azov Battalion.

Yes, and then they show some of the pictures that I had already showed you. You know, there is another group called the Jewish 100. see and the Jewish 100 was was actually started by an IDF officer and they're the ones who use the banderite flag with with the sorry David on top of it so then we also have this article this is from March of 23 and this is Assad the president of Syria speaking to the Russian media

and he tells the Russian media that the U.S. is sending Islamic terrorists the people who were trying to overthrow Assad in Syria the U.S. is scooping them up, putting them on planes, and flying them to Ukraine to fight against Putin. And that would be ISIS, of course.

So we were literally, the U.S. was literally flying ISIS fighters from Syria to Ukraine to fight Putin after they failed to overthrow Assad. And again, like, these are things that the State Department doesn't want to talk about. They don't want to address it. None of the American politicians want to talk about it.

But this was something that was being reported at the time in 2023 and talking about how the same fighters, the same guys who were fighting in Syria appear to be. Yeah, they were being recruited from the Kurdish-controlled camps, and they were affiliated with al-Qaeda. They were affiliated with ISIS. Yeah, and so that's not too surprising if you really understand the history of the CIA. And here's a chart that shows a lot of these militias. So volunteer battalions involved in the military action in eastern Ukraine. In Ukraine today, 44 volunteer territory defense battalions, 32 volunteer special purpose patrol battalions, three volunteer special purpose, National Guard battalions, and several battalions under the volunteer Ukrainian Corps have been established or in the process of being established. And I apologize. I think I said DeNipro Battalion earlier. I meant the Dombas Battalion.

That was the one that Igor Kilimoisky created this first one. Seamen Simenchenko is its leader. And I wonder if the Jewish 100 is on here. Maybe it's not. But you certainly have Azov Battalion right here. Here's Azov created in May of 2014. So, yeah, so you can see there's a lot of different fighting groups that are all that are fighting all over the. all over the place for Ukraine against Russia,

but the one that becomes the most famous is the Azopatai. That's the one that's the most significant. That's the one that's committing a lot of atrocities because we get reports that they're going in, you know, that they cut off the water to Crimea. They are abusing, you know, they're going in and they're basically like capturing pro-Russia advocates, pro-Russia leaders, right?

in these communities in eastern Ukraine. They're torturing them. They're maiming them, you know, gouging out their eyeballs. I mean, these are some of the reports that we're getting, you know, cutting off water to Crimea, cutting off electricity to Crimea, you know, committing war crimes. And that's what, you know, and there have been people who have been embedded with, you know, because all these mercenaries come out of the West,

come out of America, come out of Europe to go fight the big, bad, Russians after they invaded or after they did the special military operation in 2022 and a lot of these guys came home and said I had to quit because the Azov Battalion was just so brutal like what these guys were doing was just so crazy

and again this is like a consistent there's a pattern that you see all over the place when it comes to CIA when it comes to Massad you know when it comes to the IDF frankly yeah and so let's see what else what else do we have

on Azov. All right. So the Azov Battalion is integrated in 2015, the end of 2014, going in 2015, it's integrated into the National Guard, and they start receiving more supplies of heavy weapons. Balitzky has toned down his rhetoric. The websites that he was running that were very, very, like, neo-Nazi are shut down. He kind of rebrands himself a little bit. Let's see. There was a law passed that all fighters were forced to accept Ukrainian citizenship. If they wanted to fight under the National Guard,

otherwise they would have to join civilian volunteer corps groups that weren't receiving heavy weapons or the resources that groups like Azov were. Let's see. And then we have in 2018, let's see, let's see, 2018 or 2016, there is a nation, a veterans of the regiment and members of the Azov Civil Corps. The civil corps was something that was started in spring of 2015, to serve as non-military, non-governmental organizations

for the purpose of political and social struggles. So basically like the political arm of the Azov Battalion, Right, to get involved in the politics, to get involved in the NGOs. There's lots of money flying around in that stuff. So I think they were trying to capture as much of that USAID money as they could. So then from that, the civil corps, a year later in 2016, they spin out the National Corps. And this is the formal political party that is associated with the Azov Battalion. It advocates for stronger government control over politics and economy and in completely severing all ties politically with Russia.

It poses the Ukraine joining the EU and NATO. It basically just wants the Ukraine to be a totally autonomous state. Let's see. And so they run in 2019 in the parliament. election. They form a far-right political coalition alongside a few other political parties. The coalition wins a combined two or three percent of the nationwide electoral vote, but they ultimately failed to win any seats in the RADA, which is their Congress. They create a youth corps in 2015, which is like organizing summer camps for children and teenagers,

where they receive combat training and they get lectures on Ukrainian nationalism. And then they form a national militia in 2017. This is all Azov Battalion, which becomes a paramil, like the paramilitary group, linked to the movement. And that exists from 2017 to 2020. In 2020, the national militia ceased all of its activities

has been inactive ever since then. because remember, the original Azov Battalion at this point is integrated into the National Guard. Yes, and so lots and lots of human rights, like alleged human rights violations, waterboarding, torture, electrocution, sexual violence. let's see mutilating people's genitals they suspected to be spying for Russia all right and so

I want to get to a point where we can kind of land it because we will obviously we'll be picking this up when we talk about Zelensky and we talk about Hunter Biden and we talk about obviously the special military operation of 2020 because they certainly have dustups.

The Azopatayin has dustups with the Kateravites, right? The Kateroffs, the Chechens. They become like fierce enemies of them. So we're going to see those characters clash. Yeah, and so the connection to anti-Semitism, Adrift Bledsky said in a 2010 interview that the Ukrainian nation mission is to, quote, lead the white races of the world and a final crusade against the Semite-led Intervention, which is the class of people that Hitler just described as, you know,

like the subhuman class, the class that wasn't meant to rule the world. It says, according to Freedom House Initiative, reporting radicalism, Balitsky stopped making anti-Semitic statements after February 2014. So he stopped being anti-Semitic publicly, but he had been doing that for years and years and years leading up to that. Obviously, that was because he was becoming a public political figure. Let's see. Yeah, so then in 2013, we see the Euromidean protest in Kiev

and the supporters of Natanzan Kuzin. displaying flags of the Ukrainian insurgent army but the Star of David added to it. So this is the guy that I was referring to. Nathan Kazin, Natan Kazin, I think, is how he says his name in Hebrew. So let's see if I can get a good picture of him. Yeah, so here he is right here. So this is from Forward Magazine.

If it actually wants to take me to the right. I don't know if it's going to take me to the right article. I guess it's not. But you can see in this picture right here, so it says, The Ukrainian Revolution's unlikely street fighting rabbi. That's what the headline is. You can see it in this thumbnail.

And so this guy's a rabbi who, I guess he's credited as a co-founder of the Azov Battalion, but my understanding is that he had a group called the Jewish 100, and that was a reference to the Jewish defense forces that were created in Odessa, you know, 120 years ago, 100 years ago, leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, those were created by Trotsky or by, was it Trotsky? I think it was Trotsky. No, no, Zayef Jabatinsky. Jabatinsky created something called the Jewish, I think it was the Jewish 100. So again, and then here's the flag.

This is the flag that that guy flew. Nathan Kazin. And here's the picture I was looking for of him. Let me grab that picture so we can throw it on the my map. And so the connection here between Israel and Ukraine is interesting. And it's something that I've been studying for years and trying to understand because it doesn't really make any sense on its surface, on its face. until you really dig into it, and then it really does actually start

to make a lot of sense. And the history there, of course, is the pale of settlement. The pale of Jewish settlement, which was established in 1791 by Catherine the Great, the Tsarina of Russia. And it was basically a zone where that was the only place that Jews were allowed to live

within the Russian Empire, a very large area. It's, you know, modern day Belarus, modern day Ukraine and half of Poland, most of Poland, I think. I think I have a map of that somewhere here on the fringes of the mine map. But this zone, the reason they created it, of course, is because these Jewish communities would create their own legal system. They'd create their own courts. and then they would instruct their their constituents to def, you know, when their laws came in conflict with the secular local laws, they would tell their constituents not to follow the secular laws and to only follow the Jewish law. And that created problems with the local authorities. That created problems with the Russian Empire.

And so they quarantined them basically to this area, the borderlands of Russia, the Ukraine, right? And that's where they were forced to live for 125 years until the Bolsheviks, who were recruited out of the Palos settlement, to go into Moscow and kill Tsar Nicholas II and his family. And upon doing that, the first thing that the Bolsheviks did was they liberated, they abolished the pale of settlement. They got rid of that law, right? and then that leads to, I guess, like the diaspora spreading out or whatever. But you have this city, Uman, and Ukraine, which is right here. So you can see it. It's right there, south of Kiev.

And this is, it's between Kiev and Odessa. And so this is considered like the holiest site in modern Talmudic Judaism, like modern Judaism, but probably not the Judaism that's practiced, I would imagine, in America, because the people that I've spoken to said they don't even know what the Talmud is. But in Israel, they only studied the Talmud, the Oral Torah. And if you study the Talmud and you study the Zohar, then there is a rabbi who is extremely important who lived in Uman and was, the, this is a rabbi who is extremely important, who lived in Uman and was, this would have been in the 1700s, the late 1700s. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. That's his name.

Rev. Neckman. Trying to get this to pull up. And he lived in the, I think it was the late 1700s. And yeah, he lived from 1772 until 1810. he was known as the Rebbe, which is the Talmudic version of a rabbi. It's the Yiddish version of a rabbi.

And he's the founder of the Breslov Hasidic dynasty. One of the founders of, basically, of credited as one of the founders of, I don't know if it's Orthodox Judaism. I think it's, but it's some version of that. The Judaism that comes out of the late 1700s. And so his two, tomb is in Uman and every

Rosh Hashanah, it's considered like a major pilgrimage of Israelis to leave Israel and to go to Ukraine in order to visit this guy's tomb. It's Hasidic Judaism, that's what it is.

Hasidic Judaism. So the Hasidic Jews from Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Israel gather there annually. Yeah, and so that's kind of the major connection between Ukraine, you know, from a cultural standpoint, between Ukraine and Israel. But there's also, I think, a corrupt standpoint because we've talked about Robert Maxwell. We've talked about the connections between Robert Maxwell and how he kind of connects the Soviet Union to Israel, which would include Ukraine.

there's definitely a banking aspect of this and the way that money is being laundered out of the Soviet Union at the end of the Soviet Union through Israel, through Cyprus. And then there's also, I think the whole energy conflict, the fight for control over energy resources. I think that's also all connected to Ukraine. And that would be Hunter Biden and everything that he's involved in. and Igor Kilimoisky. That's where we go back to Igor Kilimoisky. So Kilimoisky, again, he's a try, he was a tri-citizen. And we'll get into this whole history when we do his episode, specific episode. But so he was a Cypriot citizen. He was an Israeli citizen and he was a Ukrainian citizen. He's born in Ukraine originally. Zalinski actually takes away, strips him of his Ukraine citizenship, because it's illegal to be a tri-citizen. I'm pretty sure in any country. but certainly in Ukraine it's it's against the law to have tri-citizenship so Zelensky takes away his citizenship um throws him in jail he's been in jail for like two years now at this point two or three

years um and if we go back to 2015 actually after Poroshenko gets in about a year after almost a year after Poroshenko gets in to office here's the Kiev post it says Poroshenko sins shot across oligarchs bow by sacking Kilimoisky. So he removes Kilimoisky. He dismisses him as governor of the Denepro Petrovsk Oblast. And the debate here, it says it's renewed the debate over whether Ukraine's government is finally willing and able to break the stranglehold that Ukraine's oligarchs have had over the state. And so this time period, this 2015 time period is right in the middle of this economic crisis that Ukraine is enduring from 2014 and 2016. It ultimately leads to the nationalization of the Prevot Bank.

Again, we'll get into all that in the Kilimoiski episode. But all of this kind of informs all of this is connected to the Azov group because the Azov group, again, becomes the major fighting force against Russia. in the special military operation, but also in the Dombos War, and it's all being funded by Kilimoisky and his friends. And so Kilimoisky is the key player here that I think connects all of this, and is obviously we're still dealing with the fallout from his, from his actions now as Russia is trying to bring the Ukraine situation to head to a head. All right, guys. So,

it's a somewhat shorter, shorter episode. This is all pre-recorded. Hit the thumbs up. Leave a Badlands Boost or leave a rant. I'm going to try to be in the chat tonight. I'm going to play an ad before we get out of here. Let's see.

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