Reacting to a damning report by Radio Canada, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, blames the Canadian government for training neo-Nazi fighters in Ukraine.
“Canada has spent nearly $1 billion to train Ukrainian forces since 2014, Radio Canada says, in an article published on April 11, 2022. Military personnel from the Azov regiment, known for its links to the far right, have benefited from this training, according to documents analyzed by the radio.”
The article states, “Since 2015, Canada has helped train 33,346 candidates from Ukraine’s Security Forces, including 1951 elements of the Ukrainian National Guard (GNU), as part of Operation Unifer. The cost of this program is over $890 million. Every six months, approximately 200 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel rotate to provide security force training assistance. All of these personnel have been temporarily relocated to Poland until conditions allow training to resume.”
The Azov Battalion and Nazi ideology
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel and arguably the world’s greatest “Nazi hunter”, reacted to this information on April 13, 22, in the Canadian daily Ottawa Citizen. Efrain Zuroff reproached Julien Trudeau and his government for not having “shown vigilance” in this matter, explaining that “It is the responsibility of the Canadian Ministry of Defense to know exactly who it is training”. He added, “There is no doubt that there are neo-Nazis in various forms in Ukraine, whether in the Azov regiment or in other organizations.”
The Azov battalion was incorporated into the Ukrainian army. Its links to the far right have always been recognized. In 2017, Canada’s Joint Task Force Ukraine produced a briefing on the Azov Battalion, acknowledging that “multiple Azov members have described themselves as Nazis.”
Ottawa Citizen recalls that in 2018, the US Congress banned the use of US funds to provide weapons, training and other assistance to the Azov Battalion because of its links to the far right and neo-Nazis. The UN and Amnesty International have accused the unit of human rights violations.
nazi insignia
Putin is known to have used, among other things, the argument of the presence of neo-Nazi fighters to justify the war in Ukraine. But the Russian invasion and the sympathy it generated for Ukraine in Western countries served as a catalyst for a wider acceptance of Azov, according to the Canadian daily.
Still, the far-right sympathies of some Ukrainian military units are sometimes a problem. NATO recently used Twitter to highlight women in the Ukrainian military, but the organization had to remove the tweet “after social media users pointed out that the women pictured were wearing Nazi insignia.” Others have claimed that the allegations made against the Azov Regiment are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Efrain Zuroff does not believe this. This is not Russian propaganda, far from it,” he says. These people are neo-Nazis. There is an ultra-right element in Ukraine and it is absurd to ignore it.”
Ukraine: Why is Putin talking about Nazis?
RIA Novosti’s drone operator has filmed the first images from the sky of the Azovstal territory in Mariupol, where the last Ukrainian soldiers are stranded. Mainly foreign mercenaries and extremists from the Azov Regiment. pic.twitter.com/yeVN9UocBD
— Unpredictable ?????? (@Hadji1006) April 18, 2022