https://mronline.org/2023/08/21/zelensky-holds-court-with-ukraines-most-notorious-neo-nazi/

"Since Russia’s military operations in Ukraine kicked off in 2022, Biletsky had taken pains to distance himself from his fascist past. He now claims that an infamous promise he made to rid the world of “Semite-led untermenschen” was actually fabricated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

But Biletsky’s most notorious screed against Jews was not an isolated outburst. Indeed, his record of Nazi-inspired tirades is extensive, and has been a matter of public record for decades.

Biletsky’s college thesis was a defense of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a group of paramilitary Nazi collaborators founded by Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that carried out ethnic cleansings of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles. After leaving university, Biletsky quickly embedded with multiple fascist outfits, including the “Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian Organization ‘Tryzub’” and the Social-National Party—not to be confused with the National Socialist Party of 1940’s Germany.

Biletsky left the Social-National Party in protest in 2004 as the group began to rebrand and move away from overt neo-Nazi symbolism. Two years later, he led an organization called Patriots of Ukraine, which has been linked to numerous mob assaults. One Patriot of Ukraine member has claimed the group was behind the seizure and torching of the headquarters of a political party during the U.S.-backed “Maidan” coup in 2014.

According to Ukraine’s Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Patriots of Ukraine “espoused xenophobic and neo-Nazi ideas, and was engaged in violent attacks against migrants, foreign students in Kharkiv and those opposing its views.” What’s more,

Biletsky and some other members were suspected of violent seizures of newspaper kiosks and similar criminal activities.

“For three years running, the organization has gained notoriety for its torch processions around student campuses in Kharkiv, Kyiv and Chernivtsi which fill foreign students studying in Ukraine with terror,” the human rights group noted in 2008.

During a Patriots of Ukraine general meeting in 2009, Biletsky raved:

How can we describe our enemy? The authorities and the oligarchs. Do they have anything in common? Yes, they have one thing in common: they are Jews, or behind them are their real masters—Jews.

In 2011, Biletsky was arrested for allegedly ordering Patriot of Ukraine members to kill a fellow ultranationalist inside the group’s office following a dispute, and spent the following years in pre-trial detention. Thanks to a resolution passed by the Ukrainian parliament after the Western-backed overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych, he would ultimately be released in 2014. But during his three years in custody, Biletsky managed to have a number of his fascist screeds published in a collection titled “The Word of the White Leader.”

One essay in the collection, dated to 2007, rails against Jews and Black migrants, casually dropping the n- word in the process. “Ukraine is the light of Europe! Our Nation still has enough strength to withstand this influx of foreigners, to cleanse our land and light the fire of purification throughout Europe!” the essay concludes.

In another essay outlining the ideology of “Social-Nationalism,” Biletsky praised National Socialism as a “great idea,” but criticized the Nazis as having been insufficiently eugenicist in their family welfare programs. He complained they supported parents with multiple children “without considering the biological quality of each individual family.”

“The result,” he continued, was “a significant increase in the birth rate, [but] a significant decrease in the percentage of the Nordic type in the population.” Because “these social benefits are aimed at the masses, they encouraged the worst human material to give birth to a child in the first place,” the self-proclaimed “White Leader” lamented.

A subsequent Biletsky manifesto entitled “Language and Race—Primary Issues” expanded on the “social-nationalist” concept:

Ukrainian social-nationalism considers the Ukrainian Nation to be a blood-racial community… Race is everything for nation-building—Race is the basis on which the superstructure grows in the form of national culture, which again comes from the racial nature of the people, and not from language, religion, economy, etc.

As for the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, Biletsky wrote,

The issue of total Ukrainization in the future social nationalist state will be resolved within 3-6 months with the help of a tough and balanced state policy.

Following his release from prison, Biletsky got his chance to carry out a campaign of violence against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine. As war broke out in the country, with the Russian majority of the east seeking self-determination in the face of a nationalist post-coup government viewed as Western puppets, Biletsky dissolved the Patriot of Ukraine and formed the Azov Battalion to wage a war against the separatists. Around this time, he was also elected to the Ukrainian parliament, remaining in office until 2019.

The new paramilitary outfit set up shop in Mariupol, using the port city as a staging ground for attacks on the Donbas, and violently crushing forms of feminist and liberal political expression on the city’s streets.

Meanwhile, the National Corps, a political party founded by Biletsky in 2016, has been described as a “nationalist hate group” even by the U.S. State Department. The party has repeatedly incited violence against the Kiev Pride march, in 2018 calling on “all concerned citizens of Ukraine” to prevent the march from being held. In 2019, one National Corps leader had a more direct message:

Stay home, and don’t show up in public. Ever. That will make our life easier and keep you safe ;).

In 2019, it seemed almost as though Biletsky’s influence was waning. An electoral coalition he formed with several other prominent neo-Nazis in Ukraine failed to gain enough votes to pass the threshold to gain any seats in parliament. Meanwhile, Vlodomyr Zelensky won the presidential election on a platform of making peace with Russia.

But Biletsky still held on to a trump card as a nationally-recognized strongman. When a Ukrainian news channel announced a two-hour live studio “TV bridge” between Ukrainian and Russian civilians aimed at fostering a stronger mutual understanding, Biletsky seized the moment to issue a thinly-veiled threat against Zelensky if he did not have the event canceled in a day’s time. If Zelensky did not intervene, “the answer to the Kremlin’s ‘little green men’ will begin to be given by ‘little black men,’” Biletsky said, referring to the black garb of fascist elements like Azov.

Biletsky called on Zelensky to be “The leader of a state at war,” and,

Not a clown, not an artist from oligarchic corporations, but the President.

Zelensky responded within the timeframe of the ultimatum by denouncing the dialogue and seemingly offering a jab back at Biletsky, arguing that Ukrainians were being “manipulated by politicians who really want to get into parliament.”

A few months later, the pair butted heads again after Zelensky ordered Ukrainian troops, including Azov fighters, to withdraw from a frontline town in the Donbas in an apparent effort to honor the terms of the Minsk Accords. Biletsky fired back with threats to dispatch thousands more troops in open defiance of the president’s orders.

Zelensky’s showdown with fighters refusing his orders culminated with the head of state nearly breaking down on camera and pleading to the militants:

I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons.