Above photo: Members of the Azov Battalion visit Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, October 1, 2022.
The government-funded research project’s mysterious removal of Azov’s profile was followed by a State Department decision to allow the controversial right-wing unit to receive U.S. military aid.
Stanford University’s Mapping Militants Project (MMP), a U.S. government-funded initiative that conducts research on “violent militant or extremist organizations,” quietly removed their profile on the Azov Battalion early last month. The Azov Battalion (now known as the 12th Special Purpose Brigade “Azov”) is a Ukrainian National Guard unit infamous for its use of neo-Nazi insignia, recruitment of far-right foreign fighters, and alleged war crimes. The Stanford MMP’s mysterious removal of its Azov profile was followed about a month later by the U.S. State Department lifting its ban on military assistance to the unit, raising questions about the motives behind removal of the webpage.
MMP’s removal of Azov is significant in that it could be used to guide U.S. foreign policy. Though MMP was created and has operated with funding from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, the papers written by its researchers are cited in academic research, reports and testimony to Congress, government–funded institutions and initiatives, and federal agencies. The website functions as an authoritative source for information on militant and extremist groups, and their interactions and connections over time. At the very least, Azov’s removal means MMP’s list no longer contradicts the State Department’s decision allowing U.S. military assistance to the group, and therefore cannot be used to criticize it.
The Stanford MMP’s takedown of its Azov profile also may have occurred in part due to pressure from Ukrainian diplomats. Late last week, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova published a post on Facebook celebrating the MMP’s removal of its Azov profile, with a screenshot of the “Page not found” message that appears if one navigates to the Azov MMP profile’s URL. Curiously, Markarova thanked Stanford for its “response,” and thanked her colleagues at the Ukrainian Embassy and the Association of Families of Azovstal Defenders “for constantly drawing attention and joint fight against Russian propaganda and disinformation,” according to Facebook’s automatic translation of the post. Markarova’s mention of Stanford’s “response” and her diplomats’ “constantly drawing attention” raises the possibility of a Ukrainian pressure campaign, spurred by Ukrainian diplomats, to get the MMP to remove its Azov profile.
The State Department and Markarova could not immediately be reached for comment.
Asked about the removal of Azov’s profile, one of the academics behind MMP, Professor Martha Crenshaw, told Noir: “we plan to update that profile, but I don’t know when the update will be complete.” When asked for more details, including whether militant group profiles are typically taken down during an update process, when the update would be completed, what kinds of updates were being made, and whether Azov’s profile would eventually again be visible on the MMP website, Crenshaw and the other MMP academics provided no specific answers. They also did not clarify whether Ukrainian Ambassador Markarova contacted the MMP about removing its Azov profile.
Founded in March 2014 as a volunteer unit to fight pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region, Azov was subsequently incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, and gained international attention for its role in re-taking the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol from separatist forces in June 2014. During this engagement, Azov also received scrutiny for its neo-Nazi iconography, in particular an inverted Wolfsangel superimposed over a Black Sun (the former an ancient runic symbol appropriated by the Nazis, per the ADL, the latter “based on a design commissioned by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, and overwhelmingly used by neo-Nazi and esoteric National Socialist movements,” according to the MMP’s now-removed Azov Battalion profile).
Azov is part of the broader “Azov Movement,” a network of far-right Ukrainian groups that also includes a political wing, the National Corps (led by Azov founder and notorious white nationalist Andriy Biletsky), which the U.S. State Department called a “nationalist hate group,” and a paramilitary faction, the National Militia, which has attacked Roma and other minority communities in Ukraine.
Azov came to renewed prominence following Russia’s February 2022 invasion due to its high-profile defense of Mariupol that spring. The destructive battle, during which large swaths of Mariupol’s residential infrastructure were damaged or destroyed, ended in a drawn-out siege of the Azovstal steel plant, beneath which surviving Azov and Ukrainian servicemembers retreated until their May 2022 surrender. The battle for Azovstal garnered substantial international media attention due in part to Azov’s use of Starlink terminals to publish videos about the conditions of the Ukrainian defenders.
Azov’s reputation for combat effectiveness and stubborn defense of Mariupol, coupled with a desire to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims of Nazism in Ukraine (with one stated goal of the invasion being “denazification”), has motivated many pro-Ukrainian commentators to whitewash the unit’s far-right extremism, claiming the unit has been depoliticized and is now entirely distinct from the volunteer battalion that first emerged a decade ago.
This line has also made its way into mainstream media, exemplified by the Guardian’s reporting that “The 5,000-plus strong [Azov] brigade has shed any far-right associations, relentlessly emphasized in Russian pre-invasion propaganda.”
This is false. As reported by The Nation, many of Azov’s current leaders, including Commander Denys Prokopenko and Deputy Commander Sviatoslav Palamar, have years-old ties to far-right groups, and the brigade continues to don Nazi symbols on the battlefield and social media. Indeed, Azov has never stopped using the Wolfsangel symbol, which is still part of its official logo and featured on its X/Twitter page. Azov’s founder, Andriy Biletsky, a blatant white supremacist who reportedly said Ukraine’s national mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans],” remains closely connected to the unit despite his supposed departure in fall 2014. In his 2022 book From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right, author and journalist Michael Colborne argues Azov has not divorced itself from the far right, writing that “[d]espite unconvincing efforts to separate the two, it’s clear that the Azov Regiment is part of the broader Azov movement and should not be treated as something distinct from it.”
The extremism of Azov was essentially undisputed among Western institutions and media outlets until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That was true for MMP too. Prior to its removal, MMP’s Azov profile documented in detail the force’s far-right ideology, ties with foreign white supremacist organizations, and use of Nazi symbols.
MMP’s removal of Azov’s profile came a little over a month before the State Department’s decision to lift the longstanding ban on the provision of American weapons to the brigade. The State Department, which originally banned arming Azov due to concerns over its far-right extremism, rescinded this policy because the brigade recently “passed Leahy vetting as carried out by the U.S. Department of State,” as reported by the Washington Post on June 10. While a Congressional ban on military assistance to the “Azov Battalion” remains in place under appropriations laws, the State Department said it didn’t believe the congressional ban applied to the group as it exists today, per the Post.
In fact, the State Department has maintained since at least April 2023 that Azov as currently constituted is a different group from the “Azov Battalion” targeted in the Congressional ban, according to comments from a State Department spokesperson quoted anonymously by the Washington Post. The State Department official said the “Azov Battalion” was a non-state “militia group” that has not existed in over five years, and that Azov is now “a different unit.”
“Leahy vetting” is in reference to the Leahy Law, which prohibits the United States from funding “foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights,” per a State Department fact sheet. In reality, not only is the State Department’s original concern around Azov’s ideological extremism still germane, but the force’s human rights record has remained checkered since its founding as a non-state volunteer militia in 2014. Indeed, Azov has been credibly accused of torture, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killing, all of which are “gross violations of human rights” that would disqualify a military unit from receiving U.S. military aid, according to the State Department’s interpretation of the Leahy Law. Many of Azov’s alleged human rights abuses, which also include the use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes and looting of civilian homes, occurred after the unit was formally integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in late 2014.
The proximity of the State Department announcement and the removal of the Azov profile could be coincidental, but MMP’s close ties to the U.S. Government cast doubt on an innocuous explanation.
Stanford launched MMP in 2009 and operated the project until 2012 using funding from the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. In 2019, MMP received funding from the Department of Homeland Security, per the project’s website. The academics behind MMP also have deep ties to American defense.
Professor Martha Crenshaw, Senior Fellow of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor Emerita of Government at Wesleyan University, has overseen MMP since it launched. She also served as “lead investigator with the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security” from 2005 to 2017, per the Stanford website.
Iris Malone, who co-directed MMP from 2019 to 2022, simultaneously served as Principal Investigator for a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE). Professor Kaitlyn Robinson, who has served as a researcher with MMP since 2022, formerly worked as a research assistant for the Department of Defense, per her website. Curiously, Robinson described MMP itself as “a member of” NCITE on her website.
This article was originally published by Sam Carlen and Iain Carlos for the Noir newsletter.