Who And What Was Taught By NATO Military Instructors In Ukraine?

sputnik  |  Access to high-tech weapons and Western military master classes was not only available to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but also to fighters of the nationalist battalions. According to Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, US and British military instructors began training Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov Battalion in 2015. Ritter said that the goal of Western specialists was to create nationalist detachments in Ukraine, which is why the Americans and Britons got in touch with the Azov Battalion.

In an interview with an unnamed website on 18 March 2016, Roman Zvarich, the head of the headquarters of the Azov Civil Corps, said that “last summer”, they had organised an officer school with Azov’s “Georgian brother”. According to Zvarich, the tutors were four former American officers and one Canadian.

 

He also said that 32 Azov officers had graduated from the school and that they were “ready to carry out tactical tasks according to the procedures adopted in NATO countries, and they know better than Ukrainian generals”. Zvarich argued that a new military headquarters had been built in Azov in full line with NATO standards – “probably the only such headquarters in the system of the Ukrainian Armed Forces”.

 

In 2018, American journalist and blogger Max Blumenthal published a study on the contacts of the Azov Battalion with US military personnel. According to the author, in November 2017, overseas military inspectors visited the Azov Battalion, “known as a bastion of neo-Nazism in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine”, to discuss “logistics and deepening cooperation”. An unnamed Azov fighter quoted by Blumenthal told American journalists that US instructors and volunteers worked closely with his battalion. American officers met with Azov commanders for two months for “training and other assistance”.

 

The leadership of Azov, Blumenthal argued, managed to establish warm relations with the US military. A photograph posted on the Azov website shows a US officer shaking hands with the Azov commander (and the American is not at all embarrassed by the Nazi symbols on the uniform of his Ukrainian counterpart). These photos confirm the secret ties between Ukrainian nationalists and US military personnel, according to the journalist.

 

Blumenthal drew a parallel between Washington's billion-dollar programme to train Syrian “moderate rebels” and the US military’s ties to Ukrainian nationalists, claiming that there are clear similarities between the two projects. Previously, heavy weapons allegedly designed for the Free Syrian Army fell directly into the hands of Daesh*, and now US arms go directly to Azov extremists, Blumenthal concludes.