Azovite youth from Centuria on the 2026 spring equinox in Odessa
On March 22, shortly after the spring equinox, the Hitlerite core of the Azov movement could not resist the urge to highlight the 1488th day of the Russo-Ukrainian war, simply because this is the favorite number of many neo-Nazis around the world. In the 1980s, U.S. neo-Nazi leader David Lane wrote his Fourteen Words (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) and “88 Precepts” in a prison cell. “88” (H.H.) is a well-known code for “Heil Hitler.”
Among those who commemorated the 1488th day, Dmitriy Krukovsky from the 53rd Mechanized Brigade and Alexey Levkin from Ukraine’s Russian Volunteer Corps came as no surprise. Krukovsky has a tattoo of Adolf Hitler, and led the Azovite paramilitary youth group Centuria in 2024-25. The Russian Levkin, a celebrity ideologue in Centuria, is the chief organizer of National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) concerts in Ukraine, and even a “Fuhrernight” in 2019. Levkin sings,
Blood and soil under wheels of Totenkopf
Pressing rivals’ short skulls into filthy mire
Preachers of Kabbalah, offspring thereof
Labour in Death Camps, burn in furnace fire
3rd Assault Brigade medic Yury Pavlyshyn, now a leader of its Hatred Battalion who appears on billboards and in videos for the 3rd Army Corps, is the bass guitar player in Levkin’s Russo-Ukrainian NSBM bands M8L8TH (aka “Hitler’s Hammer”) and AKVLT (“Adolf Cult”). Pavlyshyn’s latest tattoo is of Charles Manson, so of course he also had to post something — the same image as Krukovsky, who reposted it from a mutual friend of the Russian Volunteer Corps’ commander “White Rex.”
Yury Pavlyshyn at the headquarters of the Italian neo-fascist movement CasaPound (November 2025), appearing in a 3rd Army Corps advertisement (March 2026), and his Charles Manson tattoo (March 2026)
From Pavlyshyn, the image found Yan Klishayev, who I wrote about recently. Klishayev, the neo-Nazi coordinator of the new Veteran Corps of the Azov movement, also acknowledged the 1488 milestone, on the day before he signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Minister for Veterans Affairs of Ukraine.
“Bolgar,” a notable Azovite in the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU), who used to have the numbers 14 and 88 in his Instagram username, shared the same screenshot from an application counting the days since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. He formed the openly neo-Nazi “Neptune” group in the 12th Azov Brigade (even featuring an 88 in its emblem), and now commands the personnel training battalion of the 1st Azov Corps. Vladyslav Blinsky, a company commander from the 3rd Assault Brigade and co-founder of the popular Azovite brand “Only Wars,” captioned a picture of himself with a POW, “1488 days of this fool.”
Neo-Nazi football hooligans, who gave rise to the Azov movement years ago, naturally found reason to celebrate, for example the “Dynamo Ultras,” part of the “White Boys Club” in Kyiv. “Northern Division,” the new youth movement associated with the neo-Nazi rap group “Nord Division,” held a “large-scale sporting event” (big brawl of hooligans) apparently supported by the HUR, or Ukrainian military intelligence. Nord Division originated in the Azovite HUR Kraken regiment.
Supposedly these fanatics commemorated Ukrainian Volunteer Day from the previous weekend, but they posed with a large banner that said “1488 days of war.” As told by Events in Ukraine, “Nord Division” has a neo-Nazi rap song according to which HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov “supervises us” and “gives us assignments,” and even “listens to our tracks in Russian” before interviews. “All of Ukraine’s counterintelligence says that we are art.” Now Budanov heads the Office of the President.
The banner on the right says “1488 Days of War.” The logos on the bottom of the image include the Ukrainian military intelligence agency HUR and its far-right “Aratta” battalion which originated in the “Right Sector” movement.
Almost a month earlier, the full-scale war in Ukraine entered its 5th year. Stanislav Ryzhenkov, a veteran of the NGU Azov Regiment, received a standing ovation in the European Parliament (as seen in the video below). “We will win this war,” he said. Ryzhenkov, a former POW after his neo-Nazi unit surrendered in Mariupol, is now an advisor to the mayor of Kyiv as the city council’s commissioner for veterans affairs. He addressed the European Parliament at the invitation of center-right Lithuanian MEP Petras Auštrevičius, who previously won an auction for a framed photo of Ryzhenkov missing an arm in the Azovstal complex in Mariupol.
Meanwhile in Kyiv’s Mariinsky Palace, a visibly uncomfortable Volodymyr Zelensky handed the “Hero of Ukraine” award to an emotionless senior lieutenant in the Azov movement’s 3rd Assault Brigade. In 2022, Oleksandr Khyzhnayk joined the 98th Territorial Defense Battalion “Azov-Dnipro,” a unit with neo-Nazi emblems that formed the 1st Mechanized Battalion in the 3rd Assault Brigade. “There is no exhaustion from the war,” he said after the ceremony.
There is a certain demotivation due to what is happening outside the army. Corruption scandals, the population’s support for the military has decreased, and of course, scandals with the TCK [mobilization offices], namely people who see TCK employees as the enemy…
Commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces General Oleksandr Syrsky also presented awards to service members of the NGU 1st Azov Corps. And at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, there was a documentary screening co-starring Vladislav Shatilo, a neo-Nazi Azov veteran. He appeared at last year’s February 24 NATO HQ commemoration in connection with the film.
Vladislav Shatilo, a friend of the Hitler-tattooed Centuria leader Dmitriy Krukovsky, now leads the Veteran Corps in Chernihiv. Vladislav Shatilo used to be a football hooligan, part of the “SS Men” (Parny SS) ultras along with his friend Oleksandr Tarnavsky, who has a swastika tattoo, and led the local branch of the National Corps, the political party of the Azov movement.
Vladislav Shatilo with Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the chairman of the NATO Military Committee since January 2025
At a February 24th demonstration in Brussels, a representative of the Azovite patronage service told the media, “I want to say to all Europeans that although you try to understand Ukrainians, you cannot.”
Someone who works with NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic commented that day, “The most exciting part of the frontier now is UGVs [Unmanned Ground Vehicles]. They are becoming stronger, faster, more independent and are an integral part of how the 3rd Assault Brigade fights.” Perhaps he saw that the Modern War Institute at West Point had just published “War Without Soldiers: The Evolution of Warfare in the Age of Machines,” a blog post that General James Mingus wrote (with the help of an intelligence officer) days after he ceased to be the 39th vice chief of staff of the US army.
General Mingus
General Mingus’ short February 24 article opened with a robotic military operation of the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade from last summer, the claim to fame for its star UGV company “NC13,” which originated in a unit with a modified emblem of the Waffen-SS Dirlewanger Brigade. That day the London-based magazine New Scientist also published a report from the Azov movement’s “Killhouse Academy” in Kyiv which opened a school for UGV operators last summer: “How Ukraine became a drone factory and invented the future of war.”
NC13 commander Mykola Zinkevich at the 2026 Munich Security Breakfast, and wearing his modified Dirlewanger patch at an award ceremony with the “White Fuhrer” of the Azov movement. Less than a year before the Russian invasion, his “Galician Youth” posted Nazi leaflets in Lviv.
At the Latvian National Opera in Riga, the President of Latvia attended a Ukraine-themed concert, which featured a screening of Azovite propaganda directed by Yevhen Matviyenko, in particular two episodes of his “Varta” project. I already wrote about one of them before. “Made in Ukraine” showcases proud neo-Nazis in the Special Operations Forces “Azov-Kyiv” Regiment established in 2022, which spearheaded the 3rd Assault Brigade, the elite infantry unit that now leads the 3rd Army Corps. The other short film “She” features some women from the 3rd Assault Brigade, including a hardcore neo-Nazi who died in the war, and a medic now serving in the Hatred Battalion.
According to the Russian Volunteer Corps, the high-profile neo-Nazi HUR unit, its supporters took to the streets in Germany, Austria, France, Finland, Poland, and even Israel on February 24. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko noted, “Italian neo-fascists affiliated with CasaPound organized a commemorative marathon on the streets of Italy, honoring Ukrainian far-right fighters from Azov, Right Sector, and other groups who were killed during the war. Many of them were posthumously awarded the title of Heroes of Ukraine. Streets, schools, and other public facilities have been named after them.”
Anyway, here’s a table of contents for today’s post.
- Russian Nazis on the rise in Ukraine?
- Nazi propaganda roundup
- Heroization and Azovization
- Conferences (Davos—Kyiv—London—DC—and beyond…)
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