Kyiv Youth Forum: Nazis Are Our Future

Azov stars at NATO-sponsored youth conference

Ukraine’s most powerful neo-Nazi movement stole the show at this year’s “Kyiv Security Forum for Youth,” organized in partnership with the NATO Representation in Ukraine and the Atlantic Council.

A young person doing the Azov salute during the first five minutes of the event

Valeriy Horishniy, 28, is a former “Azovstal defender,” only released from Russian captivity in September. Horishniy, a self-described adherent of the “native faith,” joined the neo-Nazi pagan-led paramilitary group “Patriot of Ukraine” when he was 12 years old. Now he is a senior sergeant in the Azov Brigade, a neo-Nazi unit in the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) that was only “depoliticized” according to “pro-Ukraine” propagandists.

Almost 20 years ago, “Patriot” leader Andriy Biletsky was already “training the youth, raising and educating them” for a “future war” with Russia. Biletsky, now the head of the Azov movement and commander of its 3rd Assault Brigade in the Ukrainian Ground Forces, was supposed to address a major youth conference in Kyiv recently, but he didn’t make it. Horishniy, the former head of an Azov-affiliated “School for Young Leaders,” appeared on stage next to the famous civil society activist Oleksandra Matviichuk, whose organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.

Aleksey Levkin (right), a hardcore Russian neo-Nazi from the Azov movement, recently presented Horishniy with a banner from the Azov-affiliated “School for Young Leaders.” According to Horishniy, “Fate brought us together in a common cause in 2018. Back then, Alexey and I worked together on the Askold and Khoma School for [Young] Leaders project in the same room and often had very interesting dialogues and discussions, which, in turn, significantly influenced my Worldview. He and His Work are the factors that made me decide to join the Azov Regiment for military service, which changed my life forever.”

Rodion Kudryashov, the deputy commander of Andriy Biletsky’s unit, made a short speech on his behalf. “I with leaders of Azov and 3rd Assault Brigade have been paying a lot of attention to the development of youth,” he said. Kudryashov, an important figure in the Azov movement who led the “98th Azov-Dnipro” battalion (2022), fought in the original Azov Battalion (2014). He didn’t seem to stay long, and walked out shortly before Lauren Van Metre from the Atlantic Council predicted, “Your democracy is the future of my democracy.”

Rodion Kudryashov at the event. On the right, a screenshot from his Instagram account, highlighting his early days in Azov. The person next to him is making a Nazi salute in his profile picture.

The annual Kyiv Security Forum (KSF), “Ukraine’s foremost platform on war and peace,” is chaired by its founder, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a deeply unpopular former prime minister of Ukraine (2014–16). A recent post on this blog explained that the KSF director, Danylo Lubkivsky, advised the far-right “Capitulation Resistance Movement” (2019–22) that threatened to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky if he tried to deliver on his major campaign promise to end the war in eastern Ukraine through peace negotiations.

Azov Goes to Brussels

Readers of the above article already know that Lubkivsky’s son recently joined an Azov Brigade delegation that visited NATO headquarters in Brussels. The most high-ranking NATO official they met, Marie-Doha Besancenot, the Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy, remotely addressed the KSF youth event just days before. However, the signal was so bad — which seemed rather symbolic — that the KSF organizers awkwardly tried to reconnect multiple times, before accepting that Besancenot had to turn off her camera and go God-mode with the NATO official’s voice just coming over the speakers. “Ukraine will be a member of NATO, there is no doubt about this,” Besancenot told the audience, telling one or two lies.

Azov fighters Horishny and “Carlo” sitting in the front row, across from Yatsenyuk, the former PM

About thirty minutes later, “Carlo” from the 3rd Assault Brigade took the stage with his co-panelists. His commander, Andriy Biletsky, the leader of the Azov movement, was supposed to join them to discuss “Ukraine’s Warrior Generation.” Instead of a Q&A period after this panel, the emcee introduced Rodion Kudryashov, the “deputy commander of one of the best known units in Ukraine.” After his short speech, former CIA director David Petraeus came online.

‘This is Where the Presidents Play’

Readers of the above article already know that earlier this year, Petraeus met at least half a dozen Azov veterans at the first annual “U.S.-Ukraine Freedom Summit” in Washington, which included a charity golf event at Joint Base Andrews for “Azov’s Angels,” the military patronage service of the Azov movement. The former CIA director predicted for the Kyiv Security Forum for Youth that Ukraine “will be the military-industrial complex, the most important one in all of Europe,” but he also said that because of Russia’s steady gains on the battlefield, “this will require Ukrainian conscription … on a larger scale than has been the case so far,” and well as “lifting restrictions on the use of the longest-range US and UK systems on Russian soil.”

Several hours later, Olena Tolkachova, the longtime head of “Azov’s Angels,” talked about how she once struggled to look disabled people in the eye, but now she sees them as regular people. Among wounded Azov veterans, she explained, “the boys are kind of very proud sometimes that they have a kind of ‘exclusive’ injury, they show their prosthetic limbs and even kind of show it off, ‘Look at my leg, it’s made of this or that.’ They make jokes about that. They’re quite tough.” Tolkachova also said that “Azov’s Angels” deserves credit for “pushing some changes in the legislation to allow this kind of people to continue serving in the army.”

Horishniy’s tattoos include Perun on his arm, an OUN symbol and Thor rune on his chest, and a spider web on his elbow, which he says “symbolizes loyalty to one’s principles and worldview” in right-wing circles.

On the second day of the KSF youth event, Azov sergeant Valeriy Horishniy received a standing ovation, and took a seat next to the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who complained that African countries are almost totally ignorant about Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Later that afternoon, the Atlantic Council held a session featuring remote commentary from John Herbst, Brian Whitmore, and Kurt Volker.

It was on the eve of the 2020 election that John Herbst, the former Ambassador of the United States to Ukraine under George W. Bush, confidently told the KSF, “at the end of the day, Zelensky has a choice. He can bow down to Kremlin dictates, or he can pursue policies which ensure Western support.” That was a cute way of saying “or he can bow down to Western dictates.” This time, Herbst also acknowledged, “Much of this is actually beyond the control of Ukraine.”

Brian Whitmore, a former Russia analyst for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, optimistically predicted that a Kamala Harris administration would “be more hawkish than Biden.” Days earlier in Latvia, Whitmore moderated a panel discussion at the 2024 Riga Conference about “Lessons for the West in Combating Hostile Information Operations.” Panelists included a senior expert at the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, and two representatives of the Azov Brigade — one of them Yulia Fedosiuk, the head of international communications for the unit, who used to work for a far-right publishing house associated with the Azov movement. Fedosiuk reportedly “spoke about the methods used by the Russians in their information attacks on the unit for ten years, and for the first time publicly shared Azov’s successful experience in fighting Russian propaganda on the international stage and presented some of Azov’s counter-propaganda projects.”

From right to left at the Riga Conference: retired US general Ben Hodges, Yulia Fedosiuk, and Volodymyr Vernyhora, a sergeant from Azov’s school for “political/ideological officers” who visited London this year.

Speaking of “information operations,” Whitmore told the Kyiv Security Forum for Youth, “If there was a left-wing version of Trump on the scene, Russia would be supporting that”; in other words, people like him would try to “Russiagate” that candidate, like they did when Bernie Sanders got too hot in 2020.

Kurt Volker, the former U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations (2017–2019), tried to make the case for his former boss, Donald Trump. “The Biden administration was not comfortable with the exercise of American power, in fact wanted to pull the U.S. back from the world, for instance Afghanistan,” argued Volker, “and I think that a Trump administration, or at least President Trump personally is going to be very comfortable with the exercise of power when he chooses to use it.” As for the Azovites, some like Valeriy Horishniy openly favored Trump.

Valeriy Horishniy reacted to Donald Trump’s victory with a homophobic meme and shared a video from an Azov Brigade-linked Instagram account that dared Trump to “dream big again” for Ukraine’s war effort.

As the conference came to an end, a young man and woman beaming with self-importance read letters “on behalf of Ukrainian youth” to the Secretary General of NATO and the Ukrainian government. The optimistic young woman said, “we are a generation of changers, a generation of warriors and winners,” who understand that Europe is “about the system of values where … everyone is equal.” Furthermore, “we continue to prove that we are resilient on the battlefield and it is an opportunity for us to prove that we are capable of introducing the European standards in Ukraine.” But as Denys Prokopenko, the commander of the Azov Brigade once declared, “Ukraine belongs to us. Brave, real and loyal. Who have chosen honor and courage.” The liberal nationalist alliance with right-wing extremists won’t last forever. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?