‘Love is Blind’ Meets Azov
American Azov veteran co-stars in Netflix reality TV show
The new season of “Love is Blind,” a popular reality TV show on Netflix, will premiere tomorrow — featuring a former U.S. marine who served in a neo-Nazi special forces unit in Ukraine. Bohdan Olinares, 36, has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman “just a few weeks after he left town to film his portion of the show.” He is also a veteran of the Azov Special Operation Forces (SOF), which was founded in 2022 by Andriy Biletsky, arguably Ukraine’s most notorious neo-Nazi.
Later that year, around the time that Olinares returned to the United States, the Azov SOF formed the 3rd Assault Brigade in the Ground Forces of Ukraine, another openly neo-Nazi unit that came under Biletsky’s leadership. Olinares’ friend Oleh Romanov, the commander of its anti-tank battalion, has several pagan and Nazi tattoos, including a large sonnenrad on his left shoulder. (One of his buddies has a swastika on the back of his head.) Earlier this year, someone from Romanov’s unit visited Auschwitz wearing a neo-Nazi shirt. The commander “liked” one of the Instagram posts about this stunt before it generated significant controversy.
Recently this same Azov commander raged about the rise of arson attacks against Ukrainian military vehicles, and declared that he’s ordered his troops to shoot on sight any civilians that engage in this campaign of antiwar sabotage. Now he is visiting New York and Washington, where his family appears to live. Yesterday after picking up his daughter from school for the first time in the United States, Romanov visited his friend from the war, Bohdan Olinares, to catch up and make dinner. Maybe tomorrow they’ll go to one of DC’s watch parties for the premiere of the new season of “Love is Blind.” But the founder of the “Kill House” drone school might not be interested.
Bohdan Olinares, an American born in Ukraine, is not your typical Azov recruit. His left arm isn’t covered in far-right symbols, but Nintendo characters, with a large Pokemon ball tattooed on his shoulder. When Voice of America interviewed him last year, he had his Azov SOF patch displayed within reach of his Nintendo Switch. I don’t suspect that Olinares is a neo-Nazi, but apparently he is proud to be associated with them. In one of his only Instagram posts about the war, there are two photos of Olinares next to an Azov fighter wearing a sonnenrad patch.
“Love is blind” is an expression for when loving someone means you can’t see their faults. In this Netflix show, the cast members literally can’t see each other until they’ve agreed to get married. Some people in Washington might eventually regret getting this country recklessly hitched to Ukrainian neo-Nazis, but by the time they want a divorce, it will probably be too late.
Falling in love with Ukraine and its cause to repel Russian aggression has blinded (and endeared) many Westerners to the country’s increasingly powerful neo-Nazi movement. As for Netflix, this isn’t the first time. In 2015, it released the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom,” which erased the role of the far-right in the 2014 “Maidan revolution.” This past year in Ukraine, Netflix showcased a propaganda film about Azov’s 3rd Assault Brigade, starring some of its neo-Nazi commanders, that the Ukrainian Oscar Committee even considered submitting to the Academy Awards for “Best International Feature Film.”
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