Successful Russian Operation in Kyiv Suburb Exposes Azov's "Torture House"

Congratulations are in order for Moscow. If Ukraine's officials are to be believed, Russian special services have pulled off their most successful operation yet, and they didn't fire a shot.

Yesterday, a crowd gathered outside a private house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, a village on the western edge of Kyiv. Telegram channels said armed men were holding around 40 people in the basement. A medical worker said she had seen video of people in critical condition, and that the armed men guarding the house would not let medics in.

By the evening the 1st Azov Corps of the National Guard had confirmed that the house is theirs.

Four servicemen it was holding there for "disciplinary violations" had injuries and were sent to a military hospital for examination. The corps did not say how they were injured, nor did it say on what legal grounds soldiers are locked up in a private house.

Soon after, National Guard commander Oleksandr Pivnenko said the house was a temporary point for men who had gone AWOL or had just been mobilised.

The Interior Minister ordered an internal investigation into the conditions there.

Later, Kyrylo Budanov, now head of the Presidential Office, arrived.

"I came here to find out what the f*** is going on here," he said.

He promised to find out "why such buildings exist, what happens in them, and why we have AWOL cases".

Why such buildings exist. Plural.

Azov commander Denys Prokopenko declared the uproar over Borshchahivka plays into Russia's hands, because Moscow wants to set civilians against the military.

So let us look at what this sinister operation achieved. It seems to have made the 1st Azov Corps lock up injured, perhaps tortured, men and a 14-year-old boy inside in a private house in a Kyiv suburb.

Fiendishly clever. A Russian operation, apparently, is when you get caught holding your own people in a basement.

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Ukraine is not Syria. It likes to present itself as a European, Christian country and a candidate to join the Union on fast forward, representing the values of democracy and fighting for what is right.

European taxpayers have been funding it for almost five years, in the name of European values.

Ukraine has been under martial law since February 2022.

The president's term ended on 20 May 2024.

On 26 October the Verkhovna Rada extended martial law, together with general mobilisation, for the 21st time, until 29 January 2027. The constitution forbids elections under martial law, so there are none.

How long can a country go without a vote and still call itself democratic?

Nobody can say Azov came as a surprise.

In 2015 the US House of Representatives voted unanimously for the Conyers–Yoho amendment, barring arms, training and other help to the Azov Battalion. The amendment was quietly stripped from the final bill. In 2018 Congress wrote the ban into the omnibus spending law. Representative Ro Khanna welcomed it, saying it stopped the US from arming and training the "neo-Nazi Azov Battalion".

Facebook listed Azov as a dangerous organisation, the category it uses for terrorist and hate groups. In January 2023, eleven months into the war, its owner Meta took the regiment off the list. Azov founder Andriy Biletsky and his party, National Corps, are still on it.

Japan's Public Security Intelligence Agency wrote in its International Terrorism Handbook 2021 that "a neo-Nazi organisation formed the Azov Battalion". In April 2022, six weeks into the war, the agency deleted the line and said it had never recognised Azov as neo-Nazi. The handbook, it explained, only collected what others had published.

Even Wikipedia changed its mind. In December 2021 its article said Azov "is a neo-Nazi Ukrainian National Guard unit", with a note to editors not to change those words without consensus. Today it calls Azov "a formation of the National Guard of Ukraine", and the neo-Nazi part has become a "controversy" over its "early and allegedly continuing association" with far-right groups.

Before February 2022, the US Congress, Japan's security agency, the world's largest social network and the world's largest encyclopedia all treated Azov as a far-right formation. After February 2022 they were on magazine covers.

What changed: Azov, or the official narrative?

When Moscow said "denazification", the West laughed it off as propaganda.

Was it all propaganda?

Or did it name something that the sophisticated leaders in Brussels, London, Paris, "neutral" Vienna and the Biden White House had agreed not to mention because blind Russophobia mattered more?

Was that a Russian operation too?

When a regime's answer to a mishandled child in a paramilitary detention house is "you are helping the enemy", do YOU want to support this regime, or is it time to end this war and finally denazify Ukraine?