Recruitment and far right: “I Love the Third Brigade”
The United States is putting pressure on Zelensky to lower the age of conscription again, but for the moment the Ukrainian president is rejecting this possibility. This is what Ukrainian media such as Ukrainska Pravda reported this week, referring to the mobilization of men between 18 and 25 years old, a very small population group in which the country’s future cannot afford to lose. Even before the law on mobilization was approved, which is very unpopular despite not being as harsh as foreign allies demanded, prominent figures and self-proclaimed friends of Ukraine such as US Senator Lindsey Graham have publicly encouraged Ukraine to recruit those over 18 years old despite the demographic risk that this implies for the country they claim to defend. These suggestions seem to have become a demand that is confirmed even by people who belong to the state apparatus. “If this information has come to light, it may confirm that American politicians from both parties are putting pressure on President Zelensky on the question of why there is no mobilisation for those aged 18-25 in Ukraine,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, one of Andriy Yermak’s advisers and a figure who has gone from representing the third sector, civil society in Maidan Ukraine to all kinds of well-paid positions in government or in the few state-owned companies that Kiev has not yet privatised. The past ten years show a double standard between those who have been privileged and those who have been impoverished and marginalised thanks to the European and liberal reforms of the peacetime years. However, Ukraine’s refusal to recruit its most vulnerable population group strictly responds to the future needs of the state, which, if it hopes to rebuild itself, must maintain minimum levels of youth population.
Although a willing proxy force is prepared to continue fighting to the last Ukrainian, as Graham once stated, sometimes the interests of Ukraine and its suppliers are not perfectly aligned. And if Kiev has an obligation to look, at least from time to time, beyond the war, its partners seem to be concerned only with the here and now, that is, with having enough troops to handle the millions of dollars and euros that continue to flow from west to east in the form of weapons and ammunition. The number of articles warning of the high casualties is increasing, those trying to romanticize the fact that thousands of people have suffered amputations, those admitting the thousands of deserters – 45,543 official cases between January and August 2024 according to Cristian Segura in El País this week -, those denouncing the dismantling of plots to help men of combat age to flee the country or highlighting that some of those who leave the country with permission do not return. As the Minister of Culture and Strategic Communication admitted yesterday, one in five men who obtain permission from the Ministry to temporarily leave the country do not return to Ukraine, which not only loses its cultural figures, but also men to recruit. These articles help to understand the wear and tear that the war is causing and the losses that the country is suffering, but they also reinforce the idea that it is necessary to increase mobilization.
This is also the argument of units that have the privilege of carrying out their own recruitment and that present themselves as an example of how centralised, state-led mobilisation is ineffective. This is the case of Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of the Third Assault Brigade and one of the people who worked to reconfigure the military wing of Azov after the defeat at Mariupol, where a significant part of his troops were taken prisoner. For Zhorin, a well-known member of the far right and one of the important figures of the National Corps, the political party of the Azov movement, mobilisation must be complete, education must be militarised and punishments must be toughened. War has been the group’s raison d’être since the summer of 2014 and this logic must now be extended to the state, which both the Third Brigade and the Azov Brigade have criticised for being excessively soft. The success of the formation commanded by Colonel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Andriy Biletsky is not only an argument of the propaganda of the Third Brigade, but has also been publicized in the past by media such as The Economist, which, like much of the Western press, did not focus on the ideological component of this unit, a direct heir to Azov, which Arsen Avakov and Anton Gerashchenko incorporated into the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine as a police battalion when Ukraine was preparing to declare its anti-terrorist operation. The fact that it was created in recent years and under a name that does not include the reference to Azov despite being led by two of the most relevant people in the movement has made it unnecessary to even admit continuity. Thus, unlike Denys Prokopenko’s unit, which, despite maintaining continuity, is further removed from the political nucleus that Azov formed, it must be argued that the Brigade has been depoliticized, the Third Assault Brigade has been freed from all suspicion, with the press not seeing the need to claim that Biletsky or Zhorin are not the same people they were a decade ago.
In this context of freedom to recruit outside the state despite being a formation integrated into the Armed Forces of Ukraine and of absolute whitewashing of the extreme right forces that began to fight against the internal enemy – then the population of Donbass – ten years ago, it is not surprising that the Third Assault Brigade has launched a publicity campaign with large media outlets. Even less surprising is the reaction of the media. “Faced with public distrust, Ukrainian military units compete with each other to replenish their troops. To fight the war better, they have to sell it, and few do it better than the 3rd Assault Brigade, known for its innovative billboards and its YouTube channel that generates dollars, as well as for the controversial ideology of its founder,” writes The Washington Post this week in a report on the recruitment and public relations campaign of Andriy Biletsky’s unit, of which the text gives a single reference to admit that “he was a far-right politician before the war.” As the Ukrainian-Canadian professor Ivan Katchanovski recalled, Biletsky has in his personal archives declarations of intent such as “the historic mission of our Nation is to lead and direct the White Peoples of the world in the last crusade for their existence, a march against the subhumans led by the Semites.” Although the anti-Semitism of the current official ideology is hidden – although not always that of the soldiers – racial hatred is now directed at other groups and in them Biletsky has seen “a serious confrontation of the native European peoples with foreign colonizers, mainly of African and Muslim origin.” According to the white leader “an ethnic civil war can only be won by the native Europeans under the banner of the National Revolutions of the New Right.”
According to Khrystyna Bondarenko, part of the creative team, the campaign “is being run by a team of 20 people: 13 military personnel and seven civilians. Their messages seem impossible to miss, as they cover more than a thousand billboards across Ukraine, which she says are largely donated. The digital ads are funded by profits from their YouTube channel, which has nearly 1.3 million subscribers and generates more than $15,000 a month. On Instagram, they have another 115,000 subscribers,” writes The Washington Post, describing the current advertising campaign by Biletsky’s group, which, after a previous one in which the aim was to completely dehumanize Russia by presenting its population as zombies, is now seeking “to experiment with a totally new image but linked to historical themes. They settled on pin-up girls.” New for Azov is an aesthetic inspired by the 1950s.
Although the latest US budget law explicitly prohibits arming or financing Azov, the Third Assault Brigade or any group that inherits them, nothing prevents them from spreading their message. Present at the filming, journalists from The Washington Post describe the scene:
“The machine gunner held his weapon, his body tense, his eyes focused and his finger on the trigger.
On the hood of his Humvee, a model in shorts and cherry-red stilettos leaned on her elbows, her bare legs dripping with bubbles. The soldier aimed his weapon: a power washer.
The cameras flash.
This is not a battlefield, but the front line of the upcoming advertising campaign by Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade – a modern take on the style of World War II pin-up girls, with scantily clad models clutching pistols and straddling soldiers. The brigade hopes the campaign will attract recruits, who are in increasingly short supply as the war with Russia heads into its third year .
As the article indicates, Biletsky and his people have had enough funds to place their message not only on social media, but throughout the country, filling the Ukrainian capital’s subway with images with the slogan “I love the Third Brigade.” The American media does not value this campaign of trivialization and romanticization of war or the values it instills, a way of perpetuating hierarchies and gender roles that presents women as sexual objects at the service of the warrior. The message of the campaign is not accidental but perfectly intentional. This is made clear by what was published by one of the best-known figures of the Third Brigade and the National Corps, Dmytro Kukharchuk who wrote: “On the new recruitment campaign of the Third Brigade. I just want to add that the critical situation in Ukraine is no less the fault of Western leftists and liberals than of Russian missiles and degenerates from Buryatia. We are fighting for the traditional Ukrainian family, not for invented female forms and non-existent genders.” The sexist gender message is accompanied by racism – it is no coincidence that Kukharchuk points to Buryatia, a Russian republic located north of Mongolia – and hatred of the left.
“Hegemonic militarized masculinity and sexism often go hand in hand. The best example of this in today’s Ukraine is the Third Assault Brigade. Its public communication includes numerous misogynistic incidents, presented as “army humor.” For example, some fighters equated their female counterparts with military dogs during the “Dvizh” show, meant to promote the Brigade. Others made “dirty jokes” about women’s “true vocation” in wartime, which was to satisfy the sexual needs of male soldiers. Some made “jokes” about women’s “proper place” during wartime, associating it with cooking borsch,” wrote Ukrainian history professor Marta Havryshko, who is hated by the far right and can afford criticism without risking the wrath of groups like Azov by being outside the country.
Values have not changed, and this week’s statements should serve as a wake-up call to those who argue that Azov has become depoliticised or is no longer what it was in 2014. Monday marked the day in Ukraine of the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a group that actively collaborated with Nazism and played a starring role in the mass murder of Polish people in Volhynia. Both Biletsky and Zhoryn posted messages presenting their brigade as the heir to UPA. The Third Assault Brigade’s spot marking the date stated that “October 14 is Ukraine’s Defence Day, honouring the 82nd anniversary of the formation of UPA” and added that “the date also recognises the resilience of the Maidan volunteer men in black and the founding of the Third Assault Brigade two years ago.” More candid than the Western media that whitewash and depoliticise it, the group admits the continuity between the group that collaborated with the German occupation during World War II and Azov, but also from the men in black, the paramilitary origin of the group branded neo-Nazi by the US Congress, to the Third Assault Brigade. Neither Biletsky nor Azov have changed, only circumstances have. The movement now has more weapons, more recruits and a whole propaganda machine that has succeeded in normalising a group whose hard core fought under the banner of a modified totenkopf and whose soldiers can be found across the spectrum of types of fascism.
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