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Servicemen of the 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov of the National Guard of Ukraine fire a howitzer towards Russian troops, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Donetsk region, Ukraine April 5, 2024.
The Biden administration haslifted a long-standing ban on funding for Ukraine’s controversial Azov Brigade. Critics of this regiment, not just in Moscow, say some founding members of a volunteer group called the Azov Battalion, formed 10 years ago in response to Russia’s 2014 aggression in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, had links to neo-Nazis, and the US banned all support for the group. Two years later, aUN report accused the Azov group of “looting of civilian property, leading to displacement” in that region.
But today’s Azov Brigade, now part of Ukraine’s National Guard, claims fighters with links to ultra-nationalists long ago left the group, and a State Department spokesman reportedlytold the BBC that a review “found no evidence of gross violations of human rights” by the current group.
It’s one more sign the White House worries that Russia could make big gains in Ukraine this summer and long-stalled US support for Ukraine’s defenses will be partly to blame.
A much bigger boost for Ukraine could come later this week if the US and others agree at the G7 summit to usethe interest from hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine's defense and reconstruction.