UK Denies It Agreed to Train Neo-Nazi Linked Ukraine Unit
February 15, 2022
Ukraine’s National Guard says that last year the U.K. military agreed to start training its forces, which include a thousand-strong neo-Nazi unit, Matt Kennard reports. The U.K. Ministry of Defence disputes the claim.
By Matt Kennard
Declassified U.K.
U.K. MoD tells Declassified it has no plans to train NGU and that British commander was misquoted
But U.K. military is engaging with NGU and aware of “the peculiarities of [its] combat operations”
Apparent member of another far-right Ukrainian group was trained at Sandhurst in 2020
Details and photos of the meeting in the capital, Kiev, were posted in Ukrainian on the website of Ukraine’s National Guard (NGU) last year.
Declassified understands the U.K. Ministry of Defence (MoD) believed the September 2021 meeting to be private and should not have been publicized. There is no mention of the meeting in any U.K. records that are publicly available.
Three British commanders of Operation Orbital — the U.K. military’s training mission in Ukraine — are pictured, alongside three NGU officers. They sit around a table taking notes.
The MoD refused to give Declassified the names of the U.K. personnel who attended the meeting, citing operational and personnel security issues.
However, the NGU report names Lt Col Andy Cox, deputy commander of Orbital, while two other British officers are pictured, one with his name tag prominently displayed.
Orbital, which was launched in 2015, has so far only trained Ukraine’s regular armed forces. Expanding it to include the National Guard would be controversial due to sensitivities around the far-right sympathies of some of its units.
The NGU was formed in 2014 to incorporate an array of paramilitary and volunteer battalions which were fighting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. This included a neo-Nazi unit, the Azov Battalion, which reportedly has a thousand soldiers.
Now an official regiment within the NGU — and therefore part of Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs – Azov fighters have been pictured in eastern Ukraine with Nazi insignia such as swastikas and SS runes on their helmets.
The battalion’s founder has said that Ukraine should “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen[subhumans].”
‘Develop Combat Capabilities’
The NGU report quotes Lt Col Cox as promising “the British military is ready to involve representatives of the National Guard of Ukraine in the training activities being conducted today for units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to develop their combat capabilities.”
Cox adds: “We are currently considering training with the National Guard of Ukraine on defence operations and the work of staff officers.”
He continued: “We will start this work with the inclusion of NGU representatives in the training activities that are already being conducted by British instructors in some units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
But the MoD told Declassified it has no plans to start training the NGU and that Cox was misquoted, probably due to a translation error.
An MoD spokesperson told Declassified:
“The U.K. does not conduct training with the National Guard of Ukraine. This meeting was a routine engagement between personnel deployed on Operation Orbital and a government organisation in Ukraine to improve mutual understanding.”
‘Peculiarities of Combat Operations’
The September meeting, however, appears to be a significant engagement between the British military and the NGU.
The report notes that British commanders were “acquainted with the history of creation, tasks and structure of the National Guard of Ukraine,” “the peculiarities of the combat operations of NGU units” as well as its “role and place in the security and defence sector of the state.”….
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/15/uk-denies-it-agreed-to-train-neo-nazi-linked-ukraine-unit/