The administration says the “Azov Brigade” is separate from the old, Nazi-linked “Azov Battalion.” The unit itself says they’re the same.

The State Department announced Monday that it has formally lifted a ban on arming and training the Azov Brigade, an infamous Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit.

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

A neo-Nazi militia launched a cross-border raid from Ukraine into Russia’s Belgorod region on Monday using US armored vehicles, Financial Times reported Tuesday.

Amid their looming defeat in the Donbas, which even The New York Times and Washington Post have belatedly and reluctantly begun to acknowledge of late, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is still struggling to make over its image, given the Western mainstream had long ago admitted them as a significant "neo-Nazi threat" - as one BBC documentary bluntly described years ago. But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the public has been steadily told that Azov is merely "far right" or simply "nationalist" in their ideology. Or even better, the group just has far-right "roots" with images often "misunderstood" and shared "out of context"...

BBC Newsnight's Gabriel Gatehouse investigates the links between the new Ukrainian government and Neo-nazis