US lifts weapons ban on Ukraine’s Azov brigade

The US has lifted its long-standing ban on weapons supplies and training to Ukraine’s Azov brigade, whose origins were mired in controversy over alleged links to far-right groups.

A state department spokesman told the BBC a vetting process “found no evidence of gross violations of human rights” by the brigade.

The Azov brigade, now a unit within Ukraine’s National Guard, hailed the move, saying Russia’s “lies… received a devastating blow”.

Moscow condemned the decision, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying the US was “even prepared to flirt with neo-Nazis” to suppress Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made false claims about a “neo-Nazi regime” in Kyiv to try to justify first the annexation of Ukraine’s southern Crimea peninsula and backing of pro-Moscow fighters in the east in 2014, and then his full-scale invasion launched in 2022.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the state department spokesman told the BBC that Washington applied a vetting process to the National Guard of Ukraine’s 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade and “found no evidence of gross violations of human rights committed”.

“Russian disinformation attempts to conflate Ukraine’s National Guard Unit of 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov with a militia formed to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion in 2014, called the ‘Azov Battalion’,” the spokesman added.

Under America’s “Leahy Law”, sponsored in 1997 by then-Senator Patrick Leahy, a finding that a foreign military unit has committed gross violations of human rights means it can be cut off from US military assistance.

The US government says it considers torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance and rape as such types of violations when implementing the law.