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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A state department spokesman told the BBC a vetting process “found no evidence of gross violations of human rights” by the brigade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Azov brigade, now a unit within Ukraine’s National Guard, hailed the move, saying Russia’s “lies… received a devastating blow”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moscow condemned the decision, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying the US was “even prepared to flirt with neo-Nazis” to suppress Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US government says it considers torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance and rape as such types of violations when implementing the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39966,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39965,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39963\/revisions\/39965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}