The image was first posted on Twitter in 2014. It shows the "Asov Brigade", a self styled private militia founded in May 2014, following the April 2014 incursion into the Donbas by Russian paramilitaries. In March 2014, Russia occupied Crimea. "Coincidently" "anti-revolution" and pro-Russian protests began in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, collectively 'the Donbas'. In April 2014, Igor Girkin, a former FSB officer led a fifty-strong unit of heavily armed Russian militants who captured the strategic town of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine. The unit were mostly Russian Armed Forces 'volunteers' from Russian-occupied Crimea and wore no insignia. Girkin admitted that this action sparked the Donbas War. It is a fact, certainly when football was being played in the region, Ukrainian and Russian football teams were associated with so-called Ultras, who openly court WW2 German Nazi imagery. Stone might be shocked by all this, but thats how it is in Eastern Europe, possibly a result of decades of indoctrination which used to turn defeat of Nazi Germany into a means to prop up an equally repressive, rotten regime. Likely the men in that photo are now either all dead, or legged it. If we are picking and choosing militias in this war, lets talk about DShRG Rusich, active in Ukraine since 2014 (and tried their hand in Syria), the Russian Imperial Movement, which deploys people in Ukraine via the Russian Imperial Army and the Russian Orthodox Army, religious fruitcakes fighting in Donbas. https://medium.com/dfrlab/an-untimely-death-reveals-the-nature-of-a-russian-neo-nazi-unit-that-fought-in-syria-5398a7d28e0a https://united24media.com/latest-news/russian-neo-nazis-group-launch-photo-contest-with-killed-ukrainian-pows-13513 https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-russian-imperial-movement-in-the-ukraine-wars-2014-2023/ https://www.voanews.com/a/how-russia-uses-neo-nazi-groups-to-spread-chaos/6629981.html Its fair to say you need to know your Nordic runes. https://www.ukrainer.net/en/azov-arent-neo-nazis/
