Welcome to another seasonal edition of the Azov Lobby Review. Unlike Winter and Spring 2025, this post will be partially paywalled. Also, Substack says this is too long for some subscribers to read in their inbox.
Azov supporters celebrate the summer solstice in the Netherlands (more about them below the paywall). Kupala Night might be a harmless Slavic folk tradition, but there is a lot of neo-Nazi paganism in the Azov movement.
European Strategy: Neo-Nazis 404
The 2025 annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference, one of the premier events dedicated to “Ukraine’s European future,” convened in Kyiv earlier this month. The first day — Friday, September 12 — featured two speakers from the Azov Corps in the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU), which is led by the “depoliticized” 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade that originated in the notorious Azov Battalion.
Tetyana Teplyuk, a combat medic, said she “told my colleagues when they got down, ‘You joined the Azov battalion, you knew you might go to the frontline, that this might happen, so let’s stay strong.’” The other NGU Azov speaker was Valery Horishny, “Chief Sergeant of the Azov Corps,” who keeps coming up on this blog. You might recall that this hardcore neo-Nazi adherent of the “native faith” once wrote poetry dedicated to Adolf Hitler, but that hasn’t stopped him from making speeches at the United Nations, the UK Parliament, and the Bundestag this year.
Horishny and Teplyuk at the 2025 YES conference
Horishny, who spent over two years as a prisoner of war after the NGU Azov Regiment surrendered in Mariupol, told those at YES, “The captivity made me better and stronger.” Furthermore, “I instruct people how to protect and return our land.” In fact, Horishny is an instructor for a new “404” youth movement associated with the NGU Azovites. David “Khimik” Kasatkin, another famous former Azov POW and deputy commander of the Azov Brigade’s sniper detachment, leads the new group. He is also evidently a neo-Nazi, as I covered in this Twitter/X thread. Recent pictures and videos from the “404 Movement” reveal numerous neo-Nazi shirts, including from the National Socialist Black Metal band “M8L8TH” (also known as “Hitler’s Hammer”). So much for depoliticization…
404 Youth Movement, with M8L8TH fans circled in red
On the second day of YES, the very name of which alludes to the false promises recklessly made to Ukraine, the so-called “white fuhrer” of the Azov movement participated in this high-level event. Andriy Biletsky, the commander of the Azovite 3rd Army Corps, remotely joined a panel featuring retired U.S. general David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA; Carl Bildt, the former Prime Minister of Sweden, who co-chairs the European Council on Foreign Relations; Ukrainian Marine Corps major general Andriy Hnatov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who previously commanded its Joint Forces; and Ukrainian general Yevhen Moisiuk, the Deputy Minister of Defense.
Biletsky and Petraeus at YES
“The key issue is developing a strategy and new tactical approaches,” according to Biletsky, who is now hailed as one of the greatest military commanders in Ukraine. “In addition to the ongoing revolution in aerial drones, we are on the verge of another revolution, in my opinion. This is the revolution of ground-based robotic systems, which will radically change the battlefield and replace a significant share of soldiers, both in terms of logistics and combat use.” Here Biletsky is touting the military technology achievements of his openly neo-Nazi fighters, which was a focus of my Spring 2025 Azov Lobby Review — more about that below.
As told by the journalist Leonid Ragozin, the Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski made a “striking admission” at the YES conference.
“If we are providing security guarantees to Ukraine, we are saying that we can start a war against Russia. But I don’t think this is either convincing or trustworthy. If someone wants to fight Russia, they can start it right away. But I am not seeing anyone willing. There is nothing worse in international relations than providing guarantees that can’t be trusted”.
So NATO membership promise has been a lie all along. A clear lie since Bucharest summit in 2008, which was followed by the war in Georgia a few months later. Also, “the coalition of the willing” has exactly zero members.
What was the necessity of throwing Ukraine under the Russian bulldozer when it was possible to build relations with Russia and gradually integrate it in Euro-Atlantic structures? Alongside Ukraine within its 1991 borders.
An appetite for war fueled by the defence industry lobby and the far right tilt of the Western mainstream. That’s the only answer.
A Brief Aside…
Al-Sharaa and Petraeus in New York
Less than two weeks after his appearance at YES alongside a virtual Biletsky, former CIA director David Petraeus, who also led U.S. Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, sat down at the Concordia Summit in New York with Ahmed al-Sharaa (AKA Abu Mohammad al-Julani), the President of Syria since January, who once had a $10 million bounty on his head from Washington after he launched an off-shoot of al-Qaeda with support from ISIS. Presumably, Biletsky would prefer to follow in Al-Sharaa’s footsteps then, say, Osama Bin Laden. As he said in a recent interview with The Times (UK), “I always tell my people: for the foreseeable future, we are not going to be at war with Britain, the United States or France. So we are completely open to working with tech companies from such countries.”
Nazi Military Tech Updates
In the spring edition of this newsletter, I introduced readers to the Snake Island Institute (SII) and AB3 Tech, a new think tank and “startup accelerator” created by the Azov movement, and in particular its 3rd Assault Brigade (3AB or AB3), which now spearheads Biletsky’s 3rd Army Corps. Those outfits involved the “NC-13” platoon that originated in the AB3’s “Dirlewanger” company (inspired by one of the most sadistic Nazi military units), and the Azovite “Killhouse” drone school. As a reminder, after visiting the latter AB3 training facility in February, former CIA director David Petraeus predicted that Ukraine “will be the military-industrial complex, the most important one in all of Europe.” The Azov movement obviously intends to play a key role in this process, and Petraeus is among those cheering them on.
Petraeus with Azov veterans at the 2024 “US-Ukraine Freedom Summit” in Washington just three days before the news broke that the State Department approved the NGU Azov Brigade to receive U.S. weapons and training.
In early July, the 3rd Assault Brigade declared that its NC-13 unit (now said to be in the “Deus Ex Machina” company of the 2nd Assault Battalion) “carried out an unprecedented operation … using only drones and ground-based robotic systems.” Furthermore, the Azovites claimed, “this is the first successful assault in modern warfare using exclusively unmanned platforms! The robots are fighting, and you are in command — join now!” Just days earlier, the 3rd Assault Brigade announced the expansion of “KillHouse Academy” with the opening of the “School of Ground-Based Robotic Systems.” By August, NC-13 was officially designated a “company of ground-based robotic systems.”
Biletsky awarding a Glock-19 pistol to NC-13 commander Mykola Zinkevich, seen on the right wearing his modified Dirlewanger patch
As spring turned to summer, the Snake Island Institute joined Defense Tech Week in Prague (represented by the possible girlfriend of the NC-13 commander), signed a memorandum of cooperation with the elite special forces “Omega” unit in the National Guard of Ukraine, and held its inaugural event in Kyiv. At some point in the coming weeks, SII reportedly “took part in an invite-only defense workshop” at the Royal Air Force Club in London that it connected with the Omega group. The latter received the ten drones built at the workshop, which also raised money for a “Combat Driven Innovation Showcase” in Lviv organized by Snake Island Institute. Tech entrepreneur Martin van der Heijden hosted the London event. He’s the CTO and co-founder of 11xAI, a British startup that “builds automated digital workers that can be used in lieu of human employees.”
SII president Vladyslav Sobolevsky, a former football hooligan and alleged war criminal, who became an important member of Biletsky’s political party and a deputy commander of the 3rd Assault Brigade, has said that his think tank “works directly with key decision-makers in both Ukraine and the U.S. to develop strategic alignment, increase institutional capacity, and support battlefield innovation with a long-term vision.” According to SII’s young executive director, Maryna Hrytsenko, “our mission is ambitious - we are a strategic bridge of Ukraine to the world. The voice of the Ukrainian military on an international level. We act as a direct communication channel between our Defense Forces, technological innovators and strategic allies.”
The June SII event in Kyiv started with a presentation, allegedly to “an audience of senior military officials, government representatives, civil society leaders, and international partners.” That was followed by a roundtable discussion that included Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy chief of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, which is linked to the CIA, to put it mildly. One of Skibitsky’s predecessors, Maj. Gen. Illia Pavlenko, also participated. Here are some of the other speakers:
Eveline Buchatskiy is the managing partner at the Kyiv-based “D3 Defense Tech Fund,” which sponsored a May 2025 “hackathon” in Lviv alongside the “incredible team” at AB3 Tech, KillHouse Academy, the NC-13 platoon, and the “Galician Youth,” a local neo-Nazi group connected to NC-13. Buchatskiy’s daughter Catarina is the Director of Analytics for Snake Island Institute, who I wrote about in the spring. More recently, Eveline announced that Denmark’s state-owned Export and Investment Fund “joined D3 as an investor.” Earlier this year, D3 co-founded the Ukrainian Council of Arms Manufacturers, which is reportedly expected to “help the country attract funds from allies to the Ukrainian defense-industrial complex for the production of weapons according to the ‘Danish model’ and the creation of joint defense enterprises.”
Lt. Col. Giorgi Kuparashvili is the head of the Azov movement’s “Yevhen Konovalets Military School,” which formed the 354th Separate Mechanized Regiment. He led the first Azov delegation dispatched to Washington in 2022, and claimed to have met “over fifty” members of Congress in that trip alone. In 2016, Kuparashvili represented Georgia at the founding conference of the “Intermarium Support Group” — part of Azov’s white nationalist geopolitical agenda — and the following year, he met representatives of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency that visited the NGU Azov base in Mariupol.
Lesia Ogryzko, a visiting fellow at the EU-funded European Council on Foreign Relations, directs the Sahaidachnyi Security Center in Kyiv. Before founding this Ukrainian think tank, Ogryzko was the “Deputy Chief of Party” of the USAID Civil Society Sectoral Support Activity Program in Ukraine, according to her LinkedIn account. Before that she worked for the United Nations and Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers, among other things.
Yuriy Filatov is reportedly the “Head of UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] Operations” for the 3rd Army Corps. Apparently he is not a neo-Nazi, and perhaps not even a far-right nationalist, but an “Enterprise Architect with the overall experience of near 20 years helping big companies to maintain or regain their efficiency and startups to grow from zero to sustainable operations.” In 2015-17, he helped Ukraine’s Finance Ministry develop an online portal. Before the war, Filatov was the CTO of BrainRocket, a multinational “IT Software Development Company of the Future.”
Stanislav Ryzhenkov, a former platoon commander in the NGU Azov Regiment, now advises the mayor of Kyiv as the “Commissioner of the Kyiv City Council for the Rights of War Veterans.” According to Ryzhenkov, the war didn’t end for him. “I just changed weapons. Now my front is veteran politics.” Despite losing an arm, he says that joining Azov was “the best decision of my life. Because there is no such brotherhood as there. This is not just a unit. This is a family that will always support you.”
In early July, the Snake Island Institute hosted a delegation from the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) in Washington, “including congressional staffers from both parties.” They were joined, as always, by Mykola Hryckowian from Pennsylvania, a representative of the “Bandera Lobby” who heads the DC office of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR)—formerly housed by the AFPC—and serves as president of the Organization for Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine (ODFFU) headquartered in Manhattan. (Readers of my other Substack may recall, CUSUR and ODFFU are Ukrainian American OUN-B front groups, and the Banderites have arranged annual AFPC trips to Ukraine for over a decade.)
According to SII, “Our team also facilitated meetings for the [AFPC] delegation with the Deputy Commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps [Maksym Zhorin], the Chief of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine [Kyrylo Budanov], and representatives of the International Legion — Americans volunteering in the Ukrainian Army.” It was on the initiative of Zhorin, a former commander of the NGU Azov Regiment and leader of its openly neo-Nazi “Borodach Division,” that a neo-pagan shrine was installed on the NGU Azov base in Mariupol in 2017, which involved a ceremony that featured Nazi salutes and bloodletting. In June 2025, the Embassy of Ukraine in Japan hosted Zhorin and Kyrylo Berkal, another important Azovite, who led the 2017 ceremony.
2017 ceremony at the Azov base in Mariupol
As subscribers already know, Andriy Biletsky’s former press secretary Oleksandr Alfyorov became the director of a more powerful Ukrainian Institute of National Memory this past summer. In early September, SII president Vladislav Sobolevsky joined a panel discussion hosted by UkrInform (AKA the National News Agency of Ukraine) on the topic of national memory. According to SII, the speakers “stressed that history is also a battlefield.” In addition to Alfyorov, there was Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukrainian military intelligence; Serhiy Belyaev, Deputy Minister of Culture and Strategic Communications of Ukraine; and George Barros from the DC-based Institute for the Study of War, who previously “served as a policy advisor on Ukraine and Russia for a U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee member.”
In the coming days, AB3 Tech organized a forum dedicated to “ground-based robotic systems” with SII, NC-13, and the Ukrainian Council of Arms Manufacturers, co-founded this year by the D3 venture capital firm. Meanwhile, the Azovites are not far removed from the “drone revolution” taking place in the United States.
As I wrote in the spring, SII’s Director of Analytics, Catarina Buchatskiy, the daughter of D3’s managing partner, is dating Soren Monroe-Anderson, the CEO of California-based Neros Technologies. According to CNN, Monroe-Anderson’s tech startup company, funded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, is “part of a new guard of US firms in the defense industry sphere” and already among the “leading US drone producers.” In July, U.S. Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth released a video (which may have featured one of Neros’ products, Archer Strike), “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance.” Monroe-Anderson excitedly shared this post. “It’s official,” he said. “America is going to build millions of drones. Proud to have our Archer Strike featured as the FPV drone of choice for the US military.”
In the past month, the Department of Defense/War’s Defense Innovation Unit selected Neros as a “Phase 2 Project GI winner, after two weeks with Marines at [Camp Pendleton in California], deploying Archer in realistic scenarios.” According to Neros, its Archer drone was “part of the discussion & demonstration” during Hegseth’s recent visit to the 75th Ranger Regiment of the U.S. Army. Neros also thanked representatives of the army’s Fort Irwin National Training Center for visiting its drone factory a couple weeks ago.
In late August, Catarina and Eveline Buchatskiy spoke at “TechBBQ” in Copenhagen, said to be “the biggest tech and innovation event in Scandinavia.” They joined a panel discussion, “From Crisis to Capability — How Ukraine is Pushing the Boundaries of Defense Tech.” The many other speakers included TikTok’s Managing Director in the Nordics & Central Europe, the Director of Public Policy for Meta’s Northern Europe division, the Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, the CEO of The Atlantic, the Chief Product Officer of LinkedIn, the Chief Editor of The Copenhagen Post, the Chief Europe Correspondent at Shanghai Media Group, the French Deputy Ambassador for Digital Affairs, and the Chief Information Officer at Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund.
Meanwhile in Lviv, the “Head of Projects”/“Head of Defense Tech” at Snake Island Institute joined a conference supported by the EU Delegation in Ukraine: “Joint Ventures, Joint Defense — How Europe and Ukraine can leverage each other’s innovations.” I wrote about SII’s representative, Viktoria Honcharuk, in the spring, who I believed to be the girlfriend of the neo-Nazi NC-13 commander. (Now I’m not sure, forgetting how I came to that conclusion.) Honcharuk, who used to work on Wall Street, co-founded SII and AB3 Tech. Since 2022, she returned to Ukraine and wound up in the medical service of the 3rd Assault Brigade. “Now we see a new trend: the Ukrainian military codifying their innovations together with companies. This is the path forward,” Honcharuk said in the last panel discussion, moderated by Martin Jõesaar from Brussels, who leads the EU Defense Innovation Office in Kyiv.
The “Joint Ventures, Joint Defense” conference was organized by “Tech Force in UA,” which is described as “a coalition of over 60 leading defense tech manufacturers” in Ukraine. The main partner of the event was the Munich-based Quantum Systems Group, an international “aerial data intelligence company” which is allegedly “one of Europe’s fastest-rising defense drone firms” and has “deepened its partnerships across NATO and allied nations,” in particular Ukraine. According to Quantum Systems, it is “at the forefront of AI-powered aerial robotics, developing a family of smart systems that go far beyond traditional drones.”
Around this time, Snake Island Institute helped to bring graduates from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Ukraine for the 2025 “Harvard/MIT Ukraine Trek.” SII president Vladyslav Sobolevsky and executive director Maryna Hrytsenko spoke to participants at the “CDTO Campus” in Kyiv. As explained by its website,
In 2020, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine established the position of CDTO (Chief Digital Transformation Officer). These officers, embedded within government bodies, are responsible for leading and implementing digital transformation across all areas of Ukrainian public life. CDTO Campus is a national educational initiative dedicated to preparing CDTOs and their teams — digital leaders capable of implementing innovative technological projects within public administration.
According to SII, by hosting Ukraine Trek at the CDTO Campus, “Defence Intelligence of Ukraine and representatives of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps and their subsidiary Kill House Academy were connected directly with global changemakers.” Earlier this year, as I wrote here, Sobolevsky and Honcharuk (who was accepted to Harvard before returning to Ukraine in 2022) joined Azov instructor Giorgi Kuparashvili at the 2025 Technology and National Security Conference hosted by Harvard Business School and MIT. Liudmyla Kurnosikova, the “lead organizer of the trek,” is an alumni of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who used to work for the Ukrainian consulate in Hamburg.
Shortly before Andriy Biletsky’s appearance at YES, it became official that the (openly neo-Nazi) “Kraken” unit controlled by Ukrainian military intelligence is forming a drone regiment in Biletsky’s 3rd Army Corps. Kraken, of course, originated in the Azov movement, so this is hardly a surprising development. Two days after the AB3 Tech forum, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency announced “a new level of cooperation” between itself and the 3rd Army Corps, with the creation of the “Kraken 1654” regiment. “And they are already starting to build a new high-tech unit.”
Oleh Romanov, one of the neo-Nazi commanders of Kraken 1654, founded KillHouse Academy and formerly led the 3rd Assault Brigade’s anti-tank battalion. His family lives in Washington. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Azov movement’s pet filmmaker Lubomyr Levitsky, who I wrote about here, has an action movie in the works, “KILLHOUSE,” which was produced in collaboration with military intelligence and Biletsky’s unit. Maryna Hrytsenko, the executive director of SII, even has a role in the film as the Vice President of the United States. Currently, Hrytsenko is in Washington for another round of meetings on Capitol Hill, accompanied by SII leaders Sobolevsky and Honcharuk from the 3rd Assault Brigade.
Catarina Buchatskiy, Lubomyr Levitsky, and Maryna Hrytsenko on the set of “KILLHOUSE”
Nazi Propaganda Updates
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