Azov and ‘Jewish supremacism’: A short reply to David Miller

I see that this old photo is currently being circulated on social media, having been reweeted (again) by David Miller. The flag, which combines the Star of David with the blood-and-soil banner of the genocidal-fascist, antisemitic Ukrainian Insurgent Army, is certainly striking. The individual relaxing on the bed below the flag is one Natan Khazin, a Ukrainian-Israeli rabbi who organised a Jewish “hundred” during the 2013–14 Maidan protest movement, where he worked in close co-operation with the violent far-right forces that overthrew elected president Viktor Yanukovych.

David Miller took the opportunity to declare that “the Nazi Azov Battalion was founded by an ex IDF officer Natan Khazin!” Is there any truth to this assertion? Khazin did boast, in a 2018 interview with the BBC, that he had been “one of the founders” of Azov. However, when I researched Khazin some years ago my assessment then was that this was probably a case of self-aggrandisement. Having looked through the evidence again I don’t see any reason to revise that judgement.

By his own account, during the spring of 2014 Khazin was actively involved, along with some of his far-right associates from Maidan, in skirmishes with pro-Russian separatists in Berdyansk and Mariupol, which culminated in an armed confrontation on 9 May, resulting in the withdrawal of government forces from Mariupol. Following that setback Khazin returned to Kyiv. It was in the course of those conflicts that one of his comrades, Yaroslav Gonchar, came up with the name Azov. But did Khazin play a leading role in the founding of the Azov battalion?

Apparently not. According to one study, based on information provided by Gonchar himself, “the Azov battalion was initiated on May 4, at a meeting with a member of Mariupol City Council Oleksandr Yaroshenko, an Automaidan activist Yaroslav Gonchar, an MP Oleh Lyashko, Spokesperson of the Social-National Assembly Ihor Mosiychuk and a modern Ukrainian nationalism ideologue Dmytro Korchynsky”.

The battalion itself is said to have been founded in Berdyansk on 5 May, with the veteran fascist and white supremacist Andriy Biletsky as its first commander. Biletsky and his gang of far-right thugs (then known as Patriot of Ukraine or the Social-National Assembly) had earlier been implicated in the killing of pro-Russian militants in Kharkiv, their city of origin, and these were the forces that formed the core of the early Azov battalion. Its first major military engagement was when it participated alongside government troops in the expulsion of separatists from Mariupol on 13 June, by which point Khazin was long gone.

When he achieved some prominence in the full-scale civil war that then broke out across Donbass, Khazin did so not as a member of the Azov battalion but as a leading figure in an aerial reconnaissance unit, in which capacity he was an enthusiastic advocate of the use of drones in the fight against separatist forces. He complained, it’s worth noting, that he got nowhere when he went back to Israel to appeal for help in developing that form of military technology in support of the Kyiv government. He accused Israel of selling drones to Moscow instead.

In an evident attempt to boost Israel’s role in these events, David Miller attached to his tweet a claim by Max Blumenthal that “Israel armed the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion throughout Ukraine’s war on the Donbas”. It’s true that objections were raised during 2018–19 over Israeli companies being granted export licences to sell arms to the Ukrainian government, some of which later ended up in Azov’s hands. The Azov regiment, as it became, was incorporated into the National Guard in November 2014 and fell under the authority of interior minster Arsen Avakov, who had established a close relationship with Azov’s leadership in the course of his earlier political and business activities in Kharkiv. He would have made sure his favoured regiment received their share of any weaponry supplied from abroad, whether by Israeli companies or US and European states (whose contributions to the arming of Ukraine have dwarfed anything from Israel). That is rather different from the Israeli government supplying arms directly to Azov, which is what Blumenthal appeared to suggest.

As for David Miller’s denunciation of disgraced oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky as a “Jewish supremacist”, I take this to be a reference to the latter’s involvement in the Hasidic movement Chabad-Lubavitch, about which David has developed something of an obsession. I can’t see what relevance that has to Kolomoisky’s past financial backing for Azov or Zelensky. Rather than an exercise in Jewish supremacism, his actions were typical of all Ukrainian oligarchs, irrespective of their ethnicity, who used their ill-gotten wealth to influence political and military developments. These days the 1st Azov Corps, and the 3rd Army Corps which is commanded by Azov’s original leader Andriy Biletsky, are both generously supported by multi-billionaire Rinat Akhmetov. Should we find significance in the fact that Akhmetov is ethnically a Volga Tatar?

People on the left really need to have a think before they share this sort of stuff from David Miller. It is reminiscent of traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories where the role of Jews is grossly exaggerated and they are accorded a controlling power that they don’t in fact have.

First published on Medium in November 2026