This summer, Ukraine’s high command gambled by redeploying the recently created 1st Azov Corps, a special forces unit comprising five brigades including the elite Azov Brigade, to the vicinity of the embattled city of Pokrovsk, just north of occupied Donetsk. There, Russian troops, grinding forward, had managed to partially break through Ukrainian defenses, advancing to a handful of miles short of the strategic Dobropillia-Kramatorsk highway.
Over five weeks of fierce ground battle in August and September, the Azov Corps—the first of 18 such corps formed as part of an armed forces-wide overhaul—and regular Ukrainian army units turned back the Russian advance and recaptured six villages and significant territory. “Ukraine’s armed forces rely on Azov and its offshoots as an emergency force when things get really bad,” Ukraine expert Andreas Umland said. “They have the reputation as being the best, the most well trained and well equipped.”
It was once burdened by a quite different reputation. The Azov unit was founded as a volunteer militia in 2014 by a smorgasbord of fringe right-wing radicals. Shortly afterward, it became part of the National Guard, a force within the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Azov became widely identified with its early association with far-right parties and figures dogged it, exacerbated by Russian propaganda charging that history as evidence that Ukraine is a country of neo-Nazis threatening Russian-speakers in Ukraine with “genocide.”
The commanders of Azov’s earliest iterations did hold “manifestly fascist views,” according to a paper Umland wrote in 2019. But by late 2016, said Vyacheslav Likhachev of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, the brigade had shed any vestiges of political extremism to become a “normal Ukrainian unit, just like any other, political only in the sense that it is committed to the constitution of Ukraine.”
Last summer, a U.S. congressional investigation found that the Azov Brigade was not responsible for human rights violations or xenophobia—enabling it, finally, to access U.S. military technology. Until then, it had raised its own funds, as it does again today in light of shifting U.S. policy.
Today, Azov’s image and personnel are completely different, and the unit even boasts about its Jewish and Muslim fighters on its webpage, Umland said. Its members are best described as “militant patriots,” he added.
The unit’s reorganization according to NATO military standards—conducted internally using downloaded manuals, not by foreign instructors—and its heavy reliance on noncommissioned officers made it extremely battle-ready come the full-scale invasion, according to the Post. “Our commanders don’t come straight from academies,” an Azov officer told journalist David Kirichenko in January. “They rise through the ranks on the battlefield.”
After bruising spring and early summer stretches on the battlefield this year, the high-profile success of the Azov Corps is positive testament to the Ukrainian military’s long-anticipated and still-in-progress restructuring: from a sprawling military of about 100 brigades to a more tightly packed corps system designed to optimize command and control of its forces. Military personnel and experts told the Kyiv Post that “the current corps within the defense forces are a qualitatively new phenomenon.”
Critics had long charged that as Ukraine’s armed forces ballooned in size, the military’s diffuse organization was responsible for poor coordination—and was costing Ukraine dearly. “What we have now,” Andriy Kharuk, a historian and lecturer at Ukraine’s Land Forces Academy, told the Post in April, “is a ‘vinaigrette’ of different brigades and so-called ‘attached units’ that are shuffled back and forth, often losing coordination. The corps is a holistic structure.”
“The restructuring was absolutely evident in the [Pokrovsk and Dobropillia] operations,” said officer of the 1st Azov Corps, who wished to remain anonymous. “Interoperability became much higher, the level of operational capacity more clear.”
The Azov forces were deemed best suited to kick off the reforms—and to serve as a model—because of their competent “new school” personnel and combat experience. The reforms have put the brigade’s leadership, namely Col. Denys Prokopenko, in charge of the corps as a whole, whose members number 40,000 to 80,000. Most of the brigade’s officers are in the corps leadership, too.
The Azov Brigade advertises widely in Ukrainian cities to attract recruits and is the unit of choice for many highly educated young people. It even turns many applicants away. The brigade, which contains no conscripted troops, includes an international battalion—Interbat—with soldiers from the United States, the United Kingdom, European Union countries, and elsewhere and a webpage in English for prospective recruits. If applicants meet its requirements and are tapped, they can become members in two to six weeks.
In late spring, the Azov Brigade, a special forces unit of the National Guard, was selected as among the first brigades to participate in the military’s makeover.
The brigade, formerly based in Mariupol in the coastal region of the Sea of Azov, boasts fabled status in Ukraine as a symbol of patriotic resilience and resistance. In 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, the company, at the time called the Azov Regiment, played a key role in Mariupol’s liberation from Russian occupiers. And in 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Azov defended the city tenaciously while surrounded on all sides and more than 60 miles behind enemy lines.
In May 2022, during the Siege of Mariupol—a 86-day defense of the city—Azov fighters and Ukrainian soldiers eventually surrendered the Azovstal steel plant, Ukraine’s last stronghold in the city, under orders from President Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia captured more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers and still today holds several hundred of them. The region remains under Russian control.
Since then, the brigade has fought extensively in the Donbas region and participated in the protracted Battle of Bakhmut, as well as in operations in and around Zaporizhzhia, Kreminna, Terny, and Toretsk.
Today, the extreme right is visible nowhere in Ukraine. In the last elections, in 2019, a bloc of far-right parties received just over 2 percent of the vote.
When the war ends and Ukraine again hosts a dynamic multiparty democracy, experts such as Likhachev and Umland expect that a far right will resurface, along the lines of those in Western Europe—though very unlike that which defines the ruling ideology in Russia. Until then, the trajectory of the Azov Brigade ultimately speaks for Ukraine, not against it.
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