Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Ukraine's Neo-Nazis Won't Get U.S. Money

What happens to the far-right militia when this round of fighting ends?

June 12, 2015 at 2:41 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Repellent nostalgia.
Photographer: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

It's easy to see why Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, would have a problem with the military unit commanded by Ukrainian legislator Andriy Biletsky: Conyers is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Biletsky is a white supremacist.

The House of Representatives has unanimously approved an amendment to the U.S. military budget, proposed by Conyers and Florida Republican Ted Yoho, banning support and training for "the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary militia 'Azov Battalion.'" Azov was set up in May 2014 to fight pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Here's how the group's Facebook page describes the circumstances: