The New York Times has found another neo-Nazi militia to fawn over in Ukraine. The Bratstvo battalion “gave access to the New York Times to report on two recent riverine operations,” which culminated in a piece (11/21/22) headlined “On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians.”
New York Times (11/21/22): “The Bratstvo battalion has undertaken some of the conflict’s most difficult missions, conducting forward spotting and sabotage along the front lines.”
Since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, establishment media have either minimized the far-right ideology that guides many Ukrainian nationalist detachments or ignored it completely.
Anti-war outlets, including FAIR (1/28/22, 3/22/22), have repeatedly highlighted this dynamic—particularly regarding corporate media’s lionization of the Azov battalion, once widely recognized by Western media as a fascist militia, now sold to the public as a reformed far-right group that gallantly defends the sovereignty of a democratic Ukraine (New York Times, 10/4/22; FAIR.org, 10/6/22).
That is when Azov’s political orientation is discussed at all, which has become less and less common since Russia launched its invasion in February.
‘Christian Taliban’
“We need to create something like a Christian Taliban,” Dmytro Korchynsky told the Intercept (3/18/15). “The Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan.”
The lesser-known Bratstvo battalion, within which the Times embedded its reporters, is driven by several far-right currents—none of which are mentioned in the article.
Bratstvo was founded as a political organization in 2004 by Dmytro Korchynsky, who previously led the far-right Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).
Korchynsky, who now fights in Bratstvo’s paramilitary wing, is a Holocaust denier who falsely blamed Jews for the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, and peddled the lie that “120,000 Jews fought in the Wehrmacht.” He has stated that he sees Bratstvo as a “Christian Taliban” (Intercept, 3/18/15).
In the 1980s, the Times portrayed the religious extremists of the Afghan mujahideen—who were receiving US training and arms—as a heroic bulwark against Soviet expansionism. We all know how that worked out.
In an echo of that propaganda campaign, the Times neglected to tell its readers about the neo-Nazi and theocratic politics of the Bratstvo battalion. Why should anyone care who else Bratstvo members would like to see dead, so long as they’re operating in furtherance of US policymakers’ stated aim of weakening Russia?
Modern-day crusade
The article’s author, Carlotta Gall, recounted Bratstvo’s Russian-fighting exploits in quasi-religious terms. Indeed, the only instances in which the Times even hinted at the unit’s guiding ideology came in the form of mythologizing the unit’s Christian devotion.
Of Bratstvo fighters embarking on a mission, Gall wrote, “They recited a prayer together, then loaded up the narrow rubber dinghies and set out, hunched silent figures in the dark.” Referring to battalion commander Oleksiy Serediuk’s wife, who also fights with the unit, Gall extolled, “She has gained an almost mythical renown for surviving close combat with Russian troops.”
The piece even featured a photograph showing militia members gathered in prayer. Evoking the notion of pious soldiers rather than that of a “Christian Taliban,” the caption read, “Members of the Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit prayed together before going on a night operation.”
The Times also gave voice to some of the loftier aims of Bratstvo’s crusade, quoting Serediuk’s musing that, “We all dream about going to Chechnya, and the Kremlin, and as far as the Ural Mountains.” Nazi racial ideologues have long been enamored by the prospect of reaching the Urals, which they view as the natural barrier separating European culture from the Asiatic hordes.
While plotting Operation Barbarossa, Hitler identified the Urals as the eastern extent of the Wehrmacht’s planned advance. In 1943, referring to the Nazi scheme that aimed to rid European Russia of Asiatic “untermenschen” so the land could be settled by hundreds of millions of white Europeans, Himmler declared, “We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.”
‘Mindset of the 13th century’
Bratstvo commander Oleksiy Serediuk explained to Al Jazeera (4/15/15): “I left the Azov because it was full of pagans. Committed Christians in the Azov were not allowed to stop to pray throughout the day.”
The only two Bratstvo members named in the piece, meanwhile, are Serediuk and Vitaliy Chorny. While Chorny—who the Times identified as the battalion’s head of intelligence gathering—is quoted, his statements are limited to descriptions of the unit’s fighting strategy. Serediuk’s recorded utterances are similarly lacking in substance.
Far more illuminating is an Al Jazeera article (4/15/15) titled “‘Christian Taliban’s’ Crusade on Ukraine’s Front Lines,” which quotes both Serediuk and Chorny extensively. Serediuk, Al Jazeera reported, “revels in the Christian Taliban label.” In reference to his decision to leave the Azov battalion, the piece went on to say:
Serediuk didn’t leave the Azov because of the neo-Nazi connections, however—extreme-right ideology doesn’t bother him. What does irk him, however, is being around fighters who are not zealous in their religious convictions.
In the same piece, Chorny invoked the violently antisemitic Crusades of the Middle Ages to describe Bratstvo’s ideological foundation:
The enemy—the forces of darkness—they have all the weapons, they have greater numbers, they have money. But our soldiers are the bringers of European traditions and the Christian mindset of the 13th century.
To circumvent the Times’ exultant narrative, one has to do a certain amount of supplementary research and analysis. But even the most basic inquiry—searching “Bratstvo battalion” on Google—reveals the far-right underpinnings of the unit with which the Times embedded its reporters.
The seventh search result is a June 2022 study from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which reported, “Another such far-right entity is the so-called Brotherhood (Bratstvo) ‘battalion,’ which includes Belarusian, Danish, Irish and Canadian members.”
The ninth result is an article from the Washington Free Beacon (4/6/22), which quoted a far-right Canadian volunteer as saying on Telegram that he was “fighting in the neo-Nazi ‘Bratstvo’ Battalion in Kyiv.”
SS memorabilia
The New York Times (11/21/22) captioned this photo, “Members of the Bratstvo battalion’s special forces unit prayed together before going on a night operation.”
In a world where journalists actually practiced what they preached, someone at the paper of record surely would have noticed the Nazi insignia appearing in two photos in the piece. In this world, however, the Times either forgot how to use the zoom function—though the paper made extensive use of this capability when reporting on China’s Communist Party Congress the month before (FAIR.org, 11/11/22)—or they simply did not want to report on this ugly and inconvenient discovery.
Totenkopf insignia worn by Bratstvo member in photo above.
One soldier is seen wearing an emblem known as a “Totenkopf” in a photo of Bratstvo’s prayer circle. The Totenkopf, which means “death’s head” in German, was used as an insignia by the Totenkopfverbande—an SS unit that participated in Hitler’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, and guarded the concentration camps where Nazi Germany condemned millions of Jewish men, women and children to death.
Totenkopf emblem on eBay.
Individuals donning the Totenkopf also took part in the murder of millions of others in these camps, including Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, trade unionists, persons with disabilities, homosexuals and Romani people.
In September, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted—and then quietly deleted—a picture on social media of himself with a number of soldiers, one of whom was wearing a Totenkopf patch similar to that seen in the Times’ photo of Bratstvo’s prayer meeting. One can easily find this particular iteration on Amazon or eBay.
The New York Times described this photo as ““
The Totenkopf insignia can also be seen in this photo.
Later in the Times article, another photograph of a soldier wearing a slightly different version of the insignia appeared. Here, bathed in the light of an interior room and staring out from the very center of the image, the Totenkopf is even harder to miss. Amazon’s product description for this specific variant reads, “This gorgeous replica piece takes you back to World War II.”
Amazon promises that “this gorgeous replica piece takes you back to World War II.”
If the Times simply failed to identify the Totenkopf in two separate photos—both of which were taken by a Times photographer while he was embedded with Bratstvo, and were then featured prominently in the article—that would certainly amount to a journalistic failure.
The alternative scenario is that the Times did recognize the SS memorabilia worn by the soldiers they chose to embed with, and decided to publish the images anyway without commenting on the matter.
ACTION:
Please remind the New York Times to clearly identify neo-Nazi forces when they appear in coverage, and to refrain from depicting such movements as heroes.
CONTACT:
Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Readers Center: Feedback
Twitter: @NYTimes
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
“[since 2014] establishment media have either minimized the far-right ideology that guides many Ukrainian nationalist detachments or ignored it completely”… Next sentence: “…the Azov battalion, once widely recognized by Western media as a fascist militia…”
The Western media did quite widely report on the fascist problem of Ukraine in the years after the 2014 coup. It was only after the invasion in February that it chose to pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s a disturbing and well-sourced piece by the Jewish Ukrainian writer Lev Golinkin published in mainstream site The Nation on 22 February 2019, entitled ‘Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are on the March in Ukraine’; there are numerous others along the same lines in a variety of publications.
What is fascism? By today’s definition of the term, all of US history was ‘fascism’, and Israel certainly is ‘fascist’.
If ‘fascism’ is about racial supremacism, how is the US not ‘fascist’ when it supports the Jewish Supremacist state of Israel that practices open apartheid in West Bank? Indeed, Israel was created over Palestine in a Zionist Lebensraum plan.
And the US was created by genociding the natives. So, isn’t the US ‘fascist’?
By pretty much any definition, the U.S. is and has long been fascist.
“Apartheid’ is a well-worn slur without teeth . I saw Arab doctors and nurses at Hadassah hospital treating Arabs and Jews in random order with no distinction as to ethnicity. Arab Muslims can walk the streets of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem without fanfare. Try putting on a yarmulke and walking in downtown Cairo, Riyadh or Damascus. They’d be playing with your head for soccer before you reached the end of the block.
Fine. When Israel grants full citizenship to ALL the people of Palestine, I’ll believe it’s not an apartheid state.
Not surprisingly, the gratuitous Jew hating comments are bubbling up fast and furious here. Question; are the above commentators associated with and/or supporting Trump, Kanye, along with Nick Fuentes ? Did these commentators dine with them the other night and the MSM didn’t report on that too ?? Line them up people, let’s hear about some more anti-Jewish conspiracies.
“Lazar Kaganovich was the head of Ukraine, and he felt zero sympathy for starving Ukrainians” is asserted with no evidence, along with a claim that implies Jewish people are inherently cruel. You also imply that being a Bolshevik is not, as it should be, a badge of honour.
The militia that prays together slays together
Stalin was not Jewish. In fact, he managed to execute almost all of the leading bolsheviks, a lot of whom were Jewish. He also embarked on the disastrous forced collectivization that led to the famine in Ukraine. One payback by the people hit by this man-made humanitarian disaster was the well documented joining of masses of Ukrainians to Hitler’s Wehrmacht after operation Barbarossa. A large fraction of German troops who surrendered at Stalingrad were Ukrainians. Much to the chagrin of both Hitler and Stalin.
Solid story which will go unappreciated by the Russian trolls, Jew haters and the small but active college kids here on FAIR.ORG.
So, let me get this straight: only the people YOU like can be patriotic?
Hi,
On that last photograph you missed, the symbol of the Galizian SS to the right of the ones you zoomed in on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)#/media/File:Dyvizia_Galychyna-rukav.svg
I like your article as far as uncovering the Ukr NAZI dirt. Sadly, I don’t think it is very well presented and leaves the reader with a sense of ‘not really sure’. Not that I need convincing.
Although the fact, that in all mainstream scholarship (as far as I am aware sic) the Jews up to 1949 at least, are always completely innocent of all wrongdoings, is seemingly outside the scope of your article didn’t stop you from making a passing effort to tacitly affirm, or at least not challenge this trope and a logical improbability in any way. I know it may sound harsh, and come across as victimising the victim, but nonetheless I feel this is a conversation that will have to be had in the interests of historical truth. ADL’s power first needs to go, and it will once it’s plain for all and not only the discerning few, that they are racist and corrupt to the core. So, it being outside of the scope of your article, I feel it would’ve been an improvement if you had at least included Slavs in the list of victims of the concentration camps, let alone Orthodox Christians i.e. Serbs or Russians, or Orthodox Ukrainians for that matter, who were being exterminated to the point of genocide by the NAZIs, Banderists and Ustaše under Ante Pavelić.
This combination of notions where -Jews are the only worthy victims-, and, -are always completely innocent-, a calming pill, is increasingly irritating and is ultimately untenable, not to mention how it encourages anti-semitic sentiment among multitudes of less discerning.
This was the email I sent to them. I also sent the same one to the reporter who wrote that wretched piece, Carlotta Gall via this contact form: https://www.nytimes.com/svc/int/functions/contact-reporter
To the New York Times,
My name is Amrit and I am emailing you today about this wretched article y’all wrote by Carlotta Gall while she was embedded with members of a Ukrainian Nazi militia, the Bratstvo battalion titled ‘On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians’.
FAIR.org has written an article in response highlighting the Nazi ideology of this battalion you had reporters embedded in for your Nazi propaganda piece.
https://fair.org/home/action-alert-nyt-has-found-new-neo-nazi-troops-to-lionize-in-ukraine/
I’d like to remind you and your reporters to clearly identify neo-Nazi forces when they appear in coverage and to refrain from depicting such movements as heroes.
Thank you