A regiment in Ukraine's military was founded by white supremacists. Now it's battling Russia on the front lines.

Last week, the official Twitter account for the National Guard of Ukraine shared a video apparently showing soldiers from Ukraine's Azov Regiment dipping their bullets into pig fat before battle.

One soldier in the video says “Dear Muslim brothers, in our country, you will not go to heaven.”

The video, which is aimed at predominantly Muslim Chechen fighters in Russia's invasion force, spotlights an uncomfortable truth for Ukraine's military: The front-line Azov Regiment was founded eight years ago by extremist right-wing militants, including avowed neo-Nazis. It has long served as an inspiration for U.S.-based right-wing extremists and white supremacists, some of whom traveled to Ukraine for training and combat experience.

Twitter quickly placed a warning label on the tweet saying that it violated rules about hateful conduct but that Twitter had “determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

The history of the Azov Regiment, which is part of a larger political movement, is an awkward backstory in the country's extraordinary defense of the Russian invasion.

“The Azov Regiment is definitely a nasty crew,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “They’ve had a high neo-Nazi presence, there’s documented antisemitism.”

But Beirich and other experts were quick to point out that Russia itself is home to paramilitary organizations founded on white supremacist and fascist ideals. Prominent modern American racists have been quick to praise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, admiringly comparing Putin to Hitler and cheering on his “anti-woke” agenda. Russia’s white supremacist factions are at least as significant as that of Ukraine, several experts said.

And those experts said there are also signs the Azov regiment has shed some of its troubled past, moving away from at least overt support for the white supremacy its founders believed in.

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The 'de-Nazification' myth

In a speech announcing the attack on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he aims to “de-Nazify” the country.

On its face, the statement was baffling. Ukraine, a sovereign democratic nation led by a Jewish president whose family was almost wiped out in the Holocaust, is categorically not, as Putin would like people to believe, beholden to neo-Nazis, according to several experts and political scientists who spoke with USA TODAY.

The Azov Regiment is part of Ukraine's broader "Azov Movement," which has at its core white supremacist and antisemitic philosophy. But the extremist-right commands support from at best perhaps 2% of the Ukrainian electorate, according to one prominent political scientist.

Compared with other countries in Eastern and even Western Europe, Ukraine's neo-Nazi problem is a fringe issue, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, CEO of Valens Global, an international strategy and security company.

Gartenstein-Ross said there’s a huge difference between a regiment with a checkered history playing a minor part on the battlefield and the notion that Ukraine is somehow overrun by neo-Nazis, as Putin has long pretended.

“The small, marginal presence of Azov does not justify a Russian invasion, on the pretense of de-Nazification,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

A regiment with its roots in hate, ultra-nationalism

The Azov Regiment was born in 2014 as a volunteer battalion that trained along the coast of the Sea of Azov in southeastern Ukraine, from which the group gets its name.

What began as a ragtag crew of fewer than 100 fighters grew into a formidable paramilitary force in and around the city of Mariupol, as described by journalist Michael Colborne in his book “From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right.” The Azov Regiment was officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard in November 2014 after several battles against pro-Russian forces in Southeastern Ukraine.

Colborne describes the nascent battalion as “a significant number of individuals from Ukraine’s far-right football hooligan scene, estimated from 50 percent to 65 percent of Azov’s fighters at the time. Other fighters included open neo-Nazis from foreign countries, especially Russia.”

As the Azov Regiment assimilated into Ukraine’s National Guard, some of its most infamous leaders left to create the Azov Civil Corps, later the National Corps.Gartenstein-Ross said the regiment seems to have eschewed some of its most extremist elements in the intervening years. “I'm not saying that it's reformed, but it actually became part of the state military,” he said. “I put a question mark there, giving some possibility that the Azov regiment has changed in cognizable ways.”

Vyacheslav Likhachev, a member of the Expert Council of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, scoffed at the idea that the Azov regiment still has neo-Nazi leanings, calling it “stupid” and “outdated”.

Likhachev said he personally knows an anarchist who served with Azov, as well as two Jewish people who joined the regiment. The hard-liners who founded the Azov Regiment have moved on to politics, where they continue to espouse homophobia and far-right nationalism, but even they have moved on from white supremacist talking points, he said.

Asked about the numerous visits from European and U.S. white supremacists and neo-Nazis to the Azov Regiment, Likhachev acknowledged that, for a while, the regiment was considered “a free space paradise for neo-Nazis from all over the world,” but he said reports that those neo-Nazi war tourists were ever active in Azov were overblown.

“Those who came under the illusion that they will be Azov fighters, they mostly spent some time here in Ukraine and, if they were lucky they made some photos with weapons which they took in their hands for five minutes,” Likhachev said. “Then they drank some good and cheap Ukrainian beer and went back home.”

‘They’re the tough guys’

Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies who has studied the Azov movement, said it is wrong to categorize the regiment as still a “Neo-Nazi regiment.”

Certainly, there are still white supremacists and far-right extremists present in Azov, he said, but in recent years the military wing of the movement has moved away from open support of fascism.

The presence of the Azov regiment in the Ukrainian military has long represented a practical dilemma for the Ukrainian government, Umland said. The regiment has built a reputation as a force capable of protecting the public from adversaries.

“People sign up because these are the tough guys,” Umland said.

Umland also pointed out an uncomfortable truth: In times of war, a country needs soldiers who will do battle against their enemies, and often the most willing people to fight on the front lines are ultranationalists schooled in jingoistic pride.

“If you’re going to fight a war, who is going to fight it? For war, you need a certain type of people,” he said. “The people who are willing to do that are the ultranationalists.“

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Russia's invasion of Ukraine draws attention to extremist regiment