Watch: MSM Interview Covers Up Ukrainian Fighter’s Swastika Tattoo

In another embarrassing and revealing moment for Western mainstream media and its many puff pieces on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Regiment, Canadian national broadcaster CBC has aired a news report this week from “an elite training facility” of its 3rd Assault Brigade in Kiev, featuring a fighter with a swastika tattoo on his arm.

The footage, released Thursday, blurred out the swastika tattoo of one of the main military trainers interviewed, but failed to do so in the video’s YouTube thumbnail. Comments were turned off, with a note attached in the YouTube description which reads: “A tattoo of an offensive symbol has been blurred in this video.” Watch (officer with tattoo starts at :16 mark)

It was in June 2024 that the US State Department first announced that it had lifted its longtime ban on giving weapons and training to Ukraine’s notorious Azov Brigade (often referenced by its earlier name Azov Battalion).

Since then, efforts to normalize Azov—which mainstream media had long ago grudgingly admitted was full of “neo-Nazi ideology”—have only grown.

The group’s members have never been shy about sporting Nazi-inspired tattoos and patches. Ultimately, they haven’t changed, only their Western supporters’ perceptions of them have. 

The blurred out tattoo in question from the CBC footage:

Ukrainian scholar and historian, Dr. Marta Havryshko has on many occasions slammed Western media attempts to whitewash the extremist militia group. For example she once wrote:

“Azov changed” – the mantra of many liberal and progressive public in the West, who, after 24 Feb. 2022, demonstrate sympathy toward the Azov movement, whitewashing its past, justifying its present, and showing no concerns about its future.

Just this month, Ukraine’s President Zelensky promoted Azov’s founder, Andriy Biletsky, to the rank of Brigadier General, amid these efforts to downplay or cover up the group’s clear neo-Nazi ideology.