Another step in US backing for Kyiv came on Tuesday when the State Department announced that the Azov Brigade could officially employ US weaponry against Russia.
The mayor of Kharkiv, meantime, has hailed the move to allow Ukraine to use Western weapons to launch an attack inside Russian territory as providing some “calm” to the beleaguered city.
On Tuesday, however, Russia claimed to have taken control of two villages in Ukraine: one in the Russian-occupied regions of Luhansk Oblast and one in the Kharkiv Oblast.
Part of Ukraine’s National Guard, the far-right and ultra-nationalist Azov Brigade sprang from a battalion that fought during Russia’s ten-year annexation of Crimea.
However, the US has prohibited the regiment from utilizing US weapons in 2014 due to the founders’ neo-Nazi views.
Now, the State Department claims to have discovered “no evidence” of flagrant violations or abuses of human rights by the Azov Brigade, which was reorganized as the 12th Special Forces Brigade and integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
Although the group’s current members deny any affiliation with the far-right, Russia has classified them as terrorists despite their claims to be a “ultranationalist armed formation”.
