It is 5 o’clock in the morning, Wednesday June 7, in a secret base in Zaporijia, and the night has just been consecrated, affirms Major Bohdan Krotevych, who is returning from the front, to “kill a lot of Russians”. He says goodbye to his driver, wakes the lieutenant who was sleeping in the office, and lights a cigarette. Major (nom de guerre “Tavr”) commands the 12e “Azov” Assault Brigade of the National Guard. He is accompanied by his deputy, Lieutenant Ilya Samoilenko (nom de guerre “Gandalf”). Both are survivors of the Siege of Mariupol (from February to May 2022) and, after the now famous episode of their fierce resistance in the Azovstal factory and their surrender to the Russian army, very trying months of captivity. Released in favor of an exchange of prisoners in the fall, they ensure the interim of Lieutenant-Colonel Denys Prokopenko and the leaders of Azov, also released but under house arrest in Turkey. As kyiv launches a new phase of the war against the Russian army, the Azov brigade announced on Friday June 9 that it had “advanced and took new positions”without giving details.
Even if he is, at this preliminary stage of the new battle against the Russian army, “impossible to assess the future success of the offensive, nor the extent of progress”the two officers at the head of the Azov brigade say “confident”. For Major Krotevych, the long-awaited Ukrainian operation of 2023 can, regardless of the extent of progress, only end in two ways: “Either it will be a real Russian defeat, and the end of the war will be near, or the losses will be such on each side that there will be a pause in the conflict. » His fear is that, despite“strong support” from allied countries, aid to Ukraine is still “insufficient to reconquer all the territory”in front of “a Russia that has the resources for a long war”.
Apart from the fact that after the battle of Mariupol they still count 1,150 of their fighters in captivity or missing, the Azov commanders currently face two challenges. The first is that their promotion to the rank of brigade has increased the unit from 1,500 to 7,000 men, and that a lot of freshly recruited soldiers have to be trained in a few months. The second is the image of Azov: originally a battalion of volunteers created in 2014 for the conflict in the Donbass in the form of a far-right paramilitary movement, and whose past was at the heart of the war of propaganda between Moscow and Kiev, Russia using Azov as a pretext to announce its desire to “denazification” from Ukraine.
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