Today we’ll be looking at Ukraine’s best contender for becoming the local equivalent of Syria’s Ahmed Al-Sharaa. And if the Syrian hailed today by the western press as an ‘apolitical technocrat’ had a colorful life in Al-Queda and the Al-Nusra front, today’s hero had just as much fun attacking Vietnamese migrants and mourning the epidemic of suicides among his organizational competitors.

Today’s man is the western press’s new hero — Andriy Biletsky, commander of the Third Army Corps, formerly known as the Third Assault Battalion. The greatest units of the Ukrainian army and possibly the world, if we are to believe the western and Ukrainian press. Biletsky is leader of the Azov family, which spans countless civilian paramilitary organizations and numerous frontline military units.

According to the Times, Biletsky represents the new generation of patriotic commanders, rising up against the corrupt soviet generals. And in September 2025, Biletsky himself became a brigadier general. A man who never received formal military training, I might add.

But Biletsky has another title – the White Fuhrer.

In a 2016 interview, Biletsky promised to beat anyone who used this nickname for him, but also admitted that his alias in the nationalist underground was ‘White’. Go figure.

Today, we’re going to take a look at Mr Biletsky’s political biography, going to where it all began, long before the 2014 emergence of Azov.

Just who is Biletsky? Nowadays, he is presented simply as a neutral ‘war-fighter’ with a nationalist past. But in reality, Biletsky is an entirely political animal. It is only in 2025 that he donned the mask of a technocratic military genius, the image most in demand by the endless western and Ukrainian liberal publications doting on him.

The Times claims he ‘learnt to scrap with pro-Russian demonstrators on the streets of his home town, Kharkiv’. He certainly did ‘scrap with’ (kill) such people in 2014 — but in fact, Biletsky learned to scrap in his home town far earlier, and with rather different opponents. Not ‘pro-Russian demonstrators’, but Vietnamese migrants and opposing ultranationalist groups.

And Biletsky, it should be understood, never really distinguished himself by some sort of special commitment to ‘Ukrainian nationalism’.

In fact, he broke with the reigning west Ukrainian provincial nationalism by arguing that ‘biological’ race, not language, was what really mattered. Using the Russian or Ukrainian language doesn’t matter, being white does.

And instead of blind obedience to ‘euro-atlantic civilization’, Biletsky in fact thunderously criticized NATO for bombing the Slavic Yugoslavia, and the EU for proposing to send non-white migrants to Ukraine. And where the old, mainstream west Ukrainian nationalists focused on combating atheism and pro-Russian Orthodoxy, Biletsky and his band of brothers were baptizing their children through pagan rituals.

In Ukraine, the vast array of fanatically neo-nazi military and paramilitary groups idolize Biletsky as a political leader above all else. Where other rightwing leaders like the recently killed Andriy Parubiy melted into the liberal mainstream, Biletsky has steadfastly maintained an independent, militantly rightwing political force for over two decades.

They have reason to respect him, to die for him. As the last post by Azov’s youth paramilitary wing Centuria says, the story goes back far into past. It was in 2005 that Biletsky broke with the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, led by the recently deceased Andriy Parubiy, for joining hands with Ukraine’s liberals.

So today, we’ll be examining how Biletsky earned his political reputation – the man who decided that the reigning Ukrainian nationalist organizations simply weren’t racialist enough, that they had sold out to the ‘NATO demo-liberal consensus’ (his quote). We’re going back to the years 1999 to 2008, to Biletsky’s hometown, the eastern ‘second capital’ of Ukraine, Kharkov.

The Social Nationalists went lib

But before that, we need to take a look at Ukraine’s reigning nationalist milieu, the space from which Biletsky eventually violently broke away.

Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, nationalism was of course centered in the western regions of Ukraine. It was these three regions – the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Volhyn oblasts – that alone voted against the preservation of the Soviet Union in 1991.