Whereas the official line of the US authorities is that Nazis don’t exist in Ukraine, a senior adviser at a significant Washington international coverage company has been overtly celebrating them.

Paul Massaro posted a photograph of a patch honoring WWII Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera on Wednesday – solely to delete it at a Polish good friend’s request – and final week posed subsequent to a signed flag of Azov, the infamous Ukrainian unit utilizing an SS image as its personal. The company Massaro works for is the US Helsinki Fee, formally often known as the Fee on Safety and Cooperation in Europe.

“Hey, look what I’ve received,” the grinning Massaro tweeted round 9:30 within the morning, displaying off his inexperienced pseudo-military jacket with a patch that learn “Bandera is our father, Ukraine is our mom.” It bore the embroidered visage of Bandera and the brand of his OUN-B group.

Lower than two hours and 270,000 views later, nevertheless, the tweet was gone. “Deleted on the request of Polish good friend. God bless Polish-Ukrainian friendship and will it stay sturdy perpetually,” Massaro defined.

The Polish drawback with Bandera is that his Ukrainian nationalists have been chargeable for the massacres of ethnic Poles in present-day western Ukraine, which Warsaw has deemed a genocide. 

Massaro’s official biography describes him as talking fluent German and protecting “German-speaking Europe and East Asia,” with no point out of Russian or Ukrainian. This has not stopped him from changing into probably the most outspoken champions of Ukrainian nationalism on-line, with day by day torrents of tweets demanding the West “cancel” or “decolonize” Russia, ban its athletes from all competitions, and take away Moscow from the UN Safety Council. 

“It arrived! Thanks, heroes. And congratulations on attaining the standing of brigade!” Massaro tweeted final Thursday, posing with a flag of Azov that was signed and devoted to him by the infamous neo-Nazi unit’s management. The publish was seen over three million occasions.

The wolfsangel on the banner is a German rune beforehand utilized by the SS panzer division ‘Das Reich’, which Azov founder Andrey Biletsky overtly boasted to American reporters of appropriating. The ADL considers it a “hate image” utilized by American neo-Nazis – although the group has not registered any protests about Massaro brandishing it in what seems to be his workplace. 

The US authorities thought of Azov a neo-Nazi and terrorist group simply 4 years in the past, passing a regulation in opposition to offering it with any support. That provision appears to have been quietly repealed, as Washington despatched over $100 billion price of cash, weapons and ammunition to Ukraine over the previous yr.

Arrange in 1976, the Helsinki Fee is run by 18 lawmakers – 9 from the Home, 9 from the Senate – and representatives of the Departments of Commerce, Protection, and State.

The transnational umbrella group established by the identical worldwide protocol, often known as OSCE, was charged with monitoring the “ceasefire” in Ukraine from 2015 to 2022. Nonetheless, it acquired criticism from the Donetsk Individuals’s Republic (DPR) for turning a blind eye to Ukrainian shelling of the Donbass.