Nazi appearance and Nazi essence

Last summer I published an article entitled “Nazi insignia on Ukrainian soldiers in Kursk region”, but I think that now this issue needs to be considered in a more general way.

It goes without saying that the use of Nazi symbols and Nazi salutes in the Ukrainian army greatly harms Ukraine's reputation among its Western partners.

For example, this summer Le Monde - one of the most influential newspapers in France - published on its website its own investigation about the 3rd Special Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, created on the basis of the Azov territorial defense units.

French journalists reported that the soldiers of this brigade openly publish their photographs with Nazi symbols and Nazi salutes on social networks (at the beginning of the article, there are two images from a documentary film shot by the journalists).

This documentary is also available on YouTube, but the editorial staff of Le Monde has prohibited the embedding of this documentary in blogs and forums, so those interested can watch it on the official channel of this newspaper by going to YouTube.

The French write on their website:

Des saluts nazis ... des emblèmes de la SS… La cellule d’enquête vidéo du Monde en a identifié plusieurs centaines, arborés par des centaines de soldats ukrainiens sur les réseaux sociaux. Parmi les 350 soldats repérés, 200 membres de la 3e brigade d’assaut, l’une des unités fer de lance de l’armée ukrainienne.

Nazi salutes… SS emblems… Le Monde’s video investigations unit has found hundreds of cases of Ukrainian soldiers posting such things on social media. Of the 350 soldiers identified, 200 are from the 3rd Assault Brigade, one of the most well-known units in the Ukrainian army.

French journalists were particularly outraged by the Ukrainian military's use of a mirror-image emblem of the SS division Das Reich (see below the left image from the documentary), since it was soldiers from this division who, in June 1944, murdered 643 civilians in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, which was the largest massacre of civilians in France during World War II.

The general conclusion of the above material in Le Monde was:

And we arm such people with French weapons and train them at military bases in France!

The use of Nazi elements in the armed forces of post-Maidan Ukraine has a long history; see below pictures and video taken by reporters from the German state television channel ZDF back in 2014.

Why, after so many years, despite the laws passed in Ukraine banning Nazi symbols, do these symbols and these salutes continue to be openly used in the Ukrainian army to this day?

To answer this question, in my opinion, we need to remember the philosophical principle of the unity of essence and form, which states that essence plays a decisive, leading role in relation to form.

The current Ukrainian state carefully hides its Nazi essence behind slogans about European values, but this carefully hidden Nazi essence has come out, is coming out and will come out to the surface, in particular, manifesting itself in the open use of Nazi symbols and Nazi salutes in such a Ukrainian state structure as the Armed Forces of Ukraine .

The current Ukrainian state simply cannot exist any other way.