- May 6, 2026
- 12:50 pm
- World News
This story began in May in the Ukrainian south, particularly in Mariupol. And, as many of its heroes hope, it will return to this city someday. Whether it will be in May or some other month of the year — it doesn’t matter.
The beginning was not large-scale — in Kyiv, hardly a hundred people noticed it. But it started a long and in many ways indicative story for the country.
Now it continues on the hot front line near Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk, and some of its heroes are known even beyond Ukraine.
People in black
On May 5, 2014, in Berdyansk, by the decision of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the Azov patrol service battalion was created. Although initially, the name was somewhat different — Azovye.
In two days, pro-Russian militants fired at the battalion’s bus near Mariupol with automatic weapons. However, a dozen young guys in black uniforms inside fought back: one of the attackers was killed, and two more were captured. One of these latter was a certain Igor Khakimzyanov, the ‘commander of the DPR people’s army,’ who had previously disarmed part of the Ukrainian paratroopers.
It was from these people in black that Azov began — a battalion, a regiment, then a brigade, and eventually a corps.
At the start, the battalion gathered different people: about twenty Kyiv football ultras, a few similar fans from Cherkasy, four Lviv residents, and several participants of Euromaidan. ‘A very motley crowd,’ says now an officer of the 12th Azov National Guard Brigade with the call sign Spider, who was among the first Azov members. However, according to him, everyone wanted to protect their country: ‘There was also excitement — to prove to yourself that you can not just sit at home.’
Less than a month passed, and the battalion, which finally became Azov, played a key role in a real combat operation. Led by its ideologist and creator Andriy Biletsky, a Kharkiv resident, former political prisoner, and leader of the Patriot of Ukraine organization, the people in black joined the liberation of Mariupol from pro-Russian militants.
Former football fans, turned into lightly armed infantry, were ready for quick and decisive actions — three enemies were killed, 38 were detained. On the Ukrainian side, four were wounded, one of them seriously.
‘We came and did what was necessary — perhaps not understanding all the risks,’ recalls Spider. ‘But no one was afraid.’
New people constantly joined the battalion, and by mid-August, three companies were formed there, and they had about 50 fighters. They acquired the first equipment — a used MTP, a technical assistance vehicle based on a Soviet tracked armored personnel carrier from the 1950s. Then more powerful weapons appeared. And then, after several relatively small operations, most of Azov was sent by command to liberate Ilovaisk. Only six remained at the base.
‘We all sat every night, didn’t sleep, and we were sad — because we weren’t taken,’ recalls Spider. ‘The whole Azov left, and we just waved and went to the base.’
The battalion was withdrawn from Ilovaisk to Mariupol — just before the other Ukrainian units fighting in this area found themselves in a cauldron.
In the fall of 2014, Azov was incorporated into the National Guard and turned into a regiment. Then heavy positional battles began — Maryinka, to the west of Donetsk, and then Shyrokyne, a village to the east of Mariupol on the coast of the Sea of Azov.
The area near the latter became the front line for Azov for a long time.
Time of change
In the fall of 2014, Biletsky, unexpectedly for many, found himself in the Verkhovna Rada as a majoritarian deputy from one of the Kyiv districts.
‘I knew Andriy [Biletsky] in three roles: in 2014 as the commander of Azov, then a politician, and now the commander of the corps,’ said earlier Mykola Abdula Volokhov, a long-time comrade of the founder of Azov, ‘He shows himself best in war: it’s his element.’
However, Biletsky tried to regularly maintain a connection with his regiment, visited, communicated with the unit, raised problematic issues.
In March 2015, after the announcement of a ‘truce’ and the withdrawal of the unit from Shyrokyne to the second line, Azov organized a command-staff training course in Yurivka near Mariupol. Four instructors from the USA and Canada came to train the military.
‘The entire command staff of Azov — 44 people — was gathered for the course,’ Prokopenko himself later recounted, ‘After the course, we went with new knowledge for combat coordination at the training ground. Then the war in the format of ‘wall to wall’ and ‘crowd to crowd’ ended, and we understood that we urgently needed to become military from non-military people.’
Prokopenko himself headed Azov in July 2017. Thus, he became the youngest commander of such a unit in the history of the National Guard and the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
‘We were taught not by the Soviet system. It was easier for me with this — I simply didn’t know it,’ says Lieutenant Colonel Bohdan Gryshenkov, the current commander of the 12th Azov Brigade, who joined the unit as a soldier of the mortar platoon on May 8, 2015.
The unit introduced a sergeant school and officer courses. ‘The concept of a sergeant in Azov was sharply different from the army standard: not ‘some warrant officer who writes something off,’ but a leader who has a say and must have his opinion before the officer if there are contradictory moments,’ adds the Azov brigade commander.
With the arrival of Redis as commander, discipline became the defining characteristic of Azov. Prokopenko knew: to achieve significant success, the unit must constantly develop, improve. He focused his attention on this.
The new regiment commander also encouraged fighters, including by his own example, to engage in sports — physical training was always extremely important for Azov members.
And since those times, in Azov, the address to each other ‘friend’ instead of ‘sir’ has been in use — and even for Prokopenko, there are no exceptions in this matter.
Why were Azov members restricted? Because the Russians quite successfully created an image of neo-Nazis for them. This is how Azov was sometimes evaluated in the Western democratic press and establishment.
Biletsky himself denied any connection with Nazism and the use of Nazi symbols by Azov.
Many Azov members recalled that the official authorities for a long time limited the regiment’s development opportunities — it eventually gained recognition as part of the National Guard, subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but did not have access to heavy weapons and modern Western models of weapons.
Anton Shekhovtsov, a researcher of far-right movements, agrees that the Russian narrative about ‘Nazis’ blocked the supply of Western weapons to the unit for years — until June 2024, when Azov passed the US State Department’s check, and the Americans found no evidence of any violations in this area, so the ban was lifted. Meta had already earlier, in 2022, removed Azov’s online resources from the list of blocked organizations.
Vladyslav Docent Dutchak, a lieutenant of Azov and a doctor of philosophy, recalled that during interrogations in captivity, the Russians accused him of using ‘Nazi symbols’ because of the chevron. In response, he drew the attention of the guards to the fact that their hands were covered with tattoos of runes and the esoteric sign Black Sun, which was popular in the Third Reich. ‘The next time I was brought in for interrogation, the same guys had already rolled up their sleeves,’ Dutchak said. And he reminded that from the first days, Georgians, Armenians, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Belarusians served in Azov. ‘The only ideology a professional army can have is the protection of Ukraine’s statehood,’ the lieutenant explained.
In the end, in 2016-2017, two company-tactical groups of the regiment went on demonstration actions to the Transnistrian border — practicing counter-sabotage, setting up mobile checkpoints, conducting demonstration exercises. In 2019, Azov had its first combat deployment as part of the 30th mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the Svitlodarsk arc — its fighters spent nine months on positions. For the next two years, the regiment performed tasks as part of a sniper and counter-sniper group along the entire line of contact in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
In 2021, Gryshenkov, then already a company commander, went to Ocheretyne beyond Avdiivka — deploying combat orders, determining boundaries. There were exercises in the Luhansk region near the border with the Russian Federation. And along that road, the enemy advanced already in 2022, he adds.
The Great War
Before the full-scale invasion, Azov was responsible for the anti-landing defense of the coast from Zaporizhzhia region to Shyrokyne. And almost from the first hours of February 24, 2022, the regiment came under attack.
‘When I was driving [on the morning of February 24] from home on alert, I didn’t believe it was happening at all — until something big exploded near the location,’ Gryshenkov recalls.
And then the preparation mechanisms worked, and the regiment began to act according to pre-planned plans.
The main task was the defense of Mariupol — the city was held by 1.4 thousand Azov members together with the marines, border guards, and national guardsmen. A total of about 4-4.5 thousand fighters against the Russian group numbering 14-20 thousand. Street fighting continued for a month.
In March, the Russians closed the ring around Mariupol. Only one support route remained — by air. On March 21, two Mi-8 helicopters made the first successful flight to the Azovstal metallurgical plant — the last stronghold of the city’s defense: through 100-120 km of occupied territory, they delivered ammunition, evacuated nine wounded. Further flights continued — March 25, 27, 29, 31, and several more in April. During one of them, on March 31, the occupiers shot down an Mi-8 with the wounded. Three pilots and everyone on board died.
At the same time, Biletsky joined a risky operation planned by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and Azov veterans — an attempt to break through to Mariupol. Then a column of 20 pieces of equipment and paratroopers advanced 10-15 km deep into occupied lands towards the city but was stopped by heavy Russian shelling and eventually retreated.
‘There really was an attempt to deblockade,’ one of the high-ranking GUR employees said earlier on condition of anonymity, ‘But it was interrupted because the question arose not only of entering Mariupol, which was surrounded by the Russians, but also of exiting it. Because the exit was almost impossible.’
But the helicopters continued to fly. And people came to Azovstal with ammunition — Azov members who had long since left for civilian life: thus, more than fifty new ‘old’ fighters ended up at Azovstal.
Prokopenko commanded the defense of the entire Mariupol group — although formally it was not within his powers. ‘The man took responsibility for a large number of units. But Redis pulled it off,’ says Gryshenkov, ‘I am sure that we are alive only because Redis commanded us.’
On May 20, 2022, after 86 days of defense (82 of which were in encirclement), about 2.5 thousand defenders, among whom were more than 900 Azov members, left Azovstal by order of Volodymyr Zelensky through a humanitarian corridor agreed with the participation of the UN. And they were captured.
At that time, there were hundreds of wounded at Azovstal, including severe and immobile ones. This sharply narrowed the possibilities for any breakthrough and made the chances of exit minimal.
Olenivka
On the night of July 29, 2022, an explosion occurred in one of the barracks of the Olenivka correctional colony in the occupied territory of the Donetsk region. It was there that almost 200 captured Azov regiment contractors were held. 53 people died, more than 130 were injured.
‘I was sleeping on the top bunk. My fingers were torn off, shrapnel all over my body. And the person who was under me, friend August, burned. Just burned,’ Gryshenkov recalls.
He was released from captivity on September 21, 2022 — in exchange, after four months. ‘I consider that I got off with ‘light’ memories,’ the brigade commander explained, referring to those Azov members who are still in captivity.
At the same time, the Russians released Prokopenko along with other commanders of the Mariupol garrison and interned them in Turkey.
The Olenivka terrorist attack has not yet been officially investigated by international bodies — Russia blocked access to the site of the events for independent UN experts.
During the entire time of captivity, one hundred twenty-nine Azov members received fictitious sentences ‘for terrorism’ and terms of 15 to 20 years of imprisonment by decisions of ‘courts’ in the occupied territories.
After being released from captivity, Spider returned to the unit. Rehabilitation — and immediately service. The first thing he saw in the unit was a large formation on the parade ground on the ninth anniversary of the unit. ‘Wow, how they have grown. So everything is fine,’ he thought.
New era
At the end of 2022, Azov began to recover — again almost from scratch, but with a different experience.
For the counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, the unit went out as a battalion tactical group with one Soviet 122 mm D-30 howitzer. ‘In my company, the heaviest was [grenade launcher] RPG-7 and a machine gun,’ Gryshenkov says.
In July 2023, Prokopenko and other officers who were interned with him returned to their homeland from Turkey. And already in August, Azov was turned into a brigade, which at first, not yet having a full complement, was located on the Lyman direction, in the Serebryanske forestry. Then — gradual build-up with people and equipment.
On March 7, 2025, the 1st NGU Azov Corps was officially created as part of the National Guard, the basis of which was the eponymous 12th brigade — the very one that the regiment turned into.
The corps included four more brigades: Hurricane, Red Kalina, Kara-Dag, and Lyubart. Denys Prokopenko was appointed commander of the formation, who handed over command of the 12th to Gryshenkov.
In August 2025, the corps received a zone of responsibility on the Pokrovsk direction — exactly where the enemy made a breakthrough towards Dobropillia.
Military expert Oleksandr Kovalenko, who analyzed the structure of Azov in detail, formulates the main difference of the unit from most other formations as follows: in Azov, people are listened to. Not because it is written in the charter — it is ‘rooted’ in the culture of the unit. Therefore, a person with drone pilot skills will not be sent to storm a stronghold, just as a fighter who understands technology will not be. ‘What a person is drawn to, what he can do — that’s where he will be,’ the expert explains.
In most units of the Defense Forces, Kovalenko adds, the commander is a person who is ‘the smartest and knows everything.’ In Azov, according to him, there is no such thing.
The chief sergeant of the 12th brigade with the call sign Mactavish explains it simply: in Azov, commanders are not appointed — they are grown.
Also, the brigade created its own chorunzh service — only a few units of the Defense Forces can boast of such. It conducts ideological and psychological work, and also accompanies fighters everywhere. Even fallen Azov members remain in the field of view of the chorunzh: the service takes care of everything — burial logistics, document processing, the presence of a unit representative at the ceremony. And then helps the family.
It is this work that explains one of the lowest indicators of Azov for unauthorized leaving of the unit. ‘The unit must become stronger every day,’ Gryshenkov concludes the conversation.
This story, which began in Mariupol, continues to develop. And, as many hope, someday it will return to this city. Israel News — Israel News | Nikk.Agency
Source – nv.ua
NANews Israel News Nikk.Agency