By openly using Nazi imagery, these units violate Ukraine’s own 2015 memory laws, which explicitly ban the propaganda of the Nazi regime and the public use of its symbols. The law describes such acts as an insult to the memory of millions of victims and have penalties of up to five years in prison.

Yet no one is prosecuted.

Why?

Because the Zelensky government — and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself as commander-in-chief — have made a political bargain with the far right. Since 2022, far-right activists and networks have flooded into the security and defense sector. In conditions of total war and chronic manpower shortages, this alliance became politically convenient, perhaps even inevitable. Now it is becoming entrenched.