MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th October, 2019) Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has visited the training center of the right-wing extremist group, Azov Battalion, in Mariupol, expressing support for the highly criticized group, Avakov has announced.
"In Mariupol, visited the ... mobile center of Azov, where they train fighters for offensive operations and conduct fire training with all available weapons ... This is one of the most professional and trained units," Avakov wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Earlier this month, a group of 40 House Democrats called on the US State Department to provide answers as to why it had not put the Azov Battalion on its list of Foreign Terror Organizations (FTO). It requested a response by November 4.
The Ukrainian government said last week that it was prepared to give the US Congress all the relevant information on the Azov Battalion.
Moscow has called on Washington to condemn the right-wing extremist trends in Ukraine. Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov told Sputnik last week that human rights organizations were yet to give an appropriate assessment of the neo-Nazi trends in Ukraine and that Russia expected the US to condemn any support of right-wing radical extremism in Ukraine.
The right-wing extremist Azov Battalion has been widely accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine's southeastern regions (Donbas), where local citizens have established the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, prompting a military response from Kiev.
