“French, French, today Ukraine is suffering criminal aggression from the Russian invader. […] I invite you to join the ranks of our brave and courageous warriors of the Azov regiment,” we can read on the page of a website called azov-france.fr, which presents this quote alongside a photomontage representing the president Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky against the background of a French flag.
The site presents itself as an official platform of the Azov regiment, attached to the Ukrainian National Guard, known for its proximity to the ultra-nationalism and neo-Nazi ideology of some of its leaders.
“Choose the side of good, join the Azov regiment”: azov-france.fr presents itself as nothing more than a recruitment portal for French fighters for the Ukrainian regiment.
The online platform includes a recruitment form, where Internet users are invited to provide name, first name, telephone number, email address, postal address, to indicate their skills and whether they have military training, and finally to justify their desire to join the ranks of the regiment.
On the home page, the “We are recruiting” section gives more details on the profiles that would be sought: “volunteers to join the combat units of Azov”, “military doctors” and “volunteers to join the support and supply service of the Azov regiment”.
A site which displays the appearance and official content of the regiment
All the design and content of the site are designed to suggest a real regimental site. The footer says for example “Copyright@Azov 2023”, the “About Azov” page contains real information on the history of the regiment, and the “Donation” page shares a real online platform, Azov One, which raises funds for the regiment. These different sections take up the construction of the official Azov website.
The “Career” page lists the advantages of serving the regiment, such as “a competitive salary”, or “the right to benefit from accommodation at public expense”. The page also shares several photos illustrating “the life of the soldiers of the Azov regiment”, with images taken from the regiment’s official website.
Apart from the recruitment form, the only contact indicated on the site is an email address.
Azov regiment denies being behind website
Contacted several times by 20 minutes regarding the authenticity of the website, the Azov regiment provided a response via its Telegram channel: “This is not our official website”, without providing further details.
Asked about the question, the Ukrainian embassy in France as well as the Ukrainian National Guard have not yet provided a response.
Several elements indicate that the site is probably not authentic
As we can observe by researching the domain name azov-france.fr, the latter was created on October 20, 2023, therefore very recently. Via Google’s advanced search tools, it also appears that the first Internet page referenced by the search engine dates back to October 21, 2023.
The absence of contact details, with the exception of an email address, also indicates the suspicious nature of the site. Contacted via this email address, the people behind the site indicate: “We have launched a recruitment campaign to expand the strength of the regiment. Our priority is people with military training, military doctors and supply personnel. “. When requesting information to confirm the authenticity of the site, such as the contacts and professions of the people in charge of the site, the email address will refer to the contacts of the regiment’s press center, already available on the Internet.
The quote whose layout suggests it comes from Volodymyr Zelensky is most likely not authentic, as no record of such a statement exists anywhere else on the Internet.
No response has yet been given following the sending of the completed recruitment form.
The site is mixed with false information about the author of the Brussels attack
Shortly after the site went online, several articles appeared on the Internet, implicating the site azov-france.fr in the story of a man explaining that the author of the Brussels attack was allegedly trained by the battalion .
All are based on the same video, in which a man with a masked face introducing himself as “Ayoub, an Algerian who lives in France” explains having been put in contact “six months ago” with the regiment. “I filled out the form on their website and after three weeks I was in Ukraine.”
However, the website azov-france.fr, presented as the recruitment site via which Ayoub would have joined Azov, was only put online at the end of October.
The Azov regiment, a recurring argument in anti-Ukranian propaganda
Furthermore, Ukraine does not appear in the list of different countries where Abdesalem Lassoued is known to have resided over the past ten years. Several media outlets (RTBF or LN24) have traced the terrorist’s itinerary, in which a stay of several months in Ukraine appears nowhere.
This unfounded claim was shared by Actu Cameroun, Muhtwaplus and Arab Five (Egyptian news sites), SeneNews (Senegal), The Nation (Nigeria) as well as several disinformation sites. Although signed by different editors, several of them repeat the same text almost word for word.
The Azov regiment is often used in pro-Russian propaganda stories, because the ideological proximity of some of its members to the most extreme right is used to characterize the Ukrainian army as “Nazi”, and to justify Russian intervention. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly described the military operation in Ukraine as a “denazification” campaign.