“SOF Week 2025” kicked off in Tampa, Florida, “the premier annual event for the international Special Operations Forces (SOF) community.” Featured speakers included U.S. intelligence chiefs and military commanders, foreign leaders and defense ministers, with keynote speeches by Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of Defense; Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command.

“Everything starts and ends with warriors, from training to the battlefield,” said Hegseth. “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. No more pronouns, no more climate change obsession, no more emergency vaccine mandates, no more dudes in dresses.” Straight Arrow News reports, “According to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, SOF will shift from a counterterrorism-centric mission to a broader role in great power competition.”

Andriy Smolensky, a severely wounded Ukrainian veteran who has spent many months undergoing treatment in the United States, met General Fenton at SOF Week, which Smolensky attended as the “U.S. Partnership Officer” of a new US-Ukrainian think tank connected to the Azov movement. About a month earlier at Harvard Business School, under the cover of this recently established organization, which is “dedicated to fortifying the strategic partnership between Ukraine and the United States,” some prominent Azovites probably met Fenton’s Vice Commander of the Special Operations Command. These and other stories about the burgeoning “Azov Lobby” have flown under the radar in recent months.

Nazi Tech Movement

“It’s no secret that all top brigades have their own R&D [research and development],” according to Roman Sudolsky, the editor of an online publication “covering Ukrainian defense tech,” but last month, when the 3rd Assault Brigade (AB3), allegedly the largest of its kind, launched its own “startup accelerator” to support testing new military technology on the battlefield, Sudolsky praised this “next level” step taken by the Azov movement, which is currently forming the 3rd Army Corps. A “Global Macro Investor” based in the San Francisco Bay Area also described the founding of “AB3 Tech” as “next level thinking […] to get the best tech for the frontlines.”

AB3 Tech: “Warfare Driven Solutions”

To hear it from the Azovites, “We combine the expertise of military professionals, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help startups, investors, and defense companies accelerate time-to-market, test products in real combat conditions, and attract funding.” AB3 Tech offers “rapid feedback,” “practical insights,” “brand recognition,” a “competitive edge,” “combat-proven performance data,” “video content of product performance in battlefield conditions,” and official “letters of interest to gain credibility in fundraising.” Their website promises that these neo[fascists] are “trusted by defence industry leaders for real-world validation.”

On May 16-17, the capital of Ukraine hosted “DOU Day,” a two-day annual event which is said to be “one of the largest technical conferences for the Ukrainian IT community.” One of the main speakers was Andriy Biletsky, the leader and founder of the Azov movement, and an infamous neo[fascist], put in charge of the new 3rd Army Corps.

The Azovites called this event their first “IT Dvizh.” As the journalist Leonid Ragozin explains, the Russian word Dvizh is “a slang term widely used by Russian and Ukrainian neo-nazis to designate their [‘NS’ or National Socialist] movement.” Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Ukrainian IT community “DOU” launched a large fundraiser for the 3rd Assault Brigade, just as AB3 Tech got off the ground. DOU even rolled out a special website for the campaign.

Biletsky and AB3 Tech at DOU Day 2025

This seasonal edition of the Azov Lobby Blog almost started with something I missed in my last one (Winter 2025). Taking place alongside the Munich Security Conference in February, the German-based European Defense Tech Hub (EDTH) held a “hackathon” featuring a unique representative of the Azov movement’s 3rd Assault Brigade.

Viktoria “Tori” Honcharuk, 25, moved to the United States at 15 years old, started an investment banking career on Wall Street, and got accepted to Harvard University. “I was living the life of my dreams,” she says. Since 2022, Honcharuk returned to Ukraine to become a combat medic, ultimately in the 3rd Assault Brigade, “where her sister serves as an assault rifleman.” This year, she co-founded AB3 Tech and a think tank.

https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=pSrSZSkBBhY

Viktoria Honcharuk seems to be dating Mykola “Makar” Zinkevich, a young neo[fascist] commander from the 3rd Assault Brigade, specifically from its “Dirlewanger” company, which takes inspiration from one of [the Third Reich’s] most horrendous military units. He has some suspicious arm tattoos—a valknut and life rune, “one of the most common neo-Nazi symbols.”

Zinkevich is also affiliated with the Lviv-based neo[fascist] organization “Galician Youth,” which intimidates LGBT people, pays homage to the Galicia Division of the Waffen-SS, and distributed antisemitic fliers in the year before the full-scale war with Russia.