General’s rise from far-right agitator to Ukraine war hero

Sam Kiley meets the founder of the Azov movement, Andrii Biletskyi, now a decorated military brigadier general holding Russia back on its most aggressive line of attack in Donetsk

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Telephone signals abruptly collapse as we descend into a bunker at a secret location close to Ukraine’s front line with Russia, for a meeting with one of Kyiv’s most ambitious, controversial and successful military commanders.

Easily within reach of medium-range Russian drones and jets, the caution was routine. But it takes on added drama when it emerges that an alleged Ukrainian traitor, working with Russian intelligence, was recently in the area tracking the movements of Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi.

The spy’s mission was to give real-time targeting information to Russian drone pilots when Biletskyi was visiting a frontline location - or to find him in a command centre and send the coordinates to a Russian bomber jet, according to Ukraine’s State Security Service - the SBU, also known as the SSU.

“During a preemptive operation, the SSU detained an enemy agent who was preparing to coordinate a targeted missile and bomb strike on the location of the Ukrainian general in the combat zone,” the agency said when announcing the arrest of the alleged spy, who has been charged with high treason.

Ukrainian generals are, like senior Russian officers, often singled out for assassination.

But killing Biletskyi would have been a special prize.

A national, and ultranationalist, hero, with a colourful past including a pretrial stint in jail for assault (he was acquitted), he has only ever given one interview to the foreign media. That may be a consequence of his own security concerns. It may also flow from the awkward reality that, as a young man and undergraduate historian, he held far-right views that formed the ideology of the (now famous) Azov movement, which he founded and led against Russian invaders in 2014.