On July 5 the New Zealand Herald revealed that Sam
Haines, a 22-year-old man from Auckland, was killed last
December while fighting in Ukraine as part of the fascist
Azov Brigade’s International Battalion.
The article
and an accompanying 15-minute video report are pro-war
propaganda. They exploit Haines’ death to glorify the
US-NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia. The Herald
portrays Haines as a hero, effectively encouraging others to
follow his example, and whitewashes the Azov Brigade, a
neo-Nazi organisation that plays a major role in Ukraine’s
armed forces.
The Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine
in 2022 was reactionary, rooted in Great Russian nationalism
and serving the interests of the Russian oligarchy—but it
was provoked by three decades of NATO expansion and
relentless US encirclement of Russia.
The European
powers, led by Germany, Britain and France, are now
committing vast sums to their own militaries in preparation
for direct war against Russia. New Zealand and Australia are
supporting this imperialist war with funding, equipment, and
training for Ukrainian forces.
New Zealand’s
corporate media is seeking to condition the population to
accept greater involvement in the war against Russia and
deeper integration into US-led preparations for war against
China.
The Herald highlights the ease with which
foreign fighters are able to enter Ukraine and be deployed
to the front lines. Sam Haines’ mother Mary told the
newspaper that he had no military training or combat
experience, “but the doors just kept opening for him and
he just kept progressing.” Haines did not initially reveal
to his parents that he was going to fight in Ukraine,
telling them instead that he had an intelligence-related job
in Poland.
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Ukraine has suffered hundreds of thousands
of casualties and the military is desperate for new cannon
fodder. The Kiev government says around 2 million Ukrainians
are evading the draft and more than 200,000 soldiers have
deserted their positions—a massive level of civil
disobedience which points to widespread opposition to the
war.
Thousands of foreign nationals are reportedly
fighting in Ukraine’s military. Haines is the sixth New
Zealander confirmed to have died in the war.
According
to the Herald, as a teenager, “Sam became fascinated by
the world of defence and private military contractors.” He
decided to go to Ukraine after he “met some Americans who
worked in the private military industry” while playing
Airsoft (an outdoor team-based shooting game) near Auckland.
He had also enrolled in a Defence Studies degree at Massey
University.
The Herald states that Haines enlisted in
the Azov Brigade “within weeks” of arriving in Ukraine
in January 2025. The newspaper mentions in passing that Azov
was founded as a militia in 2014 and attracted
“controversy because of its early far-right
associations,” before being integrated into the
country’s armed forces following Russia’s
invasion.
In reality the Brigade remains a neo-Nazi
organisation. When Haines joined, its commander was Denys
Prokopenko. Before joining Azov in 2014, Prokopenko was a
member of the White Boys Club, a neo-Nazi fan club of the
Dynamo Kyiv soccer team. Its Facebook posts have included
photos of graffiti with their organization’s name
alongside the number “88,” the neo-Nazi code for “Heil
Hitler.”
The Azov Brigade celebrates Ukraine’s
Nazi collaborators, including Stepan Bandera and Andriy
Melnyk, leaders of the Organisation of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN), and Roman Shukhevych, head of its armed
wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). These forces took
part in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union,
the genocide of Jews and the mass murder of at least 100,000
Poles.
The positions advanced by Azov and other
far-right groups have been adopted by Volodymyr Zelensky’s
regime, whose glorification of the OUN and the UPA as
national heroes recently provoked a diplomatic crisis with
Poland.
Zelensky’s corrupt, kleptocratic government
has postponed elections and outlawed opposition parties.
Anti-war activists have been imprisoned, including the
socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, whose organisation, the Young
Guard of Bolshevik Leninists, called on workers in Russia
and Ukraine to unite against both oligarchic regimes in
order to end the war. These facts are buried by the New
Zealand media.
The Herald’s video report features an
interview with an unnamed American soldier in Azov’s
International Brigade, who praises Haines’ combat skills
and describes the unit as a “brotherhood” in which
fighters develop “powerful” bonds. The video includes
combat footage taken by members of Azov for propaganda
purposes, which carries a watermark of the brigade’s
“National Idea” symbol—a variation of the Wolfsangel
symbol used by the Nazi SS. We are also shown Haines’
coffin emblazoned with the same symbol as he is buried in
New Zealand.
Sam Haines’ mother told the Herald:
“He found his tribe. They loved him. They cared for him. I
think he felt understood there.” His father declared that
after learning of his son’s feats on the battlefield “I
am in awe of him.”
The Ukrainian military’s
foreign recruiting department could not have hoped for a
more glowing endorsement of the Azov Brigade.
The
death of Sam Haines raises many disturbing questions. Why
was it only reported after an eight-month delay? How many
other New Zealanders are fighting in Ukraine and are there
more deaths that have not been reported?
Who exactly
were the Americans who apparently encouraged Haines to go
and fight in Ukraine? Are there recruiters for the Azov
Brigade operating in New Zealand?
The Herald’s brief
mention of Haines’ enrollment in Massey University’s
Defence Studies program also raises questions. What exactly
did he study and how did it influence his
decision?
Massey’s Centre for Defence and Security
Studies operates in partnership with the Police and Defence
Force. According to its website, its lecturers have
“experience in government, diplomacy, intelligence,
security or defence,” and its courses prepare students for
jobs ranging “from the armed forces to intelligence
agencies, businesses to government agencies.”
The
Centre’s faculty members have appeared in the media
calling for New Zealand to contribute more to the war
against Russia.
On March 15, 2022, Dr John Batersby,
Senior Teaching Fellow at the Centre and former Senior
Sergeant in the NZ Police, wrote in the Conversation that
“a deep vein of Ukrainian nationalism… has been
unleashed” by Russia’s invasion. Ordinary people, he
stated approvingly, had “vowed to kill Russians in
vengeance for their aggression, and promised to fight to the
death.”
He continued: “It is not necessarily a
character flaw that causes people to advocate and perpetuate
dreadful violence, to kill and maim, and go to their own
deaths to achieve an outcome they will not survive to
see.” Ukrainians would have to “fight back in any way
they can.… Terrorism may become a tactic they will
ultimately see themselves having little choice but to
adopt.”
Batersby noted that “A foreign legion has
been raised, and foreign fighters invited to join the
cause.” He called on Western governments to “supply and
assist” Ukraine.
These are the kinds of views that
students are being exposed to: the promotion of Ukrainian
nationalism and its “fight to the death” against Russia,
using the most ruthless methods including terrorism, backed
by the imperialist powers.
The shocking revelation
that a young New Zealand man was able to join a fascist
brigade in Ukraine and was killed in battle has not prompted
any statements of concern from anyone in the media, academia
or the political establishment. The National Party-led
government and the opposition parties, Labour, the Greens
and Te Pāti Māori, are all silent.
This is because
the entire political establishment supports the US-NATO
proxy war. The last Labour government, backed by the Greens,
sent military aid to Ukraine and deployed NZ troops to
Britain to train Ukrainian conscripts. The pseudo-left
International Socialist Organisation, which supports Labour
and its allies, is openly aligned with US and European
imperialism against Russia.
The state-owned and
corporate media have effectively banned any criticism of the
war. In 2023, when the journalist Mick Hall reported on the
Ukrainian government’s promotion of fascists, he was
hounded out of his job at Radio NZ, smeared as a “Russian
agent” and investigated by the intelligence
agencies.
Nor is there any dissent among academics.
When Victoria University of Wellington hosted a Ukrainian
nationalist exhibition in 2022, which promoted the Azov
Battalion, downplayed the Nazi Holocaust and glorified
Bandera and the OUN, the event attracted zero criticism
outside of the WSWS.
The Herald’s war propaganda
must be taken as a sharp warning by workers and young
people. As the war in Ukraine continues to intensify, along
with the US confrontation with China, New Zealand’s ruling
class is preparing to escalate its involvement. With
Labour’s agreement, the government is planning to double
military spending and wants to rapidly increase recruitment
into the armed forces. A minor imperialist power, Wellington
is determined not to be excluded from the violent carve-up
of the world’s resources and markets.
The only way
to stop this developing third world war is through the
building of a socialist and internationalist anti-war
movement that unites workers in Russia, Ukraine and across
the world, who have no interest in slaughtering each other
to increase the profits of their ruling
classes.
