For many years, the Russian regime and its various mouthpieces have tried to paint Ukraine as a country dominated by neo-Nazis and fascists; Moscow has even dubbed the present war a “denazification” campaign. The claim, explains Oved Lobel, is doubly disingenuous:

Vladimir Putin reportedly dispatched over 400 operatives of [Russia’s] paramilitary proxy the Wagner group—which is replete with neo-Nazi members and traditions—to murder Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Often referred to as a “Private Military Company” in media reports, all circumstantial and direct evidence has long since established that Wagner is merely a barely deniable arm of Russia’s Ministry of Defense. . . . Buildings in Libya occupied by Wagner were vandalized with Nazi slogans and symbols, while a tablet [computer] belonging to a Wagner operative revealed only two books related to politics: Mein Kampf and The International Jew. Investigations into the identity of Wagner fighters continuously turn up various strains of white supremacy, Nazism, and anti-Semitism.

And Wagner is far from Russia’s only neo-Nazi asset. Almost every major nationalist and racist violent extremist group in the world today, including those in Australia, got its start from the neo-Nazi Iron March forum, started by Alisher Mukhitdinov in Russia in 2011. . . . Russia provides training and safe haven for as many extremist groups as it can. On top of safe haven and training, the Kremlin funds and allies with far-right and neo-Nazi political parties across Europe and the world, which grants the Kremlin not only destabilizing political influence, but also the potential for state-backed neo-Nazi terrorism as a weapon against the West.

For many years, Lebanon has been a de-facto satellite of Tehran, which exerts control via its local proxy militia, Hizballah. The problem with the U.S. policy toward the country, according to Tony Badran, is that it pretends this is not the case, and continues to support the government in Beirut as if it were a bulwark against, rather than a pawn of, the Islamic Republic:

So obsessed is the Biden administration with the dubious art of using taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Lebanese pseudo-state run by the terrorist group Hizballah that it has spent its two years in office coming up with legally questionable schemes to pay the salaries of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), setting new precedents in the abuse of U.S. foreign security-assistance programs. In January, the administration rolled out its program to provide direct salary payments, in cash, to both the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF).

The scale of U.S. financing of Lebanon’s Hizballah-dominated military apparatus cannot be understated: around 100,000 Lebanese are now getting cash stipends courtesy of the American taxpayer to spend in Hizballah-land. . . . This is hardly an accident. For U.S. policymakers, synergy between the LAF/ISF and Hizballah is baked into their policy, which is predicated on fostering and building up a common anti-Israel posture that joins Lebanon’s so-called “state institutions” with the country’s dominant terror group.

The implicit meaning of the U.S. bureaucratic mantra that U.S. assistance aims to “undermine Hizballah’s narrative that its weapons are necessary to defend Lebanon” is precisely that the LAF/ISF and the Lebanese terror group are jointly competing to achieve the same goals—namely, defending Lebanon from Israel.