A screengrab from the RT report about the US mercenary who defected to the Russian side aired on 28 February 2023 (Russia Today)

A former US soldier who used to be a mercenary for Ukraine for nearly a year, serving in numerous units, told Russia Today in an interview that there was a prevalent Nazi influence within Kiev's armed forces.

John McIntyre, having spent a year among the ranks of Kiev's armed forces, told RT that he "had to leave", adding that he "thought I was going to be killed. My family got me $300 to get to Chisinău, then I went to Istanbul and then to Moscow."

🇺🇸🇷🇺Former US Mercenary In Ukraine Defects to Russia
"Snipers in position were for defectors,anybody tries to defect 🎯☠️"
He is saying "interesting things" about AFU pic.twitter.com/HI5L6pm8TD
— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) February 28, 2023

The US soldier who previously served in Fort Bliss, Texas, for two years, escaped from Ukraine into Russia after crossing into Moldova, though he did not reveal when he made himself known to Moscow.

"When I came, I was really surprised. Everybody had tattoos and Nazi symbolism," McIntyre revealed, confessing that he did not believe ultra-right ideology was "that big of a problem" for Ukraine until he experienced the situation first-hand.

Furthermore, he said he had to conceal his own anti-fascist and Communist views so as not to draw too much attention from Ukrainian soldiers, highlighting how some Western mercenaries told him that "the Russians aren't the Nazis, we are the Nazis."

McIntyre asserted that he felt "compromised" after discussing the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian forces with someone, saying he planned on defecting into Russia once he "gathered enough intelligence" despite knowing that whistleblowers are treated worse than spies.

"Anybody who confesses or is known to be about to confess is shot in the back of the head," he said. "A lot of people go missing… including foreigners."

The former US soldier admitted that Ukrainian soldiers habitually use civilians as human shields, adding that he knew people who executed prisoners of war.

"It's funny to them. It's hatred. They hate the Russian people, they want to kill them, they want to genocide them," he told RT.

He concluded by wondering how the West was supporting "these guys" and wanted them to join NATO, "and they can't even follow Geneva conventions."

The Azov and Aidar battalions - two of the most prominent neo-Nazi parties that have been accused of greasing bullets with pig fat to shoot Muslims - have been active on the ground in disenfranchised areas in eastern Ukraine before the said area joined Russia by popular referendum earlier this year. The battalions are official bodies within the Ukrainian military.

The US Congress passed in June a resolution intended to block US military funding to the Ukrainian army, essentially blocking such training and weaponry from reaching the hands of the Azov battalion in particular.

Congressmen John Conyers Jr. and Ted Yoho contended that the battalion has been a "source of controversy" since it was allowed to exist.

Despite there being various reports about Nazism within the Ukrainian armed forces, the Pentagon lobbied the House Defense Appropriations Committee to remove the amendment backed by Conyers and Yoho, arguing that such funding was already prohibited under another law.

The battalion's symbol is the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel, a black swastika against a yellow background.

Moreover, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an international Jewish NGO, refused to condemn the Pentagon's honoring of a veteran of the Azov Battalion who dons Nazi-inspired tattoos.

An email dated November 9 sent by the ADL to The Grayzone, an investigative journalist website, stressed that it does not view the Azov as the "far-right group it once was."

Founded by Andriy Biletsky, who vowed to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen,” the group is a pack of neo-Nazis working with the US-backed Ukrainian military.

It used to be condemned and labeled with Nazism all over it by Western media and the human rights industry - until the war in Ukraine in February 2022. Azov became the Ukrainian military’s defense of Mariupol, and Western media became suddenly inspired to rebrand Azov as a "misunderstood freedom fighter" and use the Kremlin as the anti-thesis.

The ADL seemed to turn a blind eye when Azov used civilians as human shields and executed those who tried to escape. Back in March, the ADL recognized the unit in a report it published, that white nationalists view Azov “as a pathway to the creation of a National Socialist state in Ukraine.”