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Notes -
A war is fought not only on the battlefield, but also in the realm of propaganda.
As you point out, the size of Azov is trivial compared to the size of the army, and wearing swastikas does not actually grant combat superpowers.
But this should also mean that the possible battlefield gains from arming them with US weapons would be small.
On the propaganda front, it does not matter that they are only a small group. The USSR fought one big war, in which some 13% of its citizens were killed. In the end, they won, and it is a victory celebrated to this day in Russia. Their enemies in that war were flying the swastika.
Allowing a group of your citizens to cosplay as Nazis instead of drafting them into regular army units is handing Russia an easy propaganda victory. One would be better off supporting a brigade of child rapists and cannibals.
Also, the threat model is not that Azov declares its own state and sets out to conquer Ukraine by force of arms -- which is indeed silly given the power balance. There is a huge difference between having two thousand guys with military gear outside your borders and having them freely move within your country. It takes a lot more than 2000 men with guns to defend against 2000 determined terrorists.
One of the scarier phrases from Weimar Germany is "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- uttered when the German army refused to engage paramilitary putschists because they recognized them as comrades in arms. Every army seems to have some fraction of crypto-fascists, and the Ukraine army is likely no exception.
At the moment, Azov are suffering the Jewish president Zelenskyy to live because his interests and their interests align -- both want to stop Russian aggression by military means. I find it highly likely that Ukrainian mainstream -- and their president -- will tire of this war before Asov does. From the situation on the ground, it looks like any peace deal would involve some concessions to Russia, Crimea if nothing else. At that point, Azov could turn against Zelenskyy.
But Russia also allows groups of its citizens, like this one, to cosplay as the Nazis. Of course one could argue that kolovrat is something else than a barely-plausible-deniality swastika (after all, it has barely plausible deniality!), but come on now.
Rusich is far, far less influential than Azov.
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