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The Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), which has historically been associated with the INLA, made the comments online this week.

The most recent election results the News Letter could find for the IRSP was for the council elections of 2011, when the party polled 2,133 votes (0.3% of the total), winning no seats.

But the party is reportedly going to run in the upcoming Assembly elections for the first time, with a candidate, Dan Murphy, standing in west Belfast (despite this, the IRSP is not registered as a party with the Electoral Commission, having been de-registered in 2019).

Its Facebook post condemned what it described as “the Ukrainian government sanctioning, arming and endorsing an open neo-nazi battalion called the Azov battalion”.

Writing in the Washington DC magazine Foreign Policy, journalist Michael Colborne says this unit has displayed “far-right, often outright neo-Nazi affiliations”, and he has detailed its ties to the Ukrainian government, saying that its Nazi overtones “are often downplayed or ignored”.

The IRSP post went on to praise “the legitimacy of the democratic independence referendums” of 2014.

This is a reference to two major polls held in the eastern Donbas region, which delivered landslide results in favour of splitting away from Ukraine, but which were denounced as having “zero credibility” by the UK government.

The IRSP further continued: “The conflict in Ukraine today did not start in 2022, it started in 2014 and can be traced directly to NATO expansionism in eastern Europe.

“NATO have a murderous history of upholding the Western imperialist hegemony with brutal force, we witnessed this in Yugoslavia and subsequent invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and the continuing propping up of fascist regimes across the world such as Israel.

“Since 1974 the IRSP have opposed NATO, and in 1982, in an act of solidarity with our socialist comrades across the world, volunteers from the INLA bombed the Mt Gabrial [sic] Radar Domes used by NATO during the ‘Cold War’.”

This recalls an attack on Mount Gabriel in Co Cork, where at 3.30am during September 1982, an INLA team seized two technicians on duty, tied them up, and detonated explosives around the facility (which the Irish government insisted was an air traffic control station, not a NATO facility).

The IRSP added: “Make no mistake, NATO are the biggest threat to world peace.

“The conflict in Ukraine is not simply black and white, it is a conflict that can be traced back nearly 20 years with NATO expansionism in the east, providing a major catalyst and confrontation that threatens the very existence of humanity.

“We reiterate our calls for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, we call on military restraint to avoid the unnecessary civilian casualty of war in the region and we send our ongoing support to our comrades in Donbass and Luhansk.”

Socialist republican group blames west for Ukraine war and praises INLA ‘NATO’ bombing