During a telephone call with Sputnik, Sessions initially said reports about him meeting with soldiers from Azov* — a group that had been under a Congress funding ban several years ago — were false, then clarified that he did meet with a group of people but was unsure if they were Azov soldiers.
"I did have some meeting with some people," Sessions said. "I met with a group of people."
When asked if the meeting included members of the Azov regiment, he said "I don't know, nobody was in a uniform."
On Monday, chief of Kiev-based NGO Anti-Corruption Action Center Daria Kaleniuk said that Azov soldiers were received on Capitol Hill earlier in September. The Ukrainian delegation also met with Senators Joni Ernst, Dan Sullivan, Shelley Moore, Jeanne Shaheen, and other lawmakers to discuss Ukraine's request for modern tanks like the Abrams, the Counter-Rocket, Artillery, Mortar (C-RAM) and other air defense systems, Kaleniuk said.
The delegation's visit to Washington also included a meeting with US Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for Central and Eastern Europe in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs Robin Dunnigan and the State Department’s Head of the Office of Sanctions Coordination Jim O'Brien to lobby for designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism and to seize $300 billion in Russian sovereign funds located abroad so that Ukraine can use it to buy modern weapons, according to Kaleniuk.
In August 2022, Russia’s Supreme Court designated Azov as a terrorist organization. According to the Russian prosecutor general’s office, Azov militants use prohibited means and methods of warfare and are complicit in torture of civilians and killings of children.
*The Azov battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.