Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Angela Merkel
Angela Merkel’s days are numbered. In fact, with true German precision, by announcing on Oct. 29 that she will stand down as leader of her party and not stand for election in the next parliament elections on Oct. 24, 2021, the German chancellor has allowed us to calculate exactly the maximum number of days she could have to remain in power – 1,091.
Merkel, who became chancellor in 2005, has suffered damaging defeats in recent regional elections in Germany, but she was already in trouble after the general election last year, when her Christian Democratic Union or CDU party saw its worst performance at the polls since 1949.
Merkel was forced to form a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party or SDP, Germany’s left-of-center party, which usually plays an opposing role to the CDU, which is right-of-center. That in itself is nothing unusual – coalition governments are the normal form of government for Germany, which like Ukraine has a mixed constituency-based and party-list proportional representation electoral system. Indeed the CDU and SDP formed a coalition after the last election in 2013.
But other factors had come into play since then. One was the sudden rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany or AfD party, formed only in April 2013. The AfD failed to win any seats in the German parliament or Bundestag during the 2013 elections (as in Ukraine, there is a 5 percent electoral threshold to win seats in the national legislature, and the AfD got 4.7 percent). But in 2017 the party took 12.6 percent of the vote and won 94 seats in parliament – making it the first far-right party to win seats in Germany’s parliament in decades.
Meanwhile, both the CDU and SDP saw their votes shrink: The CDU lost center-right votes to the Free Democratic Party, which went from zero seats to 80, while the SDP saw its vote share drop to 20.5 percent, its worst result since the elections of March 1933.
Essentially, the political center in Germany ceded ground to the far right – a phenomenon that has been seen across the democratic world lately. In Germany’s case, the catalyst for the CDU’s woes was the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015, which saw Germany take in a million refugees, many displaced by the civil war in Syria, as well as others from Asia and Africa.
The backlash from Merkel’s humanitarian decision to take in this huge number of people saw her poll numbers drop, and support for the AfD rise.
The refugee crisis happened after Russia intervened militarily in Syria to support Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, turning the course of the war in his favor. Those who believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been taking advantage of the Syrian refugee crisis to exacerbate tensions and the rise of populism in the European Union can point to the meeting between Merkel and Putin in Germany in August 2018, at which Putin appeared warn Merkel about, or perhaps threaten her with, more problems with Syrian refugees.
“I remind you that there are a million refugees in Jordan and a million in Lebanon,” Putin told Merkel on Aug. 18. “There are 3 million refugees in Turkey. This is potentially a huge burden on Europe, so it is better to do everything possible so that they can return home.”
While Putin was ostensibly appealing for money from the European Union to help rebuild Syria, after his forces had helped wreak more destruction there, his comment could easily be interpreted as carrying the additional sense of a warning that the Kremlin could cause more refugees to flood into Europe.
What Merkel thought of Putin’s comments is unknown, but a little over two months later she announced that she would stand down as leader of the CDU and would not seek election to the Bundestag in 2021. That would mean the end of her chancellorship no later than Oct. 24, 2018, the latest possible date for Germany’s next federal elections. She could go sooner if an unfriendly rival succeeds her as CDU leader.
That would be bad news for Ukraine: Merkel led Europe’s response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, and helped broker the Minsk peace accords, which, while not bringing peace, at least ended the phase of heaviest fighting of the war. Germany without Merkel at the helm may veer away from its course of support for Ukraine, especially if the new CDU leader attempts to move the party to the right to capture support back from the AfD.
But while Merkel has essentially announced the impending end of her chancellorship, it may not be all gloom for Ukraine. According to German political scientist Ulrich Speck, Merkel could be planning to devote her final period in power, however long it may be, to focusing on foreign affairs.
Merkel would be helped in that by the confidence she enjoys around the world (she has a confidence rating of 52 percent, compared to Putin’s 30 percent and U.S. President Donald Trump’s 27 percent, according to a Pew poll of citizens of 25 countries around the world carried out in spring 2018.) She has the political clout to make a real difference on the international stage, including in the matter of Russia’s war on Ukraine. She’s not always right, or supportive of Ukraine. She is allowing the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project to go ahead, relying on assurances from Russia that it will continue to use Ukraine’s gas pipelines after the two Nord Stream pipelines are functioning and able to carry 110 billion cubic meters of gas yearly. Russia is not trustworthy and its assurances mean nothing — as its 1994 agreement to the Budapest Memorandum shows. When he got the chance, Russian President Vladimir Putin ignored the Kremlin’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity by invading and seizing Crimea and launching a war in the eastern Donbas.
Merkel, who made possibly her last visit to Kyiv as German chancellor on Nov. 1, is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for her past support of Ukraine. Long may it continue – well, at least for another 1,091 days.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Matteo Salvini
“The Russian sanctions are a social, cultural and economic absurdity… (and the sanctions regime) makes no sense and produces no positive effect.”
Is this a quote by:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin;
- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; or
- Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev?
None of the above: It was what Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini had to say during his recent visit to Moscow on Oct. 17.
Salvini, who has been described by UK news websites as a far-right politician, has indicated that Italy will break ranks with the rest of the European Union and oppose a future extension of the union’s sanctions regime against Russia. Given his political background, it’s not surprising why he should take this position.
The leader of the Italian political party Lega, Salvini, together with the leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement and Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, is the power behind the throne of Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte – a technocrat with no previous experience in government or administration.
Conte’s government is widely considered in the media to be populist – just the type of government the Kremlin likes: Both Lega and the Five Star Movement have had support from the Kremlin, according to claims by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Michael Carpenter, former deputy assistant secretary of defense, writing in Foreign Affairs in January.
Biden and Carpenter also predicted Lega and the Five Star Movement would receive propaganda support ahead of the March general election in Italy (which they won), and that prediction appears to have been correct. The Kremlin’s propaganda outlet Sputnik in particular published articles falsely claiming that Italy had been overrun by refugees, who were responsible for creating unemployment, and that this was all the fault of the EU. Lega ran on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU platform.
However, Salvini’s claim that the sanctions regime has produced no positive effect is, on the face of it, correct: Russia has not yet ended its military occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea or withdrawn its covert forces from Ukraine’s Donbas region.
But a valid argument can be made that the sanctions regime should therefore not be dropped, but rather made better-targeted and stronger.
The fresh sanctions the United States imposed on Russia in April, which directly hit Putin cronies like the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and which impacted Russian share prices almost immediately, back up that argument. These sanctions were effective because U.S. authorities made it clear in guidelines that they could also be applied to individuals and institutions in the West who “knowingly facilitate significant transactions, including deceptive or structured transactions, for or on behalf of any person subject to U.S. sanctions with respect to the Russian Federation, or their child, spouse, parent, or sibling.”
That immediately made banks in the West wary of Deripaska’s businesses, which have long been used to turning to the Western capital markets for funds. Russia’s biggest weak point is that due to its authoritarian style of government and weak rule of law, Russian-owned capital is not safe at home or under the jurisdiction of the Russian courts. That’s why oligarchs like Deripaska seek to protect their assets by keeping them in the West under the protection of the legal systems of the liberal democracies. And that, in turn, is why Western sanctions should target these assets.
But Salvini, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin, would prefer to go back to doing business as usual with Russia, without much care for principles of sovereignty and international law.
For Italy, business as usual is the roughly $14 billion worth of exports Italy sold to Russia in 2013, according to data from website tradingeconomics.com. After the EU imposed sanctions on Russia following its aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Italian exports to Russia sank to a low of around $7.5 billion in 2016, but had risen to nearly $9 billion in 2017. Russia, on the other hand, saw its exports to Italy fall from around $29 billion in 2013 to a low of just over $12 billion in 2016. Exports were up to almost $14 billion in 2015.
So the balance of trade between Italy and Russia in 2013 was about $15 billion in Russia’s favor, while in 2017 it was $5 billion in Russia’s favor (about 57 percent of the value of Russia’s exports to Italy in 2017 were oil and natural gas.)
So business as usual, at least in terms of the balance of trade, is better for Russia than it is for Italy. One wonders whose interests Salvini truly has at heart when he argues for the ending of sanctions.
