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: Toomas Hendrik Ilves
The West’s reaction to Russia’s blatant aggression against Ukraine in the Kerch Sea on Nov. 25 was depressingly familiar. The anonymous Twitter wag Soviet Sergey, who parodies Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, summed it up perfectly with a thread consisting of all the “deeply concerned” official statements from countries that are supposed to be Ukraine’s friends.
Much like the “thoughts and prayers,” offered by U.S. politicians after each mass shooting in the United States, the “deep concern” shown by Western countries every time Russia attacks Ukraine is now devalued and shorn of meaning, because it is never followed by any significant action.
But Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise, former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, has some ideas about what significant actions could very easily be taken.
“It’s really not difficult: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of (fill in NATO or EU country) instructs our embassies and consulates to cease immediately and until further notice issuance of visas to Russian Federation passport holders”. Simple. Easy. No effort, Saves costs,” Ilves tweeted on Nov. 26.
Ilves also suggests cutting Russia off from SWIFT, the international banking information transfer system. While SWIFT is a private corporation based in Belgium, it has in the past been compelled by European Union rulings to cut off a country’s banks from its network – Iran in 2012.
Such actions might seem harsh, but we at the Kyiv Post believe that if such actions had been taken far earlier – such as when the Kremlin invaded and started to occupy the Ukrainian territory of Crimea – we would not have got to the stage of wondering how to respond to Russian attacks on Ukrainian naval vessels.
As the Russian political dissident and former chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov put it in comments on Twitter made not long after the attack on Ukraine’s naval vessels in the Kerch Strait, the West seems to have forgotten how to deal with dictators.
“In its cowardice, naiveté, and profit-seeking illusions of engagement, the West forgot what Harry Truman said about deterrence and dictators. Stand strong in small conflicts so you don’t have to fight big ones,” Kasparov tweeted on Nov. 25.
Ilves, and other current and former leaders of the Baltic states, never forgot Truman’s lesson, however. Long before Russia’s war on Ukraine, before its war on Georgia in 2008, the Baltic states were warning of the threat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin posed to the West – the reality of that threat is the reason they entered the European Union and NATO as soon as they could.
Some in the West opposed the admittance of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the European Union and especially NATO, seeing it as “provocative” and “angering” for the Kremlin. After the attacks on Georgia and now Ukraine, they have been proved wrong. If the Baltic states had not entered NATO, they would surely already have fallen victim to Kremlin aggression, just as non-EU and non-NATO Ukraine and Georgia have done, and the situation facing the West would be even worse.
The Kremlin considers the very independence of its former subject states “provocative.” This will be so for as long as Russia continues to be host to this aggressive, authoritarian, expansionist, imperialist political institution. Ultimately, only Russians can rid the world, and themselves, of their form of government.
In the meantime, the West’s best option is to dissuade Putin from taking further steps. The way to do that is to set out clearly the consequences of certain actions. An escalating schedule of punitive sanctions, one that ratchets up automatically every month the Kremlin fails to comply with international law, would do the trick.
There’s really no need for the West to scratch its head over how to respond to each fresh outrage and atrocity from the Kremlin. And their empty expressions of “deep concern” are worse than useless – they merely egg Putin on.
There is meaningful, non-military action that can be taken in response to Kremlin aggression. As Ilves, who knows Ukraine’s chief foe very well, has said: “It’s really not difficult.”
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Dmitry Polyansky
Russia’s first deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyansky, since becoming Russia’s top diplomat at the United Nations following the sudden death of his boss Vitaly Churkin in February 2017, has continued the worst traditions of his predecessor.
Russia’s diplomatic style in recent years recalls that of the Soviet Union, combative, deceitful, and cynical. But in this post-fact world, it has also taken a turn for the Orwellian.
This can be seen from the recent incident in the Kerch Strait, in which Russia attacked three Ukrainian navy vessels in a blatant violation of international law. Six Ukrainian sailors were reported to have been wounded in the attack, three of them seriously. The sailors, forced to make sham confessions on Russian propaganda television to staging a “provocation,” are now to be tried by Russia’s puppet courts for illegally entering Russian territorial waters.
At the emergency session of the UN Security Council held in New York on Nov. 26, which was called by both Russia and Ukraine, Polyansky absurdly attempted to have the debate conducted under the agenda of discussing “the violation of the borders of the Russian Federation.”
The council took a vote on Polyansky’s proposed agenda, and rejected it, with only three members of the 15-member UN Security Council supporting the Kremlin. Polyansky then announced that Russia was in a diplomatic sulk, would not take part in the debate, and would restrict itself to giving its opening statement.
The following opening statement was jaw-droppingly ludicrous, accusing Washington of being behind the whole affair, and alleging that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was carrying out a sinister scheme to cancel the upcoming presidential elections in Ukraine. Polyansky dismissed the West’s objections to Russia’s naked aggression against its neighbor in the Kerch Strait as “Russophobia,” and he painted Russia as the victim in the incident.
Anyone who was following the incident closely, and who was reasonably well informed by reports about it from reputable media, understood that Polyansky’s claims were nonsensical. But such people were not Polyansky’s target audience: Instead, he was addressing the gullible, ill-informed, and those who already have a natural bias against Ukraine due to their political views (usually those on the far-left and far-right ends of the political spectrum).
Nevertheless, Polyansky’s performance before the UN Security Council was a new low in the standard of diplomacy from the Kremlin. Russia now lies completely unashamedly before the international community’s highest diplomatic forum, reducing the discussion of critical matters to an absurd circus.
Russia, of course, is one of the veto-holding five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and so no meaningful action can be taken by the United Nations in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. However, the votes taken on the council, and in the General Assembly of the United Nations, do show that the Kremlin remains isolated and mistrusted.
All that Russia and Polyansky, Ukraine’s foe of the week and a winner of the Order of Lenin, can now do on the international stage is try to act innocent while lying through their teeth.
But by devaluing the United Nations Security Council in this way, Russia not only shows its contempt for the institutions of the civilized world, and harms the security of the entire world – it damages even more Russia’s own image, credibility, and authority. The Russian people should be ashamed that people like Polyansky represent them internationally.
