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: Mateusz Morawiecki
When is a gas pipeline not just a gas pipeline?
When it’s a Kremlin economic weapon as well.
This non-joke captures the real, and quite unfunny situation that Europe faces as Russia gears up to start its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, which would pipe natural gas from the frozen north of Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany, bypassing some of Ukraine’s pipeline capacity and tightening the Kremlin’s energy-supply grip on Europe.
While some in Europe have called for the Nord Stream 2 project to be judged purely in commercial terms, the countries closest to Russia – those most acquainted with the Kremlin’s aggressive and imperialistic nature – have warned that the pipeline could also be used as a lever of influence against them, and the West.
Apart from Ukraine and the Baltic states, Poland in particular sees Nord Stream 2 as a threat to the twin pillars on which Warsaw has built its current security architecture – the European Union and NATO. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, speaking at a NATO Parliamentary Assembly meeting in Warsaw on May 28, said Nord Stream 2 is “a poison pill for European security, which can have far-reaching consequences,” according to a report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Poland, which over the past three centuries has been dismembered several times by Russia/the Soviet Union and Germany/Prussia and the Austrian Empire, and which spent the years from 1947 to 1989 as a satellite state of the Soviet Union in the form of the Polish People’s Republic, is right to be concerned about its security. Since 2009, Russia and its client state Belarus have war-gamed attacks on Poland, including in 2013 a simulated nuclear attack on the Polish capital Warsaw.
But it is an economic assault by Russia on the West that is by far more likely, and one of the weapons that would be used to make it would be Nord Stream 2.
Russia used to pipe all of its gas exports to Western Europe via two main routes – one running through Belarus and Poland, and the other going via Ukraine and Slovakia. With the opening of the twin Nord Stream pipelines (with a supply capacity of 55 billion cubic meters per year) in 2011 and 2012, the Kremlin put the northern jaw of a pincer in place. It is to be strengthened with the addition of another two pipelines under the Nord Stream 2 project, which will double supply capacity.
The southern jaw of this pincer is Turk Stream, another twin-pipeline project with an expected capacity of 31.5 billion cubic meters per annum. The pipeline will supply gas directly to southern Europe, and further projects will pipe gas from there through the Balkans to Central Europe.
Once in place, Ukraine and Eastern Europe will largely have been bypassed as a gas supply route for Russia, but Ukraine in particular will still be able to receive gas supplies from Russia, and the Kremlin, as before, will be able to use gas supplies as a lever of influence on Kyiv.
The crucial difference, and the danger for Ukraine, is that Europe will no longer be so affected if the Kremlin turns off the gas supply to Ukraine. There will be no more outcries from Berlin, Paris and London if gas supplies to Ukraine are shut off again in the dead of winter – or so the Kremlin hopes.
“Once Nord Stream 2 is built, Putin can do with Ukraine whatever he wants, and then we have potentially his army on the eastern border of the EU,” Morawiecki told reporters on Feb. 16 after meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin to discuss the Nord Stream 2 project.
Morawiecki is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for putting the continent’s defense and security ahead of commercial gain. If only some other big EU states had such a clear view of the Kremlin’s intentions in building Nord Stream 2. They could then see that the lure of cheap gas from the Kremlin is only leading them into an energy trap that threatens the security not just of Eastern Europe, but of the whole of the continent.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Patrick Pouyanné
The CEO of the giant French oil company Total S.A., Patrick Pouyanné, announced in a statement issued on May 24 that his company would take a 10 percent stake in the Arctic LNG 2 liquefied natural gas production project of Russia’s Novatek PJSC in the frozen far north of Russia.
That very same day, the Joint Investigation Team in the Netherlands, which is probing the shooting down on July 17, 2014 of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 of its passengers and crew, announced important findings.
According to the Dutch-led investigation, the Buk missile that shot down MH17 was fired from a launcher belonging to Russia’s 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade, based in Kursk.
This was long known – the open source investigation team Bellingcat as far back as January 2016 released the results of its investigation into the brigade and its Buk TELAR launcher No. 332, which the group had earlier identified as being the one that fired the missile that downed MH17.
What is significant, and the reason that the Joint Investigation Team took another 28 months to announce that it had reached the same conclusion as Bellingcat, is that the team is working to produce a solid body of evidence that can be used as the basis of a criminal case. Evidence must be checked, preserved and incorporated into a case that will stand up in court if the team’s work is to succeed.
With the Joint Investigation Team’s May 24 announcement, and Bellingcat’s announcement next day that it had conclusively identified “Orion” – the Russian military intelligence officer overseeing both Russia’s fake “separatist republic” in Luhansk, and the transporting of Buk TELAR 332 into Ukraine – Russia’s direct responsibility for the murder of the 298 MH17 victims is no longer in doubt.
Buk TELAR 332 could only have been deployed to Ukraine on the orders of the 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade’s commander, who answers to his commander, who answers to his, all the way up the command chain to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The murder of MH17’s passengers is ultimately Putin’s responsibility, and we recall how uncharacteristically ill-at-ease Putin seemed in his first televised comments after the atrocity, at a July 18 government meeting on the economy, during which he blamed Ukraine for the shoot down.
So there can be no doubt among those of us still in the reality-based community that the Kremlin is to blame for the MH17 atrocity, yet on the same day this was definitively established, a French company announces a multi-billion-dollar investment in a Russian energy project.
There is no conspiracy here – Total has long been salivating over cooperation with Putin’s corporate kleptocracy. Back in October 2014, amid the first stages of Russia’s military intervention in the Donbas (falsely presented to the world as a separatist uprising), former Total CEO Christophe de Margerie was in Moscow to meet with the Russian government to discuss investment.
The former Total CEO was killed in an air crash at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport when his business jet collided with a snowplow on take-off. There is no conspiracy there either, but a tragic accident.
But it shows that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine won’t stop international oil companies seeking to make money from Putin’s regime, even if that regime threatens others’ and their own countries’ security. Such companies have to be reined in by a rigorous sanctions program that restricts collaboration with Putin’s regime.
That, in turn, requires political will. But who was on hand the same weekend in St. Petersburg in Russia to bless Total’s deal with Novatek? French President Emmuanuel Macron.
The sight of Macron sitting next to the murderous little tyrant Putin in Russia, praising their countries’ cooperation not long after the MH17 announcement, was revolting.
Pouyanné is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the vile Order of Lenin for aiding Putin’s rogue state, which not only shot down MH17, but started a war against Ukraine that has so far killed more than 10,000 people, and which has wrecked the post-war order by launching a military invasion and occupation of the territory of another state.
Meanwhile, Russian dictator Putin must be clasping his bloodstained hands in glee at the prospect not only of further French economic cooperation to prop up his regime, but also at the state of the Western alliance, which under President Trump is at its weakest since the fall of the Soviet Union.
His assessment of the West as weak-willed, greedy, and easy to divide appears to have been correct, which is bad news for Ukraine, Europe, America, and the wider world.
