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: Bill Browder
Russian President Vladimir Putin is not going to stop hounding Bill Browder, who has been lobbying nations to adopt tougher sanctions against the Kremlin for human rights abuses.
Putin got Browder arrested yet again briefly in Spain on May 30.
The former financier, whose campaign for democracies to enact legislation to punish Russia for the murder of his associate, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009, was in Madrid to give evidence related to the fraud case that Magnitsky uncovered. It is Russia’s sixth attempt by abusing the Interpol arrest warrants to have Browder arrested.
The Putin regime detests Browder and his campaign because it seeks to deny them the fruits of their criminal labors. As Browder explained in an article published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper on June 1, Putin’s regime “is a kleptocracy, and stealing lots and lots of money, they have to keep it safe somewhere and go spend it somewhere. By coming up with the idea of imposing visa bans, freezing assets, denying access to banks … It puts that whole model at risk.”
Luckily for Browder, when arresting him Spanish police did not immediately confiscate his phone, and he was able to tweet out an alert to his followers:
“Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now,” he tweeted.
Within minutes a tweet-storm had broken out on Twitter, and before long Browder was released, with Spanish police having been advised by Interpol General Secretary Jürgen Stock not to honor the Russian warrant.
According to Browder, Russia has made three attempts to have him arrested on an Interpol warrant in the last 10 months alone. This is despite the fact that Interpol itself, as far back as May 24, 2013, concluded that Russia’s attempts to have Browder arrested via the organization were political in nature.
But as Browder himself pointed out in another tweet, the Kremlin is still issuing fresh Interpol warrants against him.
“Just to be clear, my arrest this morning in Madrid was the result of a SIXTH Russian arrest warrant using Interpol channels. It was NOT an expired warrant, but a live one. Interpol is incapable of stopping Russian abuse of their systems,” Browder wrote.
Following Browder’s latest Interpol harassment by the Kremlin German Green Party MEP Rebecca Harms has written to the head of Interpol calling on the organization “to immediately suspend Russia’s access to Interpol’s systems until Russia ceases circulating notices for Mr. Browder.”
And a group of MPs in Britain, including Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, have written to Home Secretary Sajid Javid asking that he demand Russia be denied access to Interpol’s databases.
Meanwhile, Browder, Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for a second time, continues his campaign to cut Putin’s cronies off from their ill-gotten gains. Tweeting on June 4, he said he had launched the French Magnitsky Act campaign: “Putin’s cronies with villas on the Côte d’Azur won’t be happy,” he tweeted.
Earlier, he had tweeted: “Tomorrow I will be going to the Danish Parliament for hearings on a Danish Magnitsky Act. Danish Justice Minister @sorenpape (Soren Pape Poulsen), will you be honoring Russia’s politically motivated arrest warrant and be arresting me on arrival? It would be good to know.”
It would indeed be good to know. But it would be even better not to have to ask.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Heinz-Christian Strache
The Kremlin insists that it opposes “fascism” in Ukraine and elsewhere, and has created a war cult around the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazism in 1945. The role of the other allies is downplayed or not mentioned at all, as is the fact that the Soviet Union was aligned by treaty with Nazi Germany until June 1941.
At the same time, the Kremlin has helped boost the far right in Europe. France’s National Front has taken money from a Russian-owned bank. During the last elections in Germany, the far-right Alternative Fuer Deutschland party received media support from the Kremlin’s propaganda channels, RT and Sputnik. Italy’s Lega Nord and Austria’s Freedom Party – both far-right parties, and both now participating in coalition governments – have signed identical cooperation agreements with the United Russia party, according to Anton Shekhovstov, who researches Russia’s links to the far right in the West.
The United Russia party supports Russian President Vladimir Putin, although he ran for president in March as an independent, and at this stage in his career no longer has much need of a political party.
Nevertheless, United Russia would not be cultivating ties with Europe’s far right without the Russian dictator’s blessing. Moreover, the Kremlin’s courting of extreme right-wing parties and groups in Europe predates the steep downturn in Russia’s relations with the West that followed its invasion and start of its occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and its subsequent launching of a war on mainland Ukraine in the Donbas.
These ties have existed for a long time, and the earliest ones predate Putin’s coming to power – the first low-profile links between Russian politicians and Europe’s far right were forged in the early 1990s, according to Shekhovstov, writing in his recently published book “Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir.”
But since Russia launched itself on a collision course with the West, first with its war with Georgia, and then with its invasion of Crimea and war on Ukraine, its links with far-right extremism in Europe have become more overt, with the Kremlin granting far-right parties financial, political and media support.
While Russia has descended into authoritarianism, bordering on fascism itself, the reason the Kremlin allies itself with Europe’s fascists is not ideological. Rather, Europe’s far right and Russia’s corrupt elite have overlapping interests and coinciding goals that make cooperation between them logical.
For instance, one of Putin’s goals is to weaken and (hopefully for him) break up the European Union, which is a threat to his regime. Putin does not want to see the population of Russia, or the peoples of the countries that the Kremlin still seeks to control, aspire to join a competing union based on human rights, the rule of law, democracy and freedom of expression. All of these are antithetical to the system of government he believes in.
Many on the right and far right, nationalists and populists, instinctively share Putin’s dislike for the European project, which is based on different countries cooperating rather than competing.
The Kremlin’s political and financial investment in Europe’s far right is now bringing returns. Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, of the far-right Freedom Party, speaking in an interview published on June 3 with the newspaper Oesterreich, said “It is high time to put an end to these exasperating sanctions and normalize political and economic relations with Russia.”
The sanctions that Strache is referring to, of course, are the ones put in place as a result of Russia’s invasion of Crimea and launching of its war on Ukraine in the eastern Donbas. Other European leaders have made it clear that the sanctions will stay in place until the Kremlin reverses its aggressive actions against Ukraine.
Of course it is not “high time” to put an end to the sanctions, as Russia is still occupying Ukraine’s Crimea and still waging its unadmitted war on Ukraine in the Donbas. In fact, it is past high time to put much more painful sanctions in place – ones that directly target Putin and his cronies’ wealth, much of which is held outside Russia.
Strache is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin for shamelessly aligning himself with Ukraine’s enemies in the Kremlin, and hosting Putin during his visit to Austria on June 5.
The Austrian vice chancellor, and other figures in Europe’s nationalist, populist far right, might think that cooperating with Putin will help further their own goals. In reality, he is using them, in the same way he uses the anti-Americanism of the Western left to undermine NATO. The “cooperation” between them is the “cooperation” between a conman and his dupes.
