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: Garry Kasparov
Faced with a resurgent, aggressive Russia under Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin, it is easy to become disheartened about the prospects for peace in the world.
After all, in the last four years Putin has wrecked the post-war security order by invading and illegally occupying the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. He then launched a war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, which has cost the lives of more than 10,000 Ukrainians, wounded thousands more and displaced more than 1 million people.
In Syria, Putin has propped up a client dictator, saving Bashar al-Assad from defeat in a civil war. The Kremlin interfered in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 and seems to have attempted to influence the United Kingdom referendum on European Union membership in June 2016 (with social media), the earlier Scottish independence referendum in 2014 (Kremlin media, for instance, quickly made false claims that the independence referendum had been rigged,) as well as the presidential election in France and the national parliamentary elections in Germany.
Moreover, there are growing suspicions that the Kremlin may have been lending a hand to North Korea to develop its nuclear weapons and missiles programs.
But those who oppose the resurgence of imperialism, authoritarianism, populism, racism and bigotry in the world should temper their disappointment with the knowledge that in Ukraine, at least, Putin is failing.
That was the message brought by Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov, a former chess grandmaster, to the Free Russia Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania in December.
In an interview in Russian with RFE/RL published on Dec. 11, Kasparov claimed (and his claim is backed by alleged Kremlin policy papers leaked to the Russian press in 2015) that Russia’s aim had been to seize control of 10 Ukrainian oblasts – effectively dismembering Ukraine. Instead, Putin has gained control of only about a third of the combined area of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts – a clear failure.
The Minsk agreements, with which Putin had intended to reintegrate the Russian-occupied part of the Donbas with the rest of Ukraine, but under his terms, have also failed, as have the Kremlin’s attempts to deflect blame for their failure onto Ukraine.
“That’s because it became obvious that the West, despite its unwillingness to get into a clash with Putin, did not dare to put pressure on Ukraine and demand the acceptance of conditions absolutely impossible for any Ukrainian politician,” Kasparov told RFE/RL.
Putin has only “gained” the political and material burden of maintaining support for the “bandit formations, enclaves” that he has managed to create in Ukraine, Kasparov said.
Putin’s failure in the Donbas has come at great cost to Ukraine, of course, and the war he started there continues to kill and maim soldiers and civilians almost every day, but success for the Kremlin leader would have been much worse for Ukraine.
So Kasparov is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for reminding us that Putin is not a strategic genius, or a geopolitical master-puppeteer, manipulating events on the world stage at his whim.
Putin is failing in Ukraine, however tragic the consequences of that failure may be. He is failing because he met here determined resistance and a refusal to be intimidated. And if the West follows Ukraine’s example, and stays resolute, standing up to Putin whenever he tries to make mischief, he will most likely fail again.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Federica Mogherini
The European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, Federica Mogherini, on Jan. 1 listed in her blog 12 notable events and achievements of 2017 – “special moments,” she termed them.
But there was nothing in her self-congratulatory screed about her actions to oppose Russian meddling in the affairs of democratic states (including through information warfare).
Neither were there any mentions of her calls for the continuation and toughing of EU sanctions on the Kremlin for its ongoing occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea, or of her latest efforts to mediate a ceasefire in the Donbas, where Russia continues to pursue a war of aggression on European soil.
That’s because there were no such actions, calls or efforts by the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, last year, or in any of the years following her appointment on Nov. 1, 2014.
This is not surprising: Mogherini has never been someone who would stand up to Russia, as Edward Lucas, a senior editor at “The Economist” and long-time opponent of the Kremlin, told RFE/RL in an article published shortly after her appointment. The article concerned Mogherini’s top spokeswoman being married to a lobbyist for Gazprom, the giant, state-owned Russian energy company that the Kremlin has frequently used to exert economic pressure on its neighbors – including ones in the EU.
“I was particularly worried by what seemed to be (Mogherini’s) blind spot toward (Russian President Vladimir) Putin,” Lucas said in the Nov. 7, 2014 article. “She seemed to like Putin, to get on with him, and to not really see the world from the perspective of the European Union countries neighboring Russia.”
Mogherini’s appointment had been lobbied for by the then Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and was strongly supported by Frank-Walter Steinmeier – at that time Germany’s foreign minister and now Germany’s president – who is also widely-known as a Russlandversteher (the German word for someone who sympathizes with the Kremlin.)
Renzi, meanwhile was the only EU leader to oppose further sanctions on Russia at the EU summit in Brussels in October 2014, and was firmly behind Gazprom’s South Stream gas pipeline plan to supply Russian gas to Italy via southeastern Europe.
There is a pattern here: when European politicians come into proximity to Gazprom and its interests, they become weak at the knees. Mogherini seems to be no exception.
However, Mogherini’s instinct to appease is not restricted to the Kremlin – other authoritarian regimes, notably Cuba and Iran, have also been subject to her “engagement” and lack of ire recently. During her trip to Cuba in the first days of 2018 she talked up trade and investment, and several times criticized the U.S. trade embargo on Havana, but said nothing about Cuba’s abysmal human rights record. On the recent protests in Iran she waited nearly a week to issue an anodyne statement: “In the spirit of openness and respect that is at the root of our relationship,” she said, “we expect all concerned to refrain from violence and to guarantee freedom of expression.”
Expect the murderous mullahs of Tehran “to refrain from violence and guarantee freedom of expression?” What nonsense is this?
Mogherini thus wins the title of Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and an Order of Lenin. When the time comes to write the history of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, and list those who strenuously opposed the Kremlin’s revanchism and imperialism, she won’t get a mention.
