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: Pussy Riot
Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, a political prisoner, has been imprisoned by Russia for more than three years. Subjected to a sham trial on bogus terrorism charges, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison — all for opposing Russia’s illegal seizure of Ukraine’s peninsula — and is serving his sentence in Yakutsk.
While Sentsov is perhaps the best known of more than 30 Ukrainian political prisoners held by Russia, his case gets little attention outside of Ukraine. So it was great to see a demonstration in support of him being made on a bridge in Yakutsk on Aug. 7, with two women in balaclavas unfurling a banner reading “Free Sentstov” and setting off red and blue smoke flares.
The demonstrators, Maria Alyokhina and Olga Borisova, were from the punk band/performance art group Pussy Riot, which has been protesting against Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2011.
Alyokhina herself spent nearly two years in prison after she and other Pussy Riot members were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Her “crime” was to be involved in a performance in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in February 2012, when Pussy Riot members sang a “punk prayer” to protest Putin’s plan to return to the presidency after another stint as prime minister.
Putin won the presidential election in the first round of voting on March 4, 2012, amid accusations of vote rigging. Just the day before, Alyokhina and another member of Pussy Riot were arrested, while a third was arrested on March 16. All three were convicted on Aug. 17, 2012, and sentenced to two years in a penal colony.
On the day after Alyokhina’s demonstration in support of Sentsov, she and Borisova were arrested outside the prison in which Sentsov is being held. However, the court judge quickly ordered their release, saying police had incorrectly filed the case paperwork.
This is no doubt another example of the arbitrariness of Russian justice: the Putin regime probably calculated that it was not worth bringing more attention to the Sentsov case by putting members of Pussy Riot on trial again.
So thanks, and Orders of Yaroslav the Wise, go to Pussy Riot’s Alyokhina and Borisova, Ukraine’s friends of the week, for risking prison again to highlight the case of a Ukrainian victim of Putin’s rubber-gavel judiciary.
Ukraine’s Foe Of The Week: Michael B. Dougherty
Hardly a day goes by without someone writing something erroneous and ignorant about Ukraine, but we at the Kyiv Post only have the time, space, and patience to cover the most egregious examples.
So an Aug. 4 piece in the conservative semi-monthly The National Review, “Don’t Arm Ukraine,” written by Michael B. Dougherty, gets a mention for its sheer awfulness, while earning Dougherty an Order of Lenin and Ukraine’s Foe of the Week.
Dougherty gets the year of the launch of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine wrong, stating it as 2015 instead of 2014. A more serious error is repetition of a Kremlin falsehood — that the West was behind the abandonment of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych: Dougherty calls it “a Western-backed putsch.”
In fact, Ukrainian protesters, backed by a majority of the population, and over a period of three months, drove out the corrupt Yanukovych. The former president fled on Feb. 22, 2014 after his security forces slaughtered at least 100 people in the streets of Kyiv. Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution was a genuine one — we know, we lived through it.
Dougherty’s claims that “sending arms to Kiev (sic) would play right into (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s narrative of Western meddling.”
Dougherty also repeats the false trope that Ukraine is a deeply divided country Any election in any democratic country would “reveal” divisions.
Dougherty’s implicit claim that this division runs along linguistic lines is also hokum, as a glance at a linguistic map of Ukraine shows. There are districts in the southern and eastern portions of the country where the majority language is Ukrainian, not Russian. Kyiv, a largely Russian-speaking city, was the focal point of the revolution against Yanukovych. Dougherty ignorantly perpetuates the Kremlin myth that language was one of the causes of its war on Ukraine.
The issue of whether the United States should provide arms to Ukraine is worthy of serious and informed debate, not the dashing down of trite, sloppy, fallacious drivel.
