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, more than 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Friend: Charles Michel, President of the European Council
As President Volodymyr Zelensky is incorporating Viktor Yanukovych’s allies into his new Cabinet, the European Council is holding the line.
On Wednesday, the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the Member States of the European Union, led by Charles Michel, reportedly voted to extend sanctions against former President Viktor Yanukovych and senior officials implemented in 2014.
The yearlong extension of the asset freeze against 18 former officials who oversaw the massacre of protesters during the EuroMaidan Revolution comes as Ukraine itself is easing prohibitions on the administration.
This week, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court announced it would weigh overturning a lustration law banning senior Yanukovych administration officials for public office enacted in the aftermath of EuroMaidan. Then, the court delayed the hearing.
Zelensky, who rode to office on pledges to fill government with fresh faces, elevated several Yanukovych-linked officials to his cabinet on March 4.
Ukraine’s new healthcare minister, Illia Yemets, chaired the same ministry under Yanukovych in 2010. New social policy minister Maryna Lazebna was appointed to head Ukraine’s State Employment Service by Yanukovych in 2013.
And finance minister Igor Umansky, who has been a government official for more than two decades, was implicated in a Yanukovych-related scandal in 2015 after he authorized a Hr 79 million payment to a firm linked to Yanukovych’s son.
Collectively, the appointments do not bode well for Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts. But the European Council’s decision under Michel will at the very least ensure that the cadre will not be able to use their pocketbooks to influence Ukraine’s political process.
And for those officials who fled to Russia, including Yanukovych, the sanctions will likely prevent any sort of return to the country for another year.
For that, Charles Michel is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week.
Foe: Devin Nunes, U.S. representative
Devin Nunes, the Republican congressman who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and was central to the defense of U.S. President Donald Trump in the country’s impeachment investigation, is in the news again this week, as two developments suggest that his efforts to promote Trump administration misinformation are succeeding.
On Monday, Nunes filed a defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post after a February story reported that he had misused his position, telling Trump about comments by intelligence officials indicating Russia was interfering in the 2020 U.S. elections to benefit Trump.
The lawsuit is Nunes’s seventh in the last year filed against critics, media outlets and Twitter accounts — all efforts to silence information that contradicts the party line, often regarding the administration’s shadow policy in Ukraine.
Later in the week, Nunes’s former legal counsel Michael Ellis, who fed information to the intelligence committee to bolster Nunes’s fraudulent defense of the president’s impeachment, was rewarded with an appointment as the senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council (NSC).
In the pre-Trump era, the position was apolitical and reserved for senior intelligence officials. Rather than experience, Ellis boasts single-minded loyalty to Nunes and Trump.
Ellis first made his mark by providing Nunes with “evidence” of Obama administration surveillance of Trump in an effort to distract from the investigation into Russian interference to benefit Trump in the 2016 election.
And in another illegal move that seems to have helped the 32-year-old’s career, Ellis was reportedly the official who decided to abuse the NSC’s code word system for storing highly classified information by moving the record of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky there, an effort to hide it from the public. Former intelligence officials have said that decision was illegal.
When the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena for Ellis’s testimony in November, he defied the law again, following Trump’s orders not to appear.
Ellis’s appointment is a dark sign that Nunes and other Trump loyalists will continue to misuse the intelligence community for domestic political aims, increasing the likelihood that Ukraine and others will be caught in the crossfire. For that, Devin Nunes is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week.
