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: The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
From the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Western press have had trouble calling an invasion an invasion.
Readers have been told of a “civil war” in Ukraine, or a “Ukraine crisis” driven by “rebels” or “separatists” fighting against “far-right volunteer battalions.”
In fact, since the beginning of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, when it first sent in troops in unmarked uniforms to seize the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in February 2014, and then in April 2014 started a fake uprising in the Donbas, it has been clear that all such terms are misleading.
The person who claims to have “pulled the trigger of war” in the Donbas — a Russian military intelligence officer called Igor Girkin, also known by his nom de guerre “Strelkov,” constantly complained of a shortage of local recruits who shared the separatist goal. The so-called “rebels” and “separatists” have never been anything of the kind. While estimates of the numbers of Russian regular troops serving in Ukraine vary widely, it has long been established that senior command positions in the anti-government forces in the Donbas are occupied by serving Russian officers. The soldiers are mostly a mixture of mercenaries, local collaborators, criminals and gang members, with Russian regular soldiers covertly embedded.
The massive amount of tanks (U. S. special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker recently estimated that the anti-government forces have more tanks than all the armies of Western Europe combined) clearly came from Russia. Russia also sends regular loads ammunition. If it didn’t, the war would have been over years ago.
So it refreshing to see the Wall Street Journal, in an editorial on Aug. 1 supporting the provision of lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine, using accurate terms to describe Russia’s war. There is no mention of “rebels” or “separatists”: the anti-government forces are correctly termed “Mr. Putin’s proxy forces.” The parts of Luhansk and Donetsk where Russian proxy forces are in control are not incorrectly called “separatist enclaves,” but “occupied areas” that “the Russians invaded in 2014.”
And the newspaper is clear that Ukraine needs U.S. anti-tank weapons to defend itself against “Russian tanks,” and to “raise the cost of Moscow’s aggression.”
So the editorial board of the Journal is Ukraine’s friend of the week — and not only for supporting the provision of vital defensive arms to Ukraine, something that Ukraine has needed since the summer of 2014, and which could have stopped Putin’s proxy forces in their tracks a long time ago.
It also collectively earns the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for describing Russia’s war on Ukraine properly terms, as all other media should.
Ukraine’s Foe Of The Week: Glenn Greenwald
One would have thought, in the early weeks of 2014, that the Ukrainian people’s achievement of throwing out the corrupt, Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, would have been greeted with general acclaim from leftist politicians and journalists.
One would have been wrong though: In the days after Yanukovych abandoned office, and Ukraine, in line with its constitution, restored its government and elected an acting president, many on the left in the West started to parrot Kremlin propaganda that there had been a “fascist coup.”
One of them was Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former lawyer who has been a prominent voice in left-leaning journalism. On Dec. 31, 2014, nearly a year after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and eight months after Russia fomented war in the Donbas, Greenwald criticized fellow journalists in a tweet for “obsessing on Russia’s actions in Crimea while ignoring U.S. interference in Ukraine,” which he said was “jingoistic and deceptive.”
Given that Greenwald had already had almost a year to find out what had actually happened in Ukraine, there must be some other factor causing him to be so wrong about the country.
That factor is, of course, knee-jerk anti-Americanism. While many on the left quite rightly criticize the United States for mistakes in its foreign policy, their opposition to foreign interventions and imperialism tends to be one-sided.
Correctly seeing Russia as a foe of the West, they incorrectly ignore or, worse, justify, the graver crimes of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian, imperialistic regime.
The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend — in fact, it may well be an even worse enemy.
This has clearly not sunk in with the likes of Greenwald, as seen from a recent exchange on Twitter on U.S. plans to arm Ukraine with defensive weapons, including much-needed anti-tank missiles.
Greenwald was challenged for using the term “anti-Russian Ukrainians” in his tweet with a link to a report of Pentagon plans to arm Ukraine. When challenged about the pejorative phrase, he first said it was justified because two think tanks had used it, and then tweeted that he had “simply pointed out that US arming of Ukrainians is a policy Kremlin opposes, because it regards Ukrainians as adverse. That’s it.”
However, when asked whether he was OK with the Kremlin arming and training “rebels” inside Ukraine, Greenwald never replied.
Maybe he was bored with the exchange, but this failure to support Ukraine and recognize the truth, while apologizing for the Kremlin, fits a pattern. For that, Greenwald is Ukraine’s foe of the week and earns this week’s Order of Lenin.
