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 a century after the October Revolution he led.
Friend – Chrystia Freeland
Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian stateswoman, is a well-known in Ukraine for her long and consistent strong support for the land from which her parents originated.
The former Harvard and Oxford student, renowned journalist and author, has reached the heights of Canadian politics. Freeland has been Canada’s foreign minister and is currently deputy prime minister and minister of finance – the first woman in her country to hold the finance portfolio.
And yet this impressive Canadian has also remained proud of her Ukrainian roots and never missed a chance to show it.
This week tantalizing new details emerged about her role in supporting the burgeoning Ukrainian independence movement when she as spent time as a student in Ukraine in the late 1980s. They have just been revealed by Toronto’s The Globe and Mail after being uncovered from the KGB archives in Kyiv.
As a young foreigner sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause, Freeland was followed and spied on by the KGB while on an exchange program from Harvard University studying Ukrainian. She was tagged with the name Frida.
Freeland was active in patriotic circles and even addressed the inaugural conference of the unofficial Society for the Preservation of the Ukrainian Language in Kyiv in February 1989.
She told The Globe and Mail: “I am aware that my work with pro-democracy and environmental activists invoked the ire of the Soviet KGB, I remember being the target of smear campaigns in the Soviet press.”
In March 1989 Freeland was banned from entering the Soviet Union after “anti-Soviet materials” were found in her luggage.
But the KGB files also reveal that the student activist managed to win the grudging admiration of some of its officers. One colonel reported that she was a “remarkable individual” – “erudite, sociable, persistent, and inventive in achieving her goals.”
In other words, Freeland’s experience in Ukraine prepared her for the challenges she later faced as a journalist and a politician.
Thanks to The Globe and Mail we have again been reminded about how true a friend Ukraine has in Freeland.
Foe – Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, once a seemingly high-flyer in Russian politics, and subsequently reduced to the role of a pathetic lackey of his boss, President Vladimir Putin, has been wheeled in again to reiterate his master’s frustration with Ukraine’s resolutely independent course.
In an article published on Oct.11 in Kommersant titled “Why contacts with current Ukrainian administration are pointless,” he accused the current Ukrainian leadership of being “vassals” of the U.S. with whom it is pointless to “negotiate and strike deals.”
So, the Kremlin’s broken record repeats its shrill sound pitched at those with impaired political hearing. Only in June, Putin himself tried to justify his refusal to meet with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky by claiming that Washington has been given “full control” to “manage” Ukraine.
Medvedev went further and accused Zelensky of being “weak,” “ignorant,” “unreliable,” and even “serving the most rabid nationalist forces in Ukraine.” He concluded: “It’s pointless for us to deal with vassals.”
The Russian official earns the title of Ukraine’s foe of the week, not because of his own dubious importance. But because he represents Putin’s docile entourage epitomizing that traditional imperialistically minded Russian officialdom ready to serve tsar, communist chief – or their most recent Kremlin incarnation – for the sake of a share in the power, fortune and impunity that have gone with the subservience.
Medvedev’s diatribe reflects the bankruptcy in the Kremlin’s thinking and lack of any interest to deal with neighbors, adversaries or critics except on its own terms. “Russia knows how to wait. We are patient people,” Medvedev added cynically.
Putin, Medvedev and his like have short, and then on top of it, limited and selective historical memory. Russia’s predecessor – the early Muscovy was for long a vassal state of the Mongol Golden Horde. When it freed itself, Muscovy sought to impose this model of conquest followed by the imposition of vassalage, on others. Ukraine was an early victim, and more recently the eastern half of Europe was subjected to it.
East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and others, eventually threw off Moscow’s rule and thirty years ago Ukraine also said no to being a vassal of Russia. Belarus is still experiencing it.
For more than seven years, Ukraine has been resisting Russian military aggression and hybrid warfare and affirming on the front lines of this bitter conflict its rejection of the Eurasian tutelage that Moscow seeks to reimpose. Ukraine’s decision about its democratic European self-identification and alignment with Euro-Atlantic structures has become unshakeable, as the uncompromising stance of President Zelensky demonstrates.
Ukraine needs allies in this unequal struggle and is grateful to those who have offered their support. This does not make it a vassal but a partner of those states which are committed to democratic values and the principle of self-determination, espoused so eloquently by an American president, Woodrow Wilson, more than 100 years ago. Unfortunately, Russian imperialism in it various guises has remained deaf to it and other related international norms.
No one has forgotten Medvedev, the figure who for appearances sake in 2008- took over as “president” from his boss Putin to maintain the semblance that post-Yeltsin Russia respected a democratic constitutional order. No one took him seriously then, and today too his utterances remain just the echo of his master’s bark.
