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.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen
BY BRIAN BONNER
Time and time again, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has proven herself to be a great friend of Ukraine. This week, the New Hampshire Democrat and member of the Senate’s bipartisan Ukraine Caucus came through for the nation again.
This time, she introduced legislation jointly with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, to sanction companies that supply equipment to Russia that allows the Kremlin to lay deep-sea pipelines. The aim is to stop construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine under the Baltic Sea and connects Russian natural gas directly to Germany. If completed by 2020, the new route would double the existing capacity of the first Nord Stream pipeline, allowing Russia to send 110 billion cubic meters of gas yearly to Germany, potentially bypassing Ukraine’s land-based pipelines altogether. Losing its status as a gas-transit country could cost Ukraine at least $2 billion yearly.
This is typical of Shaheen’s commitment to Ukraine.
On March 15, she championed U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s announcement of tougher U.S. and Western sanctions against Russia, saying: “Five years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people continue to be killed, captured and targeted by the Kremlin…We will always reject Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea. I commend the administration for imposing these overdue sanctions with our European and Canadian allies and look forward to our continued work on a bipartisan basis to hold Russia accountable.
In a 2015 visit to Kyiv, Shaheen urged Ukrainians to stop tolerating corruption. “It’s about how members of the public deal with corruption,” Shaheen said. “Corruption exists everywhere, but if we refuse to tolerate it, then it’s going to be hard to continue to exist.”
For her unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s best interests, she is a most deserving recipient of The Order of Yaroslav the Wise.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Rudy Giuliani
BY MATTHEW KUPFER
On May 9, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced that he would be coming to Ukraine. But while attention from the West is often positive for Ukraine, this time it was bad news.
Giuliani is Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, and he planned to visit Ukraine to meet with President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy in order to push two investigations that would presumably benefit the U.S. president: one into alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and another into widely disproven corruption allegations against former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, potentially Trump’s opponent in the 2020 presidential election.
Had he come to Kyiv, Giuliani would have essentially served as a link between conservative pro-Trump commentators who have peddled these weak claims and Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s prosecutor general who has failed to fight corruption and appears to be using these two narratives in his own interests.
Thankfully, only a day after announcing his trip, Giuliani canceled. Unfortunately for Ukraine, he did so in the most provocative way possible.
“I’m not going to go because I think I’m walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president, in some cases enemies of the United States and, in one case, an already convicted person who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election,” he said during an interview with Fox News.
That supposedly “convicted person” is lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, who played a key role in releasing the “black ledger” of ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. That document implicated Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, in receiving illegal off-the-books payments from the Yanukovych regime. Manafort was later found guilty of financial crimes in a U.S. court.
Leshchenko is currently appealing a ruling by one of Kyiv’s least trustworthy courts, which concluded that the leak of the ledger was illegal. Oddly, the court also ruled that the publication of the payments “had the consequence of interference in the electoral processes of the United States of America in 2016 and harmed the interests of the Ukrainian state” — something that seems outside the court’s purview.
Which brings us back to Giuliani. The former mayor has become Trump’s main attack dog. He alleges that Ukraine colluded with the Democratic Party against Trump in 2016. He ignores that, even if a Ukrainian court decides that the leak of the “black ledger” was illegal, all the information in it was of domestic Ukrainian nature. Thus, the release of such information is not interference in the U.S. election.
Giuliani asserts that Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016 in order to protect his son’s business interests in Burisma, a Ukrainian oil company where he sat on the board of directors. He ignores the many experts and anti-corruption activists who have explained: Shokin was fired for being ineffective, and Ukraine’s reformers and Western partners supported that move. There is no evidence that Biden did anything to benefit his son or himself.
During the Fox News interview where Giuliani announced he was canceling his trip, the former mayor spewed conspiracy theories and promised more investigations to come.
Let’s hope Giuliani realizes that putting “America first” means not throwing the country’s allies under the bus, or undermining the U.S. government’s five-plus years of support for Ukraine, or gambling with the fate of a 42-million population that highly depends on America’s support.
He’s most deserving of the Order of Lenin, a prize which he will likely win again before his destruction is over.
