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: Tomáš Petříček
The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 27 that in a meeting with the U.S. ambassador, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban refused to back U.S. calls for NATO members (of which Hungary is one) to more strongly back Ukraine.
No surprise there: Orban, an authoritarian, welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin on official visits to Budapest twice in 2017, and the Hungarian prime minister was in Moscow for talks in September last year. While Orban has said he supports Ukraine over Russia, he also told the U.S. ambassador that Hungary wants to be “neutral, like Austria.”
And actions speak louder than words: Hungary has been secretly handing out passports to Ukraine’s Hungarian ethnic minority in western Ukraine – and in a nation afflicted by “separatism” in its east, that’s a very unfriendly action.
It is good then for Kyiv to receive much firmer support from a near-neighbor, the Czech Republic, whose Foreign Minister Tomáš Petříček made a working visit to Ukraine on Jan. 27-29.
Meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin, Petříček agreed to set up a forum to boost cooperation between their countries. Petříček also visited Mariupol and the front-line town of Hnutove in the war-torn Donbas.
“For the Czech Republic, Ukraine is an integral part of a large European family. The decisive electoral year in your country will have a great influence on the development of relations both in a bilateral and multilateral format,” Petříček said later during a meeting with Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for Euro-Atlantic Integration, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze.
And speaking in an interview with Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform ahead of his visit, Petříček noted how the Czech Republic could support Ukraine via NATO, and how Ukraine could in turn provide valuable knowledge about Russian military tactics: “Ukraine has been turned in Russia´s battlefield not only in a classical military sense but also in applying hybrid methods,” Petříček said. “The alliance should be also on the receiving side of expert advice and information/experience sharing. Generally, partnership and consultation on our activities is an obvious choice. The alliance, in its turn, can support Ukraine in specific domains like cyber, strategic communication or strengthening the resilience of the population by supporting independent media or disclosing fake news, for example.”
The Czech Republic has in the past seen Russian tanks rumbling into its territory uninvited (in 1968, when it was part of Czechoslovakia), and so one would think it natural for Czechs to have some sympathy for Ukraine in its present plight.
But the same is true of Hungary, which got its “visit” from the Russian military earlier, in 1956.
Why the difference? The answer is to be found in current affairs, rather than in history. While Hungary under Orban has lurched towards the populist right, the Czech Republic, under its billionaire businessman Prime Minister Andrej Babis and his centrist ANO party have proved to be more Prague-matic, if you’ll excuse the pun. For instance, while the party’s stance was Euroskeptic ahead of the Czech Republic’s parliamentary elections in 2017, it became decidedly more EU-friendly after them. And while the Czech Republic’s president, Milos Zeman, is pro-Russian, the presidency is limited in its authorities, and the real power lies with Babis and his government.
And as James Traub, wrote on Jan. 28, Babis’ business interests tie him much more closely to the European Union and its liberal values than to Putin’s authoritarian Russia.
Petříček is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for the support he and his government have provided to Ukraine since Russia launched its war in the Donbas. If only more of the nations to Ukraine’s west, which have all suffered from Kremlin imperialism in the past, were so sympathetic and friendly to Kyiv.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Oleg Ivannikov
Ukraine’s SBU security service is rightly criticized for many failings, but in the early stages of Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas it proved that it excels in at least one of the intelligence arts – the interception of communications.
After Russian military intelligence officer Igor “Strelkov” Girkin led his team of about 50 Russian special operations soldiers from Crimea into eastern Ukraine in early April 2014, the Russian force quickly began seizing police, security service, and government buildings in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, taking over Ukraine’s defense and security command-and-control infrastructure in the east.
However, Girkin’s small force required backup from local collaborators to hold the buildings once they were taken, and communications between these groups were clearly conducted through the civilian cellphone network.
After the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, it became obvious that the SBU had thoroughly penetrated the Russian operation’s communications. Moreover, it had been monitoring not only communications between Girkin and local collaborators, but cellphone communications between senior Russian commanders from its military intelligence agency, known as the GRU.
These officers, who of course used fake names and call signs, were in overall control of the operation to create a fake “civil war” to disguise the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. But they also used the local cellphone network for communications, and not a more secure military system.
As public releases of SBU phone intercepts, and analysis of them by groups such as the open-source investigation team Bellingcat have proved, the real name of the GRU officer in charge of deploying in Ukraine the BUK anti-aircraft system that shot down MH17 is Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov.
While Bellingcat provided a positive identification of Ivannikov on May 25 last year, German television channel ZDF’s Frontal21 program on Jan. 29 provided yet more proof of his identity.
Bellingcat had already established that Ivannikov had graduated from Kyiv Military Aviation Engineering Academy in 1988. The German journalists from Frontal21 tracked down one of Ivannikov’s classmates at the academy in Kyiv, Viktor Sekistov, who also confirmed Ivannikov’s identity.
As can be heard from the SBU’s phone intercepts, Ivannikov’s high-pitched voice is distinctive enough even for a person whose native language is not Russian to recognize. Bellingcat, having established Ivannikov’s true identity, managed to track down his home phone number, and call him on two occasions.
Unfortunately, the audio recordings of Ivannovich’s voice the group obtained during these calls were not of the length or quality required to make a cast-iron positive forensic identification, but the evidence is nevertheless extremely compelling. Bellingcat has called on the Russian government to allow Ivannikov to be interviewed, which would allow his identity as the GRU officer in charge of the BUK that shot down MH17 to be proved – or disproved.
Russia has refused to produce Ivannikov, which is telling.
So it is very much to be hoped that in the future Ivannikov can be apprehended, be positively identified, and face whatever charges connected to the shooting down of MH17, and the mass-murder of its 298 passengers and crew, may await him.
However, that is unlikely to happen while Russia is under the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Under Putin, Russia is a rouge state, beyond the rule of international law. Ivannikov will not face trial until Russia rejoins the civilized world.
In the meantime, Ivannikov is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin.
