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: Eliot Engel
Eliot Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. Congress, went one better than voicing full support for the “Crimea Annexation Non-recognition Act,” ahead of its passing by the House of Representatives.
Engel also said he fully supported Ukraine’s accession to NATO while speaking on March 11 in support of the bill – bi-partisan legislation that prohibits Federal departments or agencies from doing anything that would imply U.S. recognition of Russia’s claim to have annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.
The bill was passed by the house on March 12, with 427 representatives voting for. Three representatives did not vote, and one voted against: Thomas Massie, the Republican representative for Kentucky’s 4th congressional district – a pro-Kremlin Congressman who in the past has voted against U.S. aid for Ukraine and extending sanctions on Russia.
Although joining NATO is a strategic goal of Ukraine, now enshrined in its constitution, politicians in the West are still too wary of expressing support for the country joining the defensive alliance – presumably for fear of appearing too hawkish and offending Russia, perhaps prompting it into taking military action.
That is a nonsensical argument. Recall NATO’s Bucharest Summit in April 2008, when the alliance decided against granting Ukraine and Georgia a Membership Action Plan – a pathway to joining the alliance. The feeling then was that giving Ukraine and Georgia membership prospects would provoke Russia: “We are opposed to the entry of Georgia and Ukraine because we think that it is not a good answer to the balance of power within Europe and between Europe and Russia,” French Prime Minister François Fillon reportedly said in a radio interview during the summit, according to the Washington Post.
And speaking ahead of the summit, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin warned that Ukraine’s accession into NATO would cause a “deep crisis” in Kyiv’s relations with Moscow. He added that any incorporation of Ukraine into the alliance would also badly hurt Russia’s relations with the West, CNN reported at the time.
Yet within four months of the alliance’s rejection of Ukraine and Georgia, the Kremlin had launched a war of aggression against Georgia, biting off two chunks of its territory that it occupies to this day. Six years later, the Kremlin had already invaded and occupied Ukraine’s Crimea and was preparing to launch a fake “civil war” in mainland Ukraine, in the Donbas.
Kyiv’s relations with Moscow are now in deep crisis, and Russia’s relations with the West have been badly hurt – even though in 2008 NATO cowered away from the Kremlin. Had the alliance gone ahead with starting the process of Ukraine and Georgia’s accession to NATO in 2008, we might not be in the position we are now, with a revanchist Russia having started two simmering conflicts and threating regional stability.
Long-term, Ukraine’s security depends on either joining NATO or, like Sweden and Finland, becoming interoperable with alliance armies to the extent that is a member of the alliance in all but name. The days of NATO being bullied by the Kremlin into dropping membership prospects for states should be long gone. Backing down in the face of Kremlin threats has done no good at all – indeed, it has made the situation worse.
Realistic prospects of membership of the alliance should be offered to both Ukraine and Georgia, and aid in bringing their militaries into line with NATO standards should be stepped up. That is the best answer to the question of the balance of power between Europe and Russia.
Engel is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for helping to underscore that point.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Karin Kneissl
Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, who invited Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to her wedding in August 2018 and presented him with a publicity coup by dancing with him, waltzed off to St. Petersburg on March 11 for a meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.
Kneissl and Lavrov are also on friendly terms, Kneissl said in an interview before their meeting, because they take smoke breaks together while doing diplomacy.
And the Austrian foreign minister perhaps has other reasons for her fondness of Russia, an authoritarian police state: she was nominated to her post by the Austrian Freedom Party or FPO, a far-right, populist, national-conservative political party founded by a former Nazi. The FPO signed a “cooperation agreement” with United Russia, the main pro-Putin party in Russia in 2016, two years after the Kremlin launched its war of aggression in Ukraine.
FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache, who is also Austria’s vice-chancellor, last June called for the end of the European Union’s sanctions against Russia, imposed after the Kremlin invaded and started to occupy the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and then orchestrated a fake civil war in the Donbas.
Moreover, Austrian business is also heavily invested in Russia: Austria’s foreign direct investment in Russia stood at $7 billion in 2017, while in Ukraine in the same year it was $1.3 billion.
So the current Austrian government, and Kneissl herself, are clearly no great friends of Ukraine. But what makes Kneissl this week’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin is her claim on March 7 that Ukraine was “censoring” an Austrian journalist by banning him from Ukraine.
The journalist, Christian Wehrschuetz, who heads the Kyiv bureau of Austrian public broadcaster ORF, was banned from entering Ukraine for a year on March 7. According to Ukraine’s SBU security service, Wehrschuetz broke Ukraine’s entry/exit rules while in Crimea in July 2018 by crossing from the Ukrainian peninsula to Russia and back via the Kerch Bridge.
Wehrschuetz denies this, saying he sent a local Crimean camera crew across the bridge to Russia to get some footage, while he himself remained on the Ukrainian side of the illegal structure.
Reviewing Wehrschuetz’s reports for ORF, it is hard to see what Ukraine would gain from “censoring” his work. Wehrschuetz has been accused of having a pro-Russian bias, and he reports frequently from the Russian-occupied Donbas. He presents Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas as a conflict between the Ukrainian state and rebels supported by Russia, rather than an actual occupation of Ukrainian territory by Russian-led forces, which include Russian regular army troops.
However, this may be a condition imposed on him by the Russian-occupation authorities in the Donbas, which do practice censorship, as is shown by leaked e-mails of their internal discussions about which foreign journalists should be granted accreditation.
And as Ukraine’s Ambassador to Austria Oleksandr Scherba pointed out on March 12 after he was summoned to the Austrian Foreign Ministry over the affair, a delegation of Austrian journalists, some critical of Ukraine, had in early March visited Ukraine and gained accreditation for the government-controlled part of the Donbas.
“They had no problem with entering Ukraine or accreditation in the Joint Forces Operation zone (in the Donbas). Those journalists simply have an elementary respect for Ukraine and its legislation,” Scherba said.
Scherba reiterated the Ukrainian position that Wehrschuetz had been banned for breaking entry/exit rules, and had been given a lenient one-year ban instead of the usual three-year penalty for this offense.
Wehrschuetz has said he and ORF will fight the ban in the courts. Ukraine will have to prove that he broke the country’s laws, the journalist said.
In the meantime, for Kneissl to make the allegation of censorship is premature, and unfriendly to Ukraine, as is her subsequent threat to raise the issue at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on March 18.
“We support the principles of the EU, but we try to keep strong ties with Russia,” Kneissl told journalists following talks with Lavrov, AFP reported.
But a much better way of supporting the principles of the EU would be for Kneissl to visit Kyiv and help repair Ukrainian-Austrian relations, which have been strained of late. Ukraine is, after all, a much stronger advocate of those same principles of the EU than the Kremlin has ever been.
