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: George Soros
When John Solomon (see Ukraine’s Foe of the Week below) wrote in an article for U.S. political newspaper the Hill published on March 20 that Ukrainian prosecutors were probing the activities of a Ukrainian civil society anti-corruption group, he noted that this group was co-funded by the international financier and philanthropist George Soros.
Solomon said the group, the Anti-Corruption Action Center, which was also funded by the United States under the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama, had been protected by the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv: “Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of … (the Anti-Corruption Action Center),” Solomon wrote.
He also described Soros in the article as a “liberal mega-donor.” He went on to claim that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had told him that prosecutors in Kyiv were planning to investigate persons who “leaked” information about Paul Manafort, the one-time campaign manager of U.S. President Donald Trump, in what he claimed was an effort to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
There appears to no reason to mention Soros in the article other than as a dog whistle to the conservative right, who have disparaged Soros as some sort of liberal puppet master. Worse, as Soros is Jewish, there are obvious anti-Semitic overtones to the inclusion of Soros’s name in conservative conspiracy theories. Soros, for instance, is regularly demonized by the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a nationalist-populist with authoritarian leanings. Soros is of Hungarian origin – he was born in Budapest in 1930.
It is a measure of how far political conditions have degenerated in the West that Soros should be so demonized. A successful financier with a current estimated fortune of $8 billion, Soros has plowed $32 billion into his Open Society Foundations, a grant-making body that supports civil society groups around the world, with the stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media.
Ukraine in particular has benefited from the various programs that his philanthropic organization has funded. (Disclosure: this writer received a Soros scholarship grant to teach English in Ukraine in 1994-95).
Soros has attracted criticism because he has made money betting on financial markets, particularly the value of currencies, when he has detected that a currency is overvalued and that there will soon be a market correction. Notable cases include his shorting of the Pound Sterling ahead of the United Kingdom crashing out of the European Exchange-rate Mechanism in 1992 – a transaction that earned him an estimated $1 billion due to the plunge in the value of the pound. Another case was in 1997, when Soros sold short the Thai baht and the Malaysian ringgit, again making substantial profits when the value of the currencies dropped.
The ability of Soros to spot and profit from these currency corrections has led some, without any evidence whatsoever, to accuse the financier of orchestrating the situations in the first place. This plays into far-right anti-Semitic tropes about a Jewish cabal being in control of the world’s financial markets.
And it is poisonous nonsense.
But since 2014, when Russia under the regime of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin unleashed war on Ukraine, such anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been aired more and more frequently in the West, which has also seen a rise in the visibility, and platforming in the media, of extreme nationalist and populist parties on the far-right and far-left of the political spectrum. The rise of such extremist parties in the West has coincided with support for them from the Kremlin, both financial and in the form of propaganda in traditional and social media.
Would Soros attract such criticism if he were not Jewish? Plenty of non-Jewish financiers have done just as he has done, but have not been demonized.
Soros has also become a target for conservatives and the far-right in the West due to his support for liberal candidates, particularly from the Democratic Party in the United States, and for his support for civil society – the bane of authoritarian rulers worldwide. He was even subjected to an attempted terror attack – a mail-bomb was sent to his residence in Katonah, NY, in October 2018. Soros was not there at the time.
Soros in Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for his staunch support for civil society, especially in Ukraine and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989-1991. His vision was to recognize that the emergence of a vibrant civil society, such as has developed in Ukraine since the Orange and EuroMaidan revolutions, is key to staving off the ceaseless attempts by the far-right and authoritarians to corrupt our societies and encroach upon our freedoms. In supporting the Anti-Corruption Action Center, Soros shows that he is indeed a true friend of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: John Solomon
As the smoke cleared this week from the impact of Mueller report bombshell, efforts were already under way to cast Ukraine, not Russia, as the 2016 U.S. presidential election bogeyman.
Kremlin propagandists, with conscious disregard for U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s report on the findings of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, gleefully claimed it was Ukraine, not Russia that had intervened in the U.S. presidential election on behalf of Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.
In fact, Barr’s summary of the findings of the Mueller report quite clearly states that Russia did indeed attempt to influence the result of the 2016 election. And far from clearing the campaign of U.S. President Donald Trump of collusion with Russia, Mueller appears to have found (the report has not been made public, we only have Barr’s short summary of it to go on) that the evidence of collusion was simply not strong enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it occurred – not that it didn’t occur at all.
Nevertheless, the headlines blared in the U.S. press and elsewhere that there was “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, rather than the more accurate and nuanced reading of Barr’s report.
While the U.S. and Western press has no excuse for misrepresenting the Barr report, observers of Kremlin propaganda expected nothing else from the media in Russia: And it was tiresomely predictable that Kremlin-controlled media would immediately use the Mueller report to smear Ukraine.
But what was less predictable, and especially galling, was that it was political forces in Kyiv that breathed life back into a long-since-killed-off story that Ukraine tried to influence the U.S. presidential election, a story now pushed again by Kremlin hacks. On top of that, it was a U.S. reporter, John Solomon, who works for the U.S. political newspaper The Hill, who was used to transmit the story to Trump via the Fox news channel, in the process showing how easily foreign actors can game the current U.S. president via unscrupulous media.
Melinda Haring, the editor of the UkraineAlert blog at the Atlantic Council and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, described in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post on March 26 how the scheme works: “Find some way to connect your pet peeve to the president’s obsession with the 2016 election; find someone who can get on (Fox News); hope that Trump is watching and tweeting; sit back and watch the fun.”
In Ukraine, the pet peeve for supporters of President Petro Poroshenko was a rare burst of sharp criticism in a speech on March 5 by U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch about Ukraine’s failure to tackle corruption.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko responded by making the bizarre and unsubstantiated claim that Yovanovitch had given him a list of “untouchables” whom he should not prosecute. The U.S. embassy denied the claim, and there is no reason to believe it. Nevertheless, calls were soon coming for Yovanovitch’s dismissal.
And in an interview published by the Hill on March 20 Lutsenko also told Solomon, the person who could get his story on Fox News, that he was considering prosecuting people in Ukraine he claims were trying to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The means of influence was to leak information about Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager at the time: Manafort is suspected of taking millions of dollars in illegal payments from Ukraine’s then pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Solomon promptly appeared on Fox News to repeat Lutsenko’s claims. Before long, Trump, an avid watcher of Fox, was tweeting the claim to his millions of social media followers. The resurrected “Ukraine collusion” story was soon lumbering, Frankenstein’s monster-like, across the dismal right-wing media landscape of the United States.
Solomon, whom the Columbia Journalism Review has repeated accused of biased reporting in favor of a conservative viewpoint, is the vital link in the chain from Kyiv’s political operatives to Trump’s agitated Twitter thumbs. It is clear from Solomon’s interview with Lutsenko that the U.S. journalist’s view of Ukraine is slanted, and clouded by ignorance: For instance, he describes Lutsenko as being “widely regarded as a hero in the West for spending two years in prison after fighting Russian aggression in his country” – a claim as completely ludicrous as it is completely false.
Solomon also makes no mention of Lutsenko’s abject failure as prosecutor general to prosecute any senior Ukrainian official, nor does he mention the speech by Yovanovitch that appears to have triggered Lutsenko’s desire to resurrect the “Ukraine collusion” story. For this, he is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin. Ukraine has enough problems with fake news from Russia; it should not have its image tarnished by fake news from the West as well.
