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: Cindy McCain
Many Ukrainians remember with fondness the late Republican Senator from Arizona John McCain, who was one of the strongest supporters of Ukrainians’ efforts to shake off post-Soviet authoritarianism and Kremlin influence. He regularly visited the country, and was there to witness firsthand the events of the Orange Revolution in 2004, the EuroMaidan Revolution of 2013-2014, and Russia’s subsequent war on Ukraine in the Donbas.
It is fitting, therefore, that Cindy McCain, the wife of the late senator, who died in August 2018, should be here in Ukraine to monitor Ukraine’s latest democratic elections, the 2019 presidential elections. This exercise in democracy is one of the main achievements of the revolutions her husband supported.
“John was an ardent supporter of the Ukrainian people and their stand for freedom,” Cindy McCain wrote in a tweet on March 29, which was posted together with a picture of her husband looking out over Maidan Nezalezhnosti, across a sea of tiny lights from cellphones, and taking a picture of the amazing sight himself.
“He called his 2013 visit during the Euromaidan ‘one of the most moving experiences I have ever had… I have never seen anything like what we witnessed.’ I now understand why he loved Ukraine,” Cindy McCain’s tweet went on.
Earlier, she had announced her participation in the International Republican Institution’s election observation mission in a tweet on March 28: “I can think of no better way to honor my husband’s legacy than to demonstrate continued support for freedom in the country my husband cared for so deeply. I am proud to be part of the (International Republican Institution’s) Ukraine election observation mission.”
This will have been very much appreciated by many Ukrainians, who, after five years of war, resisting Kremlin aggression and creeping Russian encroachments on their territory, sometimes feel they have been forgotten by the world. Indeed, Ukraine’s 2019 presidential elections made the headlines internationally not because a country effectively at war was capable of organizing and holding free and fair elections in a peaceful and orderly fashion: The foreign news media instead focused on the fact that one of the candidates is a comedian and actor.
So despite the fact that the United States is now led by a reality television star with long-standing shady ties to the Kremlin, and that politics in the United Kingdom, through the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, have descended into a shambolic farce, Ukraine was presented by the media as something of a laughable political oddity, only worth a mention because an unusual populist was leading in the polls.
But democracy is no joke, and the fact that Ukrainians are for the second time holding genuinely competitive presidential elections just five years after the state was on the brink of collapse is the real story of these elections.
Cindy McCain is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a worthy winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for drawing the world’s attention back to the serious side of these elections, and actively participating in the arduous and responsible task of monitoring them. The McCain name will long be associated with Ukraine’s battle to escape the grip of the Kremlin, and to rejoin the family of civilized nations.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Olga Skabeeva
A previous Foe of the Week of Ukraine, and winner of the odious Order of Lenin, Kremlin propagandist Olga Skabeeva has been vigorously slandering Ukrainian democracy for weeks. On April 1, the day the results of the first round of voting in the March 31 presidential election started to be officially released, Skabeeva tweeted a picture of a surprised-looking boar, with eyes colored yellow and blue like the Ukrainian flag. The text along with the picture read: “Elections in the (Chinese) Year of the Pig, results released on April Fool’s Day, (and) a clown in the lead.”
It has been the policy of the Kremlin to suggest that Ukraine’s elections are illegitimate since early in the year, when Ukraine refused to accredit some 24 Russian observers of the presidential election. The Russians were to have been part of a mission sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
It was of course absurd for the Kremlin or the OSCE to expect that Ukraine would allow its enemy to monitor its elections – the Kremlin would have made every effort to undermine their legitimacy, as they have done with other votes (the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 comes to mind.)
Instead, the Kremlin has been reduced to screaming from the sidelines about the unfairness of it all, and insinuating that Ukraine’s democratic elections have been rigged. Skabeeva is one of the main Kremlin cheerleaders for this game of deception.
In fact, at least as far as the first round goes, Ukraine’s presidential election has been free and fair according to the hundreds of bona fide election observers that have come to Ukraine to monitor it. The only ones likely to believe the Kremlin’s false claims are Russian television viewers and useful idiots in the West who unquestioningly swallow the Kremlin-controlled media’s propaganda.
That doesn’t stop Skabeeva lying about them, of course. But it’s hard to lie all the time, and sometimes the truth slips out – even from a master propagandist like Skabeeva.
And that’s what happened when Skabeeva was discussing the Ukrainian elections live on television with her co-propagandist partner Yevgenniy Popov on April 1. At one point in their exchange, Popov says he doesn’t care which candidates wins the Ukrainian presidential election, to which Skabeeva, evidently in a fit of forgetfulness, replies: “We’re not on television now, you can tell the truth.”
The gaffe was picked up by Russian media expert Julia Davis (who kindly watches Kremlin propaganda television so the rest of us don’t have to), and tweeted to the world. Skabeeva’s tweeted response was a plaintive “Liar.”
With the rise of populist and extremist political parties and personalities in Europe and the West, supported and in some cases even funded by Russia, democracy is currently on the back foot. The Kremlin has done its best in recent years to pollute public political discourse in the social media in democratic countries by accentuating divisions in Western societies.
But there are signs that the public in the West are wising up. Kremlin trolls are becoming an object of ridicule, the Kremlin and Russia’s image is being trashed by its thuggish and aggressive tone, and Kremlin propaganda media like RT and Sputnik are increasingly shunned, by journalists and the public alike.
Of course Skabeeva and her ilk care who wins in Ukraine. And they are concerned that even after five years of war with Russia, Ukraine is still a functioning democracy that, if anything, is getting stronger.
The Russian media, while ridiculing Ukrainian democracy, are fascinated and at the same time terrified of it – they, and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, know that if Russians were ever free to choose their own leader, and their minds were not addled by constant television propaganda, the Kremlin regime would be done for.
So no matter who wins Ukraine’s presidential election, the Kremlin will be keeping a close watch. And perhaps Popov was even telling the truth – for the Kremlin, it makes little difference which person is democratically elected in Ukraine: For it, the enemy is democracy itself.
