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, 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Kurt Volker
As leaders of the West, along with U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, gathered in France on Nov. 11 to mark 100 years since the end of the fighting on the Western Front in World War I, countries of Eastern Europe and especially Ukraine, had reason to feel sidelined and overlooked.
Firstly, Nov. 11, 1918 did not mark the end of the fighting in Europe. The collapse of the Central Powers left Central and Eastern Europe in turmoil, and fighting continued, with Poland, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Latvians on one side, and Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine on the other. These states that would later form the Soviet Union.
The warfare in the east ended only on Oct. 18, 1920, nearly two years after the Western European armistice, with Poland and Latvia successfully defending their statehood, but part of Ukraine coming under Polish control and Ukrainian independence being snuffed out until 1991. The Treaty of Riga on March 18, 1921 set the lines on the map of Eastern Europe until the area was carved up again by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939.
Secondly, as the leaders of Europe talked solemnly of never allowing war to return to Europe, they seemed to ignore the fact that war is still going on in Europe, and has been for more than four years. A bitter, stalemated, trench war that started with the Kremlin’s military intervention in the Donbas in April 2011, rages on in eastern Ukraine.
Moreover, that very Armistice Day, the Kremlin was underscoring more changes it wants to make to the map. In defiance of the Minsk Protocol that it signed, Moscow held sham elections in the Donbas to formally install leaders it earlier selected to run its administrations in the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts Russia has occupied.
There was one prominent voice, however, talking about Ukraine and condemning Kremlin aggression – that of Kurt Volker, the U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, who is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and now three-time winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise.
Volker slammed the Kremlin’s fake elections in terms we wish we had heard from Western leaders on Nov. 11 and from the first days of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The “so-called ‘People’s Republics’ have no place in the Minsk agreements and are illegitimate tools supported by Russia’s military might and created by Russia to administer Ukrainian territory it controls by force,” he tweeted on Nov. 11.
“The people in eastern Ukraine will be better off within a unified Ukraine at peace rather than in a second-rate police state run by crooks and thugs, all subsidized by Russian taxpayers,” Volker added, after tweeting a comprehensive list of all the ways the Kremlin has broken the commitments it made in Minsk in February 2015.
We commend the special envoy’s plain-speaking bluntness. Faced with Kremlin mendacity, the correct response should be to speak the truth loud and clear, and not, as so many Western leaders and media have done – and still do – which is, use the misleading vocabulary of Kremlin propaganda. For instance, Crimea has not been annexed by Russia. Moscow claims to have annexed this Ukrainian territory, but these claims are false, as territories under military occupation, such as Ukraine’s Crimea, cannot be annexed according to international law. There is no “Ukraine crisis” but a war on Ukraine that was instigated by Russia. Separatists did not win “elections” in “rebel-held” areas by “big margins,” as the Associated Press ludicrously reported. In fact, the Kremlin-picked proxy leaders were installed by a rigged, fake vote in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
They need not parrot the propaganda of the Kremlin, and is better if Western leaders simply keep silent on Ukraine, as they did on Nov. 11. It would be even better if they adopted the tone of Volker, and spoke clearly about the only war currently going on in Europe – Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Patrick Poppel
Russia went ahead and held sham elections in the parts of the Donbas it has occupied, formally installing leaders who had assumed their posts after the overthrow by coup and assassination of their respective predecessors.
The elections, which were a clear breach of the commitments made by the Kremlin under the 2015 Minsk II peace agreement, were condemned by Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States, among others.
The elections, of course, returned the Kremlin’s candidates – by comfortable and not too incredible margins – but the results of this mockery of democracy were never in any doubt, and no other candidate got more than 20 percent. Even the locals, when nobody in a position of authority (i.e. carrying a gun) was in earshot, described this fakery as “vyberie bes vybera” – a Russian play on words meaning “elections without a choice.”
But to maintain at least a pretense of legitimacy, the Kremlin, as is usual on such occasions, brought in a motley collection of fringe foreign politicians from the extreme left and right to act as “observers.”
One of them was Patrick Poppel, the general secretary of the Austria-based pro-Kremlin Suvorov Institute – an organization promoting friendship between Austria and Russia, named after the 18th century Russian military leader and national hero, General Alexander Suvorov.
Poppel, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week, and the winner of an Order of Lenin, is an old hand at legitimizing sham elections carried out illegally by the Kremlin on Ukraine’s territory: He was present in Crimea on March 18, when the Kremlin illegally held Russian presidential elections on the peninsula, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014. The date of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “reelection” as Kremlin leader (there was never any doubt he would win) was picked especially so as to coincide with the date that Russia claimed, falsely, to have annexed Crimea in 2014.
Poppel was there to give the election his stamp of approval, as he was in the Donbas on Nov. 11. He will probably turn up next time some sham vote has to be “observed” in Russian-occupied Ukraine or somewhere else the Kremlin is doing its meddling.
But who is Poppel? He is a former member of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party who left because he felt it wasn’t taking a strong enough stand against the “Islamization” of Europe (he denies being a fascist.) He does, however, want to deport “non-indigenous” people from Austria, and calls for the defense of “Christian civilization” against the spread of homosexuality and feminism.
He is, in short, the kind of far-right, illiberal, useful idiot that the Kremlin has for years co-opted for its various schemes, from “legitimizing” sham votes to stoking political divisions in the West. In exchange for their help, such figures get some Kremlin kudos to help push their petty agendas in their own nationalist and far-right circles.
Still Poppel is a nobody, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the Kremlin is failing to attract any more prominent Western figures to its cause. Certainly, nobody more prominent than former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has publicly joined the Kremlin camp in recent years.
Moscow has even started to alienate its allies in Western governments, such as Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, who only in August hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin at her wedding in southern Austria: Kneissl canceled a planned visit to Russia on Nov. 9 following the arrest of a retired Austrian general whom it was claimed had spied for Russia for 20 years.
So why does the Kremlin even bother with sham elections like the ones on Nov. 11, when all they achieve is condemnation from the civilized world?
Leonid Bershidsky, writing for Bloomberg, reckons the Kremlin simply no longer cares what the world thinks, and that Putin may now moving ahead with plans to turn the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine fully-fledged puppet states.
He may be right: Russia has never respected the Minsk agreements, and there seems to be little reason for it to start now. There would be no advantage in allowing, as has been proposed, a United Nations peacekeeping force access to the Russian-occupied Donbas to bring an end to the fighting. Indeed, as soon as Russia loses control of the 400 kilometer stretch of border with the occupied areas, its adventure in Ukraine will fast come to an end.
The only other option for the Kremlin is to form some puppet states, and for that you need puppet leaders and sham elections – world condemnation be damned.
Meanwhile, let’s hope Poppel soon earns his three-year ban from Ukraine for illegally entering the country, and that we never hear of him again.
