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: John E. Herbst
Ever since Russia launched its war on Ukraine, there have been arguments over whether to provide Ukraine will lethal weapons to fend off Kremlin aggression.
Those who were against providing Ukraine weapons argued that doing so risked “provoking the Kremlin” and escalating the war.
But they have been proved wrong. There has been no major fighting on land in eastern Ukraine since July 2017, when there was a battle on the Bakhmut highway in Luhansk Oblast. The United States approved the supply of Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine in December 2017 (U.S. President Donald Trump was reportedly unenthusiastic about the move) and the U.S. State Department confirmed on April 30, 2018 that the weapons were in Ukraine.
While the Kremlin has indeed been aggressive of late – attacking and capturing three Ukrainian navy vessels in international waters in the Black Sea on Nov. 25 – this was not due to the supply of the Javelins. It was because Russia, thwarted on land, has shifted its focus to asserting control of the Azov Sea. Javelins are a potent deterrent against a Russian tank offensive, but are not much use against warships.
So former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John E. Herbst’s call for the United States to supply Ukraine with from six to 12 Mark V patrol boats, equipped with at least Harpoon anti-ship missiles, is timely, logical, and correct.
In an article posted on the Atlantic Council think tank’s website on Jan. 4, Herbst, the director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council, also says the United States should supply Ukraine 50 to 100 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles to protect its vulnerable coasts.
Ahead of the inevitable wails of protest from the Kremlin and its choir of useful idiots in the West that will come in response to Herbst’s call, it should again be pointed out that the weapons proposed for supply to Ukraine are defensive weapons. Mark V patrol boats are 25 meters long and weigh 57 tons. A dozen of them, even equipped with Harpoon missiles, would hardly by a threat to Russia’s control of the Azov Sea.
They would, however, inflict painful losses on any Russian forces attacking Ukraine from the sea – they are a threat to Russia only in the sense that they threaten the Kremlin’s ability carry out aggression against Ukraine.
Herbst is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for highlighting the issue of the imbalance of forces in the Azov Sea and suggesting a sensible remedy. A weak, vulnerable Ukraine invites attack from the bully Putin, and, as has been demonstrated on land, providing Ukraine with defensive weapons will again blunt Russian aggression, only this time at sea.
And like Cato, who reputedly ended all his speeches with “Furthermore, I think Carthage should be destroyed,” we will end with our regular call for increased, well-targeted sanctions against the Kremlin regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
If Putin and his cronies had been punished hard with painful sanctions as soon as Russia invaded and occupied Ukraine’s Crimea, we might never have had to argue about the pros and cons of arming Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Paul Manafort
An apparent redaction error by the lawyers of Paul Manafort, made in court papers filed on Jan. 8, again revealed what a foe the former U.S. political consultant is to Ukraine.
According to redacted text in the document, which could be recovered simply by copying the blacked-out portion into a new text document, Manafort met with Russian citizen Konstantin Kilimnik, who has been linked to the Russian intelligence services, in Madrid, Spain in early 2017.
Kilimnik told REF/RL in an interview in February 2017 that he had drafted a peace plan for Ukraine that would have seen former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych return to Ukraine to rule to parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that Russia has occupied since April 2014. He called it the “Mariupol Peace Plan.”
It is as yet unclear whether Manafort discussed the Kilimnik plan when the two met in Madrid, but the fact that Manafort had “forgotten” about the meeting and only “recalled” it when prosecutors showed him they knew Kilimnik had been in the Spanish capital on the same day he was there, is highly suspicious.
Manafort, of course, is the architect of many of Ukraine’s present woes, having helped Yanukovych, a kleptocratic authoritarian, back into power following the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. The Orange Revolution was a series of large-scale public protests that prevented Yanukovych from seizing the presidency in the rigged 2004 presidential election.
The court filings that inadvertently revealed the information about Manafort’s links to Kilimnik (they also indicated that Manafort, the one-time campaign manager for current U.S. President Donald Trump, passed campaign polling data to Kilimnik) were made because prosecutors believe Manafort violated the terms of a pleas bargain by lying to them. Manafort has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges linked to his work for politicians in Ukraine.
But the most troubling revelation is that Manafort has clearly had a long relationship with a Russian citizen, Kilimnik, who is highly likely to be a member of the Russian intelligence services. Many suspect Kilimnik is an officer of the GRU, the Kremlin’s infamous military intelligence service.
This relationship existed before, through and after the 2016 presidential election in the United States, adding to already weighty circumstantial evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to achieve the election of the current U.S. president.
No doubt more such evidence will emerge if U.S. prosecutors continue to jog the memory of the forgetful Manafort. In the meantime, for the latest revelations of ties to Ukraine’s deadliest foes in Moscow, and his attempts to cover them up, we have plenty of reason to name him Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin.
