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: Orkhan Djemal
The Kremlin has given Russian journalism a bad name. Reviving the worst practices of the Soviet era, the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has seized control of the country’s main television channels, the medium via which most Russians still get their news.
While there are still independent newspapers, radio stations and television channels in Russia, they have been marginalized and their reach reduced: TV Rain, for example was forced out of its premises twice, and taken off cable and satellite channels for challenging the Kremlin’s lie that Russian soldiers are not fighting in Ukraine, among other things. Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament then passed a law banning cable channels from carrying advertising in an attempt to drive the channel out of business. It now survives with the support of about 60,000 subscribers, 40 percent of whom live in Moscow.
In contrast, the Kremlin-controlled state TV channels have a massive reach in this country of 144 million people. They feed the vast majority of the Russian public a diet of disinformation and propaganda that allows the Putin regime to swing the public mood in whichever direction it pleases.
Those who work for Kremlin-controlled media, including the propaganda operations that target foreign audiences – RT and Sputnik – can hardly be described as journalists. Like an army of Winston Smiths, they use their knowledge of Kremlin Orthodoxy to mold their output to their masters’ wishes, knowing without being told when to say two plus two equals four, and when to say it equals five.
Nevertheless, there are still a good many principled and ethical journalists in Russia, who continue to produce news rather than propaganda. Through them, we learned of the Kremlin’s troll factory in Saint Petersburg, the secret burials of Russian troops killed in fighting in Ukraine, the participation of Russian troops from Buryatia in the Russian Far East in the battle of Debaltsevo in 2015, the Kremlin’s secret plans to break up Ukraine, and other information Putin would rather not be known.
Once such journalist, Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise, is the late Orkhan Djemal, who was murdered on the evening of July 30 along with two of his colleagues, Alexander Rastorguyev and cameraman Kirill Radchenko, while on assignment in the Central African Republic.
Djemal, one of Russia’s most respected journalists, was investigating the activities of Wagner, a Russian mercenary company connected to an associate of Putin, in the war-torn African state, which is rich in gold, diamonds and uranium. According to researchers with the Moscow-based Conflict Intelligence Team and Transparency International, Wagner could be guarding mines in rebel territory in the republic, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper reported on Aug. 1.
Djemal and his team were working for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch who was jailed in Russia for a decade for opposing Putin. A report by Khodorkovsky’s TsUR investigative media center posted on Facebook said the journalist had planned to film at the Ndassima gold mine, which Wagner troops were reported to be guarding.
While it was initially reported that the journalists were victims of a deadly carjacking when they ventured out of government-controlled areas, later, unconfirmed reports said that the three had been abducted, interrogated and then killed by nine masked men in a location well away from their planned route of travel – which are not the circumstances of a regular armed carjacking.
Wagner is a taboo topic in the Kremlin-controlled media: although Putin has used them in the invasion of Crimea, the war on Ukraine in the Donbas, in the war in Syria, and now in the Central African Republic, such companies are illegal in Russia.
So Russian state media reported on the deaths of the three Russian journalists without mentioning Wagner.
Other deaths have been connected with Wagner. In April, Russian journalist Maxim Borodin, who was investigating Wagner’s activities in Syria, was found dead – apparently having fallen from his fifth-floor balcony. Shortly before he was found dead, in what the authorities said was a suicide, he had told friends by phone that armed, masked men were on the balcony of his apartment and in the stairwell of the building, preparing to raid his home.
While there are still not many firm details concerning the circumstances of the deaths of Djemal and his colleagues, the links to Wagner must raise suspicions. But don’t look to the Kremlin propagandists to shed any light on the matter – that must be done by the real journalists in Russia, of which, thankfully, there are still some.
But tragically, there will be no more brave reporting from Djemal, Rastorguyev, Radchenko, and Borodin – all foes of the Kremlin’s falsehoods, and thus friends of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Jaromír Kohlíček
Almost 50 years ago, on the night of Aug. 20-21, 1968, four members of the Warsaw Pact launched an invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, a movement for reform, liberalization and democratization in that now defunct communist state.
Czechoslovakia was also a member of the Warsaw Pact at the time, and the invasion laid bare the fact that the military grouping was not primarily a defense organization, but a means by which the Soviet Union could maintain domination over its satellite states.
The invasion cost the lives of 137 civilians, with another 500 being injured. A quarter of a million troops from the Soviet Union, Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland took part in the initial assault, with the total number of invading troops rising to 500,000 over the course of the operation. The invaders met no resistance from the armed forces of Czechoslovakia, who were ordered to remain in their barracks. The barracks were soon surrounded by invading troops – just as happened to Ukrainian forces in Crimea in late February and March 2014.
Jaromír Kohlíček, who is a Czech member of the European Parliament, was 15 when his country was invaded by Kremlin-led forces. He was born in 1953 in Tiplice in the north-west of the Czech Republic, in the area that was once known as the Sudentenland. His native region was invaded and annexed by Nazi Germany in October 1938, with 115,000 Czechs fleeing the area to the rump Czechoslovakia shortly after. After the end of World War II, when the communists took power in Soviet-liberated Czechoslovakia, some 2.4 million ethnic Germans were deported from the country, either to the American- or Soviet- occupied zones of Germany.
One would think, therefore, that Kohlíček is probably well acquainted with the ugly consequences of military invasions and occupations. However, this did not stop him from illegally entering the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, which has been under military occupation by Kremlin forces since late February 2014.
Kohlíček, a communist, apparently entered Ukraine illegally on July 29, attending a display by Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol and meeting local lawmakers. According to a news website in Sevastapol, Kohlíček wants to write a detailed report of his visit when he returns, “so that ordinary Czechs know that beautiful people live here, and that their lives are changing for the better.”
That would come as a surprise to the Crimean Tatars on the peninsula, who since the Russian invasion have suffered a wave of repression and abuses of their rights. But Kohlíček, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin, is obviously not interested in informing ordinary Czechs about the true situation in Crimea – he would rather aid the Kremlin is spreading its propaganda and normalizing its occupation of Ukraine’s territory.
And Kohlíček, who is a member of the European Parliament’s delegation to the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Association Committee, could have entered Ukraine legally of course – visits to Crimea by politicians such as he are possible if a permit is granted by the Ukrainian authorities and entry is made via mainland Ukraine.
Instead, Kohlíček chose to show his contempt for Ukrainian and international law by entering the country illegally.
Moreover, this is not the first time he has shown such contempt, both for Ukraine and the policies of the European Union: In April he attended the Moscow-organized Yalta Economic Forum, where he criticized the European Union’s sanctions against Russia for its illegal occupation of the Ukrainian territory.
Kohlíček also proved himself a stooge of the Kremlin in the wake of the April 7 chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, which he ludicrously described as “an amateur theater… staged by the United States.”
The Kremlin has tried to cast doubt on the facts of this and other chemical weapons attacks in Syria, which were most likely carried out by the forces of the Kremlin’s ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Kohlíček has also praised Russia’s “humanitarian actions in Syria, which have been ignored by the mainstream media,” according to Sputnik, a Russian propaganda outlet that masquerades as a news medium. Since at least September 2015, and possibly before, Russia has been involved in military actions in civilian areas in Syria in which hundreds of civilians have been killed, supporting Assad’s forces as they crush a rebel uprising.
Kohlíček’s disregard for Ukrainian law should earn him a three-year ban from entering Ukraine, but given that he has already ignored entry rules for Crimea at least twice, we doubt that will stop him from repeating the offense. It’s thus high time the European Union itself took action against those of its representatives who flagrantly breach Ukrainian and international law.
The union is supposed to be based, among other things, on the principle of the rule of law. The actions of Kohlíček and other Kremlin allies in the West undermine that principle, and strong disciplinary actions should be taken against them, both by the European Parliament and by the authorities of their home countries.
