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: Jeremy Hunt
Jeremy Hunt, the United Kingdom’s new foreign secretary, is not the best-liked politician in Britain. His previous job of health secretary, overseeing the UK’s beloved National Health Service, subjected him to bruising confrontations with the doctors’ and nurses’ unions, in which the public perceived him as being the bad guy.
While he campaigned against the UK’s absurd decision to quit the European Union, he has since changed his mind and now backs Brexit, suggesting that for him, party politics are more important than sticking to a principled position.
And like his predecessor at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the buffoon Boris Johnson, Hunt is also prone to gaffes – on his first trip aboard as foreign secretary, to China, he mistakenly said his Chinese-born wife was Japanese.
As culture secretary, Hunt apparently wanted Adolf Hitler to feature in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, and for there to be a section of the show dedicated to World War II.
BBC radio presenters also seem to have uncommon difficulty in pronouncing his name, which has earned him an impolite nickname in broadcasting circles and beyond.
But Hunt is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for the stand he has taken on increasing sanctions on Russia for its illegal behavior. While visiting Washington, D.C. on Aug. 21, Hunt gave a speech in which he called on the European Union to stiffen its sanctions regime on Moscow.
“Today the United Kingdom asks its allies to go further by calling on the EU to ensure its sanctions against Russia are comprehensive, and that we truly stand shoulder to shoulder with the U.S.” Hunt said.
“That means calling out and responding to transgressions with one voice whenever and wherever they occur, from the streets of Salisbury to the fate of Crimea.
“Of course we must engage with Moscow, but we must also be blunt: Russia’s foreign policy under President (Vladimir) Putin has made the world a more dangerous place.”
Hunt’s call for stronger sanctions against Russia is particularly important at this time, with Kremlin-backed parties having entered power in Italy and Austria, and pro-Moscow leaders in office in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, Germany is flirting with the Kremlin by backing its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which would increase Europe’s dependence on the Kremlin for energy, and thus Moscow’s political influence on the West.
While the EU has so far remained steady in applying sanctions on Russia, there are increasing calls from extremist and populist parties on the left and the right, which the Kremlin has courted politically over the years, for the sanctions to be weakened or removed.
In contrast, Hunt is correct to call on the EU to come into line with the United States, which recently imposed punishing personal sanctions against figures close to the Kremlin regime, such as oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
After four years, the Kremlin continues to occupy the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and is still stoking war in the Donbas. The present EU sanctions regime is too soft. It’s time to give it some sharper teeth, and make more of Putin’s cronies feel its bite.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Karin Kneissl
It’s always a problem drawing up guest lists for weddings. Immediate relations are a must, even if they don’t always get on – seating them strategically at the wedding table can help.
Friends of the bride and groom, and their parents, are next most important: wedding planners have more freedom to choose here, but they still have to be careful not to offend those who don’t make the guest-list cut. Other considerations might be if they have boisterous children or, even worse, boisterous significant others.
Work colleagues are a little further down the list, usually, and again have to be carefully chosen so as cause undue offense if someone who expects an invite doesn’t get one.
However, most couples would not even think of causing general offense to entire nations by inviting the sinister dictator of a nuclear-armed, neo-fascist, rogue police state to their wedding – unless, of course, the bride-to-be is Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl.
Kneissl, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the odious Order of Lenin, had Russian President Vladimir Putin as guest of honor at her wedding in the southern Austrian province of Styria on Aug. 18.
Putin was in his element: Speaking slightly accented German, the Russian dictator toasted the happy couple; he danced with the bride and presented her with flowers; he brought along an alleged Cossack choir to serenade them; he gifted them a samovar and other Russian goodies.
The wedding invitation itself was a present for Putin: It was a superb photo and video opportunity for the image-conscious dictator, who craves respect and attention like a needy teenage pop star. Being able to perform at Kneissl’s wedding also allowed him to undermine the impression that Russia is isolated because of its occupation of Crimea, war on Ukraine, shooting down of MH17, propping up of the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England.
To top the wedding cake for Putin, Austria is the current holder of the rotating presidency of the European Union. While Kneissl insisted the wedding was a private event, the invitation to Putin was correctly perceived by Putin, the Russian public, and some officials in other EU states as a slap in the face to the EU’s current foreign policy of sanctioning Russia for its crimes.
It was also an insult to Ukraine, which is fending off an invasion by Russia of its eastern territory in a war that has cost over 10,000 lives, and which has seen part of its territory, Crimea, occupied and claimed by the Kremlin.
Austria, of course, is now ruled by a coalition of the right-wing Austrian People’s Party or OVP and the far-right Freedom Party of Austria or FPO – the first leader of which was Anton Reinthaller, a former Nazi and officer in the SS. The leaders of both parties, the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the OVP and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the FPO, were guests at the wedding as well.
The Kremlin has been courting political parties from the extreme left and right for decades, and its investment (Western intelligence agencies reckon the Kremlin has been clandestinely funding populist parties) is clearly paying off. The FPO has even signed a cooperation agreement with the United Russia party, which is associated with leading members of the Kremlin regime.
However, while Austria has form in laying out the welcome mat for dictators, it is still astonishing that its leaders should quite so obsequiously fraternize with the head of the Kremlin. Then again, Austria declined to join in the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats in the wake of the Skripals’ poisoning, so perhaps it is not so surprising after all.
Shame on Kneissl, who has been Ukraine’s Foe of the Week before, for fawningly stroking Putin’s ego, burnishing the image of the rogue state Russia, and at the same time casting a finger at EU foreign policy and Western solidarity.
