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: John Tefft
To rejig a well-known phrase, “Even if you don’t take an interest in the Kremlin, the Kremlin is already taking an interest in you.”
Under Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the KGB, the feared secret police of the Soviet Union, and later the director of is successor the FSB, Kremlin “interest” in the West may have already affected the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens of the Western liberal democracies.
Luckily, there are those, like former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Tefft, who have devoted their careers to figuring out on behalf of the rest of us what the Kremlin might be up to, and divining what to expect next from the sinister dictator in Moscow.
Speaking at the annual Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv on Sept. 15, Tefft first burst the image of Putin as being a hard-working technocrat – in common with other dictators, Russia’s leader spends very little time actually dictating, it seems.
“He (Putin) spends lots of time down in Sochi, as we know, and lots of time out at the dacha,” Tefft said. “Different people would tell you sometimes that he would spend only two or three days a week inside the Kremlin, and that usually occurred when a distinguished visitor would come and he would have to have to receive them there,” added Tefft, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia from November 2014 to September 2017.
Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the amount of mischief Putin has made over his 18-year reign: Under its diminutive leader, Russia has waged war in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria, and meddled in Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan, to name but a few countries.
Moreover, in recent years, through vast influence operations, using a combination of traditional Kremlin propaganda methods turbo-charged by social media, cyberattacks, and support for extremist political parties, the Kremlin may have influenced not only the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but the vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.
The election of U.S. President Donald J. Trump has weakened and demoralized NATO, throwing into doubt America’s commitment to its fundamental principle of collective defense.
The vote for the UK to leave the EU could cause huge damage to the British economy and even lead to breakup of the UK, as well as weakening the EU.
If it turns out that the Kremlin was able to influence the outcome of those votes, Putin will have left an oversized footprint on history.
Having secured another term as president in a rigged election in March, Putin, who is 65 and reportedly in excellent physical condition, will be in power at least until 2024. The Russian leader has claimed he will not seek another term after that, and while the proven liar Putin should not be taken at his word, there is already speculation about how events might unfold in the Kremlin if and when he leaves. For Ukraine, beset by a war of Putin’s making, such questions are urgent, and Tefft’s expertise valuable.
According to Tefft, in the event of a transferal of power, Putin is likely, like his previous patron, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, to attempt to install a successor whom he trusts – probably from among the cadre of regional governors whom he has put in place. Putinism, if not Putin, could continue.
But the new president will face problems, Tefft noted.
“There’s a whole generation of young FSB people who are looking on and seeing how President Putin and his buddies have made a lot of money, and they want a piece of the pie,” Tefft said.
“But unfortunately the pie is getting smaller,” he added, alluding to the contraction of the Russian economy under a combination of Western sanctions, low oil prices, corruption, and mismanagement under Putin and his Kremlin cronies.
Even now, Putin’s public support is fragile, Tefft said, noting the rapid fall in the Russian leader’s popularity rating when he tried to push through a rise in the pension age.
But Teft, Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yarolsav the Wise for his firm support for Ukraine (he also served as U.S. ambassador here from December 2009 to July 2013), warned that the danger for Ukraine is far from over. Russia itself has yet to become a modern nation, he said.
“(Russia) still has to take the decisions, to decide whether it’s going to be a part of the international community or whether it’s going to try to be an imperial power and attack its neighbors and take their land,” Tefft said.
He called for Ukraine to be patient: it might have to wait Putin out.
“The United States and Europe and Ukraine, we have to be a little patient right now, we have to push back, but we have to understand that this big process that started in 1991 has still got some time to play out,” he said.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Andrew Murray
In what at first glance seems like an astonishing piece of news, Ukraine’s SBU security service on Sept. 14 confirmed that in June it had banned an advisor to the leader of the UK opposition party, the Labour Party, for three years for being a threat to Ukraine’s national security.
But when one learns more about the advisor to Jeremy Corbyn – the Labour Party’s far-left, NATO-hating, Euro-skeptic erstwhile contributor to Russian propaganda channel RT – the news quickly becomes far less astonishing, and the SBU’s measures appears rather sensible, although perhaps a bit overdue.
That’s because the advisor in question, Andrew Murray, a life-long Stalinist who only joined the Labour Party in 2016 after Corbyn became leader, has so many connections to Russia he could get a job as a Kremlin switchboard operator (if they still have them.)
As a leader of the UK’s Stop the War Coalition, which claims to be an anti-war organization (although it only seems to oppose wars involving NATO and the United States), Murray parroted the absurd Kremlin propaganda claim that Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine was caused by NATO and Western interference.
Unsurprisingly, Stop the War has close links to two Kremlin-funded organizations, the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia and the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO), according to an investigation by the Sunday Times newspaper published on Oct. 16, 2016. Those same organizations in turn support various separatist, independence and fringe groups in Europe and America.
Murray has also attended meetings of an even more pro-Russian group, called Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine, which is linked to the IGSO and which claimed the new government in Ukraine was a “Kyiv junta, a coalition of neoliberal thieves and fascist thugs brought to power after the western-backed coup (in Ukraine).”
That last quote is Kremlin propaganda to a word. Anyone who has even a basic knowledge of what happened in the EuroMaidan Revolution in the winter of 2013-2014 can see that it is vicious nonsense. Only a fool or an ardent supporter of the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin would believe it or repeat it.
Murray is no fool. So why is he repeating the Kremlin’s lies?
In an article for the UK magazine the New Statesman published on Sept. 19, Murray slanders the whole of Ukraine as a “land (of) the morality of the brownshirts,” while at the same time claiming to be no fan of the Putin regime. He put his SBU ban down to a speech he made four years ago “protesting the takeover of Ukraine by ultra-nationalists.”
The “takeover of Ukraine by ultra-nationalists” is of course a lie and Kremlin propaganda, so the SBU is quite right to ban Murray. However, only in January Murray was on the Kremlin’s propaganda mouthpiece RT, claiming Russia is a capitalist country that does not pose an ideological and systemic challenge to the West – even though it is clearly a kleptocratic, imperialist, neo-fascist police state, inimical to everything a democracy stands for.
Some on the far-left still become dewy eyed when looking back to the Soviet regime, apparently blind to the atrocities, imperialism, and tyranny that characterized that brutal and oppressive regime. Since modern Russia also closely identifies itself with the Soviet Union, those same people on the far-left seem to be blind to the atrocities, imperialism, and tyranny of the Putin regime as well. Murray seems to be one of them.
Murray’s Stop the War Coalition also toed the Kremlin’s propaganda line on the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 – almost certainly by a Russian anti-aircraft unit – by comparing the destruction of the aircraft to the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to the First World War. The suggestion that such a comparison be made came straight from the desk of Kremlin mandarin Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s point man on Ukraine, according to a leak of his e-mails.
Moreover, Murray has form in expressing admiration for murderous tyrants like Putin.
He is, according to numerous commentators in the UK press, a fan of Stalin – the bloody Soviet dictator, under whose rule millions died in death camps – and a defender of North Korea – that horrifying, Stalinist blight on humanity.
On top of that, Murray has a long record of peddling propaganda: his resume includes a stint from 1986-1987 as a reporter for Soviet news agency Novosti (now RIA Novosti, a Kremlin propaganda mouthpiece that disguises itself as a news agency.)
As such, Corbyn’s advisor is a prime candidate for being coopted by the Kremlin regime. The political phenomenon of fascists and fascist states using the far-left to advance their aims has a long history, and is known as the formation of “red-brown alliances.” The Putin regime is known to support far-right parties in Europe, but it also targets the far-left, attacking the liberal, democratic order from both extremes of the political spectrum simultaneously.
Murray, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the odious Order of Lenin, is undoubtedly a willing Kremlin dupe from the far-left, and Ukraine is right to ban him from its territory.
Indeed, it seems the SBU is not the only security organization to have concerns about Murray: It emerged last week that he had been refused a security pass for the UK House of Commons. But from what we now know of Comrade Murray, that should hardly be surprising.
