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: Alexander Hug
Alexander Hug, the deputy chief of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, will be leaving his job on Oct. 31, it was reported on Sept. 26.
In an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Hug, a former Swiss Army officer, said he was leaving because his term of service with the OSCE was up, as he has already been with the organization for ten years.
More than four of those years were served in Ukraine. Hug took up his post in Ukraine in March 2014, shortly after Russia’s initial military intervention in the country, when the Kremlin invaded and started to occupy the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.
For obvious reasons, Russia refused to allow the OSCE to enter Crimea during its military operation to take over the peninsula. Likewise, the OSCE could do little as Russia launched the next stage of its war on Ukraine – the creation of a fake “civil war” in the Donbas.
But what started in April 2014 as a Russian special forces operation to take control of government, police and security service offices in the region quickly descended into outright war as Ukrainian forces and volunteer units in May 2014 began to fight back to free the territories. By August of that year, Ukraine was on the brink of defeating Russia’s proxy forces, and only a massive intervention by the Russian regular army in eastern Ukraine saved the Kremlin from outright defeat on mainland Ukraine.
That ushered in the current stalemated war, and with the signing of the Minsk agreements, Hug’s mission in Ukraine finally had a well-defined role – to oversee the implementation of part of the Minsk peace accords, initially signed in September 2014.
As Hug told Kommersant, the OSCE’s mission in Ukraine has only ever been mandated to observe what is going on in eastern Ukraine – it is an unarmed civilian group, not a police force. According to the second Minsk agreement, signed in February 2015, on how to implement the agreements reached earlier, the OSCE was to monitor the full withdrawal and storage of heavy weapons from the front line, oversee the withdrawal of foreign fighters from Ukraine (i.e. Russia’s covert armed forces), and monitor local elections in the region.
None of that ever happened.
The cease-fire has been declared and broken 14 times since February 2015, according to Hug. The OSCE regularly spots heavy weapons close to the front lines, and weapons disappear from and reappear in their storage sites, on both sides. The holding of free and fair elections in the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts is still obviously an impossibility at this time.
But it is not true that Hug’s mission in Ukraine has failed. The OSCE mission has done valuable work in arranging local cease-fires so that repairs to vital infrastructure can be made. Since foreign journalists were banned from the Russian-occupied part of the Donbas the mission has been practically the only independent source of information from the area. The OSCE’s unmanned aerial vehicles, although frequently being shot down by Russia’s proxy forces, and occasionally shot at by Ukrainian forces, have proved invaluable in documenting the Kremlin’s blatant violations of the Minsk accords, including its use of secret military convoys that cross the border to support its covert forces in the Donbas.
And most importantly, the OSCE’s continual presence in the region, despite frequent threats of violence against its unarmed monitors (mainly by fighters from Russian-led forces) and the death of one monitor in a landmine explosion, has helped civilians caught up in Russia’s war on Ukraine feel that they are not forgotten or ignored.
Hug has come in for some criticism for his scrupulously even-handed approach. The OSCE, for instance, reports equally all instances of breaches of the cease-fire, whether they are aggressive attacks or return fire, which can give the impression that both sides are equally responsible for the violence (they are not: Russian-led forces initiate the bulk of the clashes.)
But Hug has had an incredibly difficult job to do, not least because his mission has been infiltrated and sabotaged by the Russians (absurdly, for political reasons, the OSCE mission still included 39 Russian citizens as of Sept. 17.) It is to his great credit that the OSCE is still able to operate on both sides of the front line.
Ukraine accuses the Russian members of the OSCE mission of using their jobs as cover to collect information about Ukrainian military positions for supply to the Russian armed forces, and this is plausible. Hug maintains that all of his monitors, no matter their nationality, owe their primary allegiance to the OSCE, and not their national governments. Especially in the case of the Russian contingent of monitors, this is implausible.
Nevertheless, Hug is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for the tremendous work he has done to mitigate the consequences of the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.
Whoever succeeds him has an extremely hard act to follow.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Peter Szijjarto
A grainy and shaky video that emerged online on Sept. 19 has sparked a new round of spatting between Ukraine and Hungary.
The video appears to show Hungarian-speaking Ukrainian citizens in the Hungarian consulate in Berehove, western Ukraine, receiving Hungarian passports and taking an oath of citizenship.
The video goes on to show consular officials congratulating the new Hungarian citizens, drinking champagne with them, and urging them not to reveal their new status to the Ukrainian authorities.
This is because Ukrainian law in most cases rules out dual citizenship – an adult Ukrainian citizen who voluntarily accepts the citizenship of another country automatically loses Ukrainian citizenship, according to the law.
Ukraine, which has suffered this kind of citizen poaching by the aggressor state Russia as well, naturally reacted angrily to this unfriendly act by Budapest. But instead of offering a fulsome apology to Kyiv for this brazen infringement of its sovereignty, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto went on to threaten to further stall Ukraine’s integration with the European Union and NATO should it react to Hungary’s affront.
Budapest “will not allow the Ukrainian administration to further worsen the situation of (the country’s) Hungarians, and condemns the attempts to intimidate them in the strongest possible terms,” Szijjarto said, quoted in a report in the Irish Times published on Sept. 20, the day after the passport scandal broke.
Later, in an interview aired by Kremlin propaganda outlet RT on Sept. 23, Szijjarto called on the European Union to have more debate on extending the unions sanctions against Russia, rather than automatically extending them.
The EU imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014 after the Kremlin invaded and started to occupy the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and then intervened militarily in the Donbas and started a war there. The sanctions have been reimposed every six months because the Kremlin has failed to withdraw its forces from Crimea and the occupied parts of the Donbas.
It is not surprising that Szijjarto is supporting Russia over Ukraine. He is a member of Hungary’s ruling right-wing, populist, conservative Fidesz Party, and such parties have been courted by the Kremlin for decades. Under his boss, Fidesz leader and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, Szijjarto has participated in the rolling back of democracy in Hungary over the past few years, to the point that on Sept. 12 the European Parliament voted to trigger sanctions against Budapest for posing a “systematic threat” to democracy and the rule of law in the country.
That in turn could provoke another crisis in the EU, which is already under strain following the United Kingdom’s decision in 2016 to leave the union. Notably, a number of UK Conservative MEPs voted against imposing sanctions on Hungary, and sections of that party could also be justifiably be described as far-right. Moreover, journalists’ investigations of the Leave.EU campaign in Britain, which was found to have broken election law during the EU referendum campaign, has uncovered unsettling links to Russia.
It seems like whenever one pulls on the threads of fraying Western unity, bells ring in the Kremlin, betraying a Russian connection. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has long desired to see the breakup of the EU, and he loathes Ukraine’s efforts to draw closer to the West. Szijjarto is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of an Order of Lenin for willingly playing along with the Kremlin leader by threatening to keep Ukraine out of the EU and NATO.
Ukraine has a big enough enemy to deal with in the east without having to fear unfriendly actions from the west as well – from a country that has itself suffered Russian invasion and occupation in the past, and which should know better than to side with the treacherous Kremlin.
