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: Francois Hollande
Francois Hollande was president of France from 2012 to 2017, a term of office that encompassed Ukraine’s darkest days from late 2013 to the early months of 2015.
It was at that time that the threat of full-scale Kremlin military intervention in Ukraine was at its highest.
In late February 2014, right after the EuroMaidan Revolution that deposed President Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin seized Crimea. By early April that year it had started an operation to create a fake “civil war” in Ukraine, sending in a group of about 50 special operations troops to capture police, government and security offices all over the Donbas.
At the end of August 2014 the Kremlin sent its regular troops into Ukraine to halt a Ukrainian advance that was threatening to crush its proxy forces, forcing Ukraine to the negotiating table in Minsk in September. In January 2015, having ignored the Minsk peace process, Moscow’s forces captured Donetsk airport, obliterating it in the process.
Then in late February 2105, a few days after a second Minsk peace conference had produced a document on how to implement the agreements reached at the first, the Kremlin again sent in its forces, including tank units from Buryatia in the Russian Far East, to capture the strategically important town of Debaltseve.
Hollande flew to the Belarussian capital with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to take part in the second Minsk peace conference on Feb. 11-12, as heavy fighting continued in Ukraine: the Kremlin’s proxy forces had gone on the offensive, and the limited cease-fire – better described as a reduction in the fighting and a solidification of the front lines – had all but broken down.
The earlier September 2014 Minsk agreement had been negotiated by former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and the leaders of the fake “republics” the Kremlin had set up in the parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts it had occupied. The talks were mediated by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe representative Heidi Tagliavini and Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov.
This time, however, there would be a face-to-face meeting between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, along with the French president and German chancellor. In his memoirs, published earlier this year, Hollande told how Putin had started the negotiations in bad faith, with the intention of using them to improve Russia’s military position.
“I quickly realized that Putin wanted to gain time and delay the cease-fire for as late as possible to allow the separatists to surround the Ukrainian army and gain more ground,” Hollande wrote. “Together with Angela Merkel, we proposed to resume negotiations in a narrow format, not have dinner and get down to work as soon as possible.”
Hollande recounted a particularly tense exchange between the presidents that laid bare the fact that the fighting in Ukraine was no civil war, but a military intervention in Ukraine by the Kremlin: At one point, an enraged Putin blurted out that his soldiers would “purely and simply crush” Ukraine’s forces.
“This was the same as admitting the presence of his troops in the east of Ukraine,” Hollande wrote in his memoirs. “He (Putin) took it back immediately.”
But after that misstep by Putin, Merkel and Hollande were able to bring enough pressure to persuade the Russian dictator to sign the second Minsk peace accords. Even so, Russia still went ahead and captured Debaltseve a few days after the signing of the agreements in Minsk.
All the same, there have been few major battles in Russia’s stalemated war on Ukraine since that time, and the front line has remained largely unchanged. In the intervening period, Ukraine’s army has increased in strength, receiving NATO training and Javelin anti-tank weapons from the United States – a potent deterrent against further Kremlin aggression. The Kremlin became distracted from its war in Ukraine in the summer of 2015 when it started another military intervention, this time in Syria to prop up its faltering client dictator Bashar al-Assad.
And while there are rising tensions in the Azov Sea region, the threat of a further land offensive by Russia has receded greatly since Minsk II, and that is to Hollande and Merkel’s credit. Although the Minsk agreements are on the face of it a failure, they have at least contributed to reducing the fighting in Ukraine, and may have bought the country valuable time to bolster its defenses.
Hollande was decorated by Poroshenko with one of Ukraine’s highest awards, the Order of Freedom, at a ceremony in Kyiv on Oct. 1. He is also Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for his efforts to bring about peace in Ukraine and halt Russia’s aggression.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Jeremy Hunt
It’s perhaps an indication of the complexity of European politics at the moment that a friend of Ukraine one week can be a foe just a few weeks later.
Such is the case with United Kingdom Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt, who caused outrage in Eastern Europe with comments he made during his speech at the UK Conservative Party Conference on Sept. 30 in Birmingham, England.
During the speech, Hunt fatuously and insensitively made an implicit comparison between the European Union and the Soviet Union.
“The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving,” Hunt told his conference audience.
“The lesson from history is clear: if you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish it will grow – and we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape.”
The conference crowd applauded loudly.
Comparing a union of states built on the principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law to a totalitarian dictatorship is extremely foolish, and hugely insulting to the Baltic states, who suffered 50 years of Soviet occupation, and which joined the EU just as quickly as their economies were ready.
But it’s also a slap in the face to Ukraine, which arguably only finally escaped from the “Soviet Union,” or the lingering effects of Kremlin political and economic dominance, with the EuroMaidan Revolution. The revolution, which in early 2014 toppled former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who appeared to want to become a Kremlin satellite dictator like those of Belarus and the Central Asian autocracies, fulfilled Ukrainians’ desires to escape the Kremlin’s grip once and for all. The alternative, as the name of the EuroMaidan Revolution shows, was to make Ukraine a “normal” European country – one worthy of joining the EU.
Ukrainians died to fulfill this desire, and they still die practically every day because of Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas, which Moscow unleashed in response to Ukraine’s attempt to break its Kremlin shackles.
So the most insulting part of Hunt’s speech for the Baltic states and Ukraine (and Georgia) came when the UK foreign minister accused EU politicians of seeking to “punish” the UK for its own idiotic decision to leave the EU.
“At the moment, you European friends seem to think the way to keep the club together is to punish a member who leaves,” Hunt said. “Not just with economic disruption, but even by breaking up the United Kingdom with a border down the Irish Sea.”
Having tanks roll into your county’s capital is punishment for trying to leave a political bloc. Seeing part of your county invaded and occupied is punishment for trying to leave a political bloc. Having a fake “civil war” created on your territory that kills more than 10,300 people is punishment for trying to leave a political bloc.
The UK, in contrast, is not being punished for leaving the EU. It is suffering the consequences of its own decision to pursue the stupid and impractical endeavor that it is Brexit – the equivalent of promising every Briton a unicorn. And these consequences will only worsen if the UK government continues to demand Brexit unicorns of its European friends.
Hunt, who is by no means ignorant or a fool, knows this. The entire leadership of the UK Conservative Party knows it, and they are now attempting to shift the blame for their party’s shambolic Brexit policy onto the EU – as many have long predicted they would.
So Hunt, by implying the comparison between the EU and the Soviet Union, was preaching to the Conservative faithful, for the purely political reason of trying to shift blame.
But as foreign secretary he should have remembered he has an attentive audience beyond that constituency. He is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin for making his foolish and insensitive remarks, and he should apologize to the Baltic states, Ukraine and Georgia immediately.
