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: Bellingcat
Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without the citizens’ open-source investigative team Bellingcat coming up with some revelation that exposes Kremlin lies.
This week, on the evening of Oct. 9, the group revealed the real identity of “Alexander Petrov,” one of the two Russian military intelligence agents who in March tried to murder Russian spy Sergey Skripal in Salisbury, England, with a Novichok nerve agent.
“Petrov” is Alexander Mishkin, a military doctor who was recruited by Russian military intelligence (commonly known by the acronym GRU) sometime between 2007 and 2014, according to Bellingcat. Like his companion on the mission to murder Skripal in Salisbury, GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, Mishkin is thought to be a holder of the Hero of the Russian Federation award, which like Chepiga he appears to have received for his activities in Ukraine (Crimea) in 2014.
However, the fact that Mishkin and Chepiga failed in their mission, and the speed with which Bellingcat was able to uncover their real identities and a large amount of other information about them and their activities, has led some in the media to dismiss these agents, and the GRU, as hopeless bunglers.
This is wrong, for several reasons. First, Mishkin and Chepiga’s visit to Salisbury resulted in at least four people being seriously sickened and the death of a woman, Dawn Sturgess. Bunglers though they may be, they are also murderers, and intended to kill more people. The danger posed by Russia’s agents must be taken seriously.
Second, although these agents’ tradecraft was extremely lax, they were able to carry out their mission and return to Russia without being detected. Bellingcat has also uncovered evidence that the two have been on frequent missions around Europe over the last few years, obviously undetected as well. If the spies are incompetent, what shall we say of the spy catchers?
Third, while the GRU’s recent mission failures are known, there is obviously no information about their operational successes, or success rate. There have been many untimely and suspicious deaths in Britain of Russians who opposed the Kremlin. Given that, and the amount of travel the “Salisbury tourists” have indulged in over the last few years, the GRU could be succeeding in its missions abroad more often than not.
That is a worry in particular for Ukraine, as both Mishkin and Chepiga are thought to have been on missions here during the EuroMaidan Revolution and after. If the GRU’s operations are so widespread in the rest of Europe, then they are probably at least as active in Ukraine – unless Ukraine’s SBU security service is considerably better at countering Russia’s spies than Western security agencies have been.
But one positive conclusion we can draw from the case of Mishkin and Chepiga is that the GRU is as yet unable to cover its tracks in the internet age. The two GRU agents (Chepiga more than Mishkin) left a digital trail that Bellingcat’s experts were able to follow, and which led the group to uncover a large amount of information about them. While one should not underestimate how difficult Bellingcat’s task was, and the amount of effort that went into these investigations, there can be hope of similar such successes for the group in the future.
So Bellingcat is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week for unmasking two foes Ukraine didn’t even know it had. And with the group’s founder, Eliot Higgins, tweeting late on Oct. 8 that Bellingcat has another major report on the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in the pipeline, we can look forward to more of the Kremlin’s lies about Ukraine being exposed soon.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Hendrik Weber
If there is one thing that defines the Kremlin regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, it is fakery – fake people’s defense militias, fake referendums, fake election observers, fake separatists, fake civil wars, fake satellite photographs, fake experts, fake cathedral tourists, fake journalists, fake news.
Now we can add fake diplomats to the list.
A Norwegian citizen, Hendrik Weber said he led a “delegation” of a dozen or so Norwegian private citizens, including doctors, entrepreneurs, and “a woman who worked in the National Library in Oslo,” to Russian-occupied Crimea from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5.
Russian propaganda outlets like Sputnik loudly proclaimed this “a visit by a Norwegian delegation,” to the occupied peninsula, to give the impression that this was some sort of official visit connected to the Norwegian government.
It was nothing of the sort, of course. But it did produce a splurge of Kremlin propaganda articles in Russian media. Weber falsely claimed that Crimea is a legitimate part of Russia, falsely claimed that Russia’s sham referendum and occupation of Crimea had not violated the population’s human rights, and falsely claimed that the sanctions imposed on Russia for its aggression in Ukraine had been “organized from Washington.”
This litany of pro-Kremlin, anti-Western claptrap was gleefully broadcast by the Kremlin’s propaganda network. The idea that Weber is some sort of an evenhanded diplomat, objectively weighing the views of two sides, is patently absurd.
The Norwegian Foreign Ministry reacted to a previous trip by Weber to Crimea, in 2017, with State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Marit Berger Røssland, Norway’s equivalent of a deputy foreign minister, telling Norwegian television’s TV 2: “We are critical of this type of visit because it can help legitimize an annexation.”
Weber claims to have founded a group called “Folkdiplomati Norge” or People’s Diplomacy of Norway – a non-governmental organization – with the aim of improving relations between Norway and Russia, because, he says, the Western media are only telling one side of the story with regard to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea. Weber first visited Crimea in 2017, after he formed his NGO, and was there again in March 2018 to “observe” the Russian presidential election – Putin’s rigging-rife exhibition of sham democratic legitimization.
However, a quick google fails to turn up even a website for Folkdiplomati Norge or People’s Diplomacy of Norway – only articles, mainly from Norwegian media and Russian propaganda outlets, about Weber and his trips to Crimea, or his views on issues such as the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. All of his views are supportive of the Kremlin and its version of events.
Folkdiplomati Norge does, however, turn up on www.regnskapstall.no, a Norwegian company accounting and registration website. According to it, Folkdiplomati Norge was registered as a company on Aug. 1, 2017, a couple of months before Weber’s first visit to Crimea. The company has no employees and zero share capital, and is not required to submit (or has not submitted) its accounts to the authorities. The company’s address is given as Ystebørenen 39, in Sletta, a tiny, one-troll town about 40 kilometers north of Bergen, in southwestern Norway, care of one H. Weber. The building at the address appears to be a small private house, located at the side of a fjord.
So who is Weber, in fact? Norwegian media have described him as a “cement contractor.” Interestingly, there is another company registered at the same address as Folkdiplomati Norge – Betongrehab Vest AS – a company selling concrete injection equipment and services. It does have a website, and there we find that the contact person is Hendrik Weber, who looks exactly like our “people’s diplomat” Weber.
Betongrehab Vest AS was registered in 2012. It quickly hit hard times, however, making a loss in three out of the last four reporting years (2014-2017), according to its accounting information on regnskapstall.no. Its total operating income was only NOK 617,000 ($74,400) in 2017, down from NOK 4,248,000 ($512,500) in 2012. Salaries were down to NOK 235,000 ($28,300) in 2017, from a peak of NOK 2,209,000 ($266,400) in 2013.
It seems that Weber, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the Order of Lenin for helping spread Kremlin propaganda, would do better to mind his own business and focus on more concrete matters, rather than indulge in fake diplomacy.
