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: Rebecca Harms
It’s often said that sports and politics do not mix, but that is of course nonsense.
Politicians, especially autocratic ones, value the world’s top sports events as vehicles for promoting their personal prestige and burnishing the image of the countries they rule. And that is certainly the case with the 2018 World Cup which is being held from June 14 to July 15 in Russia.
For Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the World Cup is a chance to showcase the regime he has built over the past 20 years, and a way to portray Russia as not isolated and shunned by the world, but a great power that is at the center of international attention.
Thankfully, the world is not playing along. While, disappointingly, none of the national teams that qualified for the 2018 World Cup in Russia are boycotting the event, the leaders of the civilized world are at least not showing up for the opening ceremony.
Putin will instead be joined by a motley collection of post-Soviet autocrats, and a couple of “leaders” of the puppet states the Kremlin carved out of Georgian territory.
From further afield, the opening ceremony attendees will include the leaders of Bolivia, Panama, Rwanda, the president-elect of Paraguay, and a representative of Kim Jong-un’s Gulag state of North Korea.
The only star attraction will be crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the Saudi throne.
But no leader from a major western democracy with be seen with Putin at the opening of his World Cup, which is as it should be.
No leader of a civilized, democratic, rule-of-law state that respects human rights has any business standing next to Putin as he opens his “Berlin Olympics” for Russia. Putin has launched wars in Georgia and Ukraine. He has stolen territory from both countries. His 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade was responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, killing all 298 of its passengers and crew. More than 10,000 people have been killed in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and more than 1.5 million have been displaced.
Putin has also propped up the bloody dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, saving his regime from defeat by sending in Russian airpower, regular troops, and mercenaries. He has provided diplomatic cover for Assad in the United Nations, preventing the Security Council from taking firm action in response to the Syrian dictator’s use of chemical weapons on his own people.
Putin has meddled in the democratic elections of Western states, giving political and, according to Western intelligence agencies, financial support to a range of right-wing parties across Europe, with the aim of undermining the European Union.
And Putin has more than 150 political prisoners in Russia’s jails, around 70 of them being Ukrainian hostages taken after the Kremlin invaded and occupied Crimea and launched its war on Ukraine in the Donbas.
Rebecca Harms, the German Green Party MEP and a long-time friend of Ukraine, was one of the main figures in the European Union pushing for a boycott of Putin’s World Cup. She was also the initiator of a European Parliament resolution on the human rights situation in Russia passed by the parliament on June 14, the day the World Cup started in Russia. The resolution calls on Russia to release Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and all other Ukrainian hostages in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea “immediately and unconditionally.”
Harms is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for the strong support she has shown over the years for Ukraine, and for her work in highlighting the plight of the Ukrainian hostages in Russia.
“Sport has the power to change the world,” former South African President Nelson Mandela, himself a political prisoner for 27 years, once said.
While Russia, an autocratic, police state with an abysmal human rights record, should never have been selected by FIFA, the world’s soccer governing body, to host the World Cup, at least this sporting event can now be used by politicians like Harms to draw attention to the crimes of the Putin regime.
Putin’s World Cup won’t change the world, but perhaps some good will come of it after all.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Arron Banks
Arron Banks, an investment banker and one of the major figures behind the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, when speaking in a radio interview on June 11, called allegations that the Kremlin influenced the so-called “Brexit” vote of June 23, 2016 a “witch hunt.”
That’s the phrase commonly used by U.S. President Donald J. Trump to rubbish the charge that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to help get him elected: He uses it whenever more evidence of such collusion is unearthed.
And in the United States, the “witch hunt” against Trump does indeed turn up witches on a regular basis, with U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller having charged at least six people (four of whom have already pleaded guilty) so far during to his investigation into Russian collusion, and indicting 13 others – all of them Russian.
Now it’s time for a such a witch hunt to begin in the UK, it seems – this time in relation to Russia’s possible interference in the Brexit vote.
According to an article published in the UK newspaper the Sunday Times on June 10, Banks had numerous meetings with the Russian ambassador to the UK and other Russian officials in the run-up to the Brexit vote, rather that the “one boozy lunch” that he previously admitted to.
That the Kremlin should be interested in the Brexit campaign, and support the idea of the UK leaving the European Union, is not surprising: The Kremlin knows that by leaving the EU the UK will be diminished in influence, its economy will be damaged, and the UK itself may even risk breaking up. The EU will also be weakened once the UK leaves the union. All of these outcomes would greatly please the Kremlin.
But did the Kremlin actively attempt to influence the Brexit vote?
The Sunday Times reported that according to a cache of e-mails it had seen, Banks was introduced to a Russian businessman and offered to take part in a deal to buy six Russian gold mines and merge them into one company. The deal allegedly would have netted billions of dollars in profit. What the Kremlin wanted in return is, as yet, unknown.
According to the Sunday Times, Banks traveled to Moscow in February 2016 to meet with officials from a Russian-owned bank to discuss the deal. There is no public record that he actually invested in the mines, but curiously, on July 17, 2016, about a month after the Brexit vote, he tweeted: “I am buying gold at the moment & big mining stocks.”
Banks also gave 12 million pounds worth of services to the pro-Brexit Leave.EU campaign, making him the biggest political donor in UK history.
Speaking in the radio interview on June 11, Banks insisted that there was “no evidence” that Russia had given any money to Leave.EU.
But then there was “no evidence” that Banks had extensive contacts with the Russians ahead of the Brexit vote – until it was found. Asked if there had been Russian collusion in the Brexit campaign, Banks said: “Maybe at a low level.”
And maybe with that admission the UK authorities will now start to take seriously the threat that the Kremlin poses. In the United States, the intelligence agencies are unanimous in the opinion that the Kremlin attempted to influence the vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election – what now needs to be established is the extent to which it succeeded in these attempts. Given the evidence that has now emerged about Banks and his contacts with Russia, are strong reasons to believe that the Kremlin may have attempted to influence the Brexit vote in the UK as well.
UK lawmaker Damian Collins, the chairman of the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, asked Banks to appear before his committee to answer questions about the Leave.EU campaign’s links to the Russians. After initially refusing, Banks did so on June 12.
“Russia is not our friend. And this new material raises questions of the most serious nature,” Collins said after the Sunday Times published its report. “If deals were brokered with Russian government help, it would raise urgent questions about Russian interference in our democracy.”
To help answer those questions, the UK’s Electoral Commission may also launch fresh probes into the Brexit vote in the wake of the report.
The “witch hunt” in the UK may only just beginning, but those that listen carefully can already hear the sounds of cackling and the bubbling of cauldrons. It may not be long before some witches are caught in Britain as well.
Meanwhile, although Banks’ links with the Kremlin remain murky, his public comments clearly show that he is no friend of Ukraine.
In a tweet dated May 1, 2016, Banks wrote: “Eastern Ukraine has a majority Russian speaking and supporting population. Typically ill informed MP.”
The conflation of “Russian-speaking” and “Russian-supporting” is pure Kremlin propaganda, of course, as anyone well-informed about Ukraine knows. Plenty of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines, defending Ukraine from attack by Russian-led forces, are Russian speakers from the Donbas.
And the “typically ill-informed MP” that banks was referring to was none other than Damian Collins.
We wish Collins success in any “witch hunt” he participates in, and name Banks Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the order of Lenin both for his foolish parroting of Kremlin propaganda, and for his support of the Kremlin’s goals.
