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: Michael McFaul
Ukraine was right to be worried when Donald J. Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Before he was elected, Trump had refused to confirm that under his leadership the United States would come to the defense of NATO allies unconditionally. He also expressed admiration for Russia’s sinister and murderous dictator, Vladimir Putin.
Since becoming president, Trump has suggested that the people of Crimea “wanted to be with Russia,” apparently referring to the results of the sham referendum occupying Russian forces held at gunpoint two weeks after the Kremlin’s invasion of the peninsula. Then at the G7 summit in Canada in early June Trump is reported to have said that “Crimea is Russian because everyone there speaks Russian.”
Most recently, Trump on June 29 refused to rule out the United States’ accepting the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea, which jangled nerves again in both Kyiv and Washington.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise, former U.S. Ambassador to Russian Michael McFaul, was one of the first to react to Trump’s remark, tweeting “What seriously? Trump said that ‘We’re going to have see’ regarding recognizing Russia’s unlawful annexation of Crimea?”
McFaul served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. Since leaving his post and returning to academia at Stanford University in California, he has been an outspoken critic of the Putin regime, a stanch defender of Ukraine, and a firm opponent of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea.
That’s hardly surprising, since McFaul has experienced firsthand the nature of the Putin Kremlin. Writing in Politico magazine on May 19, McFaul recounted the harassment he and his family suffered in Moscow at the hands of the Russian police and secret services.
“During my first year as ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration, the Russian authorities conducted a ground campaign of harassment against my colleagues at the embassy, myself and, from time to time, even my family,” McFaul wrote.
“This level of police harassment at the American Embassy and Spaso House (the official residency of the U.S. ambassador to Russia) was new. No one could remember a time even during the Soviet era when our hosts were so aggressive.”
Recall that this was before the steep downturn in U.S.-Russian relations that followed the Kremlin’s invasion of Crimea and launch of its war on Ukraine in the Donbas, which prompted the United States and its allies to impose sanctions on Russia in response.
In fact, the Putin regime had set itself on a course of conflict with the West as early as 2007, when it almost certainly carried out the first ever state-sponsored cyberattack on another country. That was when NATO-member Estonia, which was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1991, for several days found the computers of its government intuitions, banks and media under simultaneous attack via the internet.
McFaul, as U.S. ambassador in Russia and earlier as a senior adviser in the administration of U.S. President Barak Obama, has thus been in the position to observe that Russia’s aggressive turn in recent years was not the result of a “Russiophobic” European Union and NATO “provoking” Russia, or meddling in its “sphere of influence,” as the Kremlin and its apologists like to say.
Rather, Russia’s revanchist policy is longstanding, and has been worsening as Putin has tightened his grip on power. It has almost nothing to do with the West’s actions, and almost everything to do with Putin’s own personality – his aggrieved feeling of victimhood, which he extends to Russia as a country, and his yearning for power and respect.
To this day, McFaul is subjected to abuse by Kremlin trolls on Twitter (he is a prolific social media user), which he takes with good humor. The denizens of Putin’s troll factory in St. Petersburg must be intensely irritated by their inability to rile him online.
And he continues to hold the line that taking territory by force should never be accepted by the international community. The next time Trump says something foolish about Crimea, the authoritative McFaul will be there to correct him, firmly and publicly, which makes him a good friend of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Jon Huntsman
There probably isn’t any good date for members of the U.S. Congress to visit Russia and meet with officials from the regime of Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin, but July 4, U.S. Independence Day, has to be the worst.
Yet seven members of Congress, six senators and one member of the House of Representatives, were in Russia on that very date to “meet with government officials, try to establish some rapport, talk about common interest, talk about common problems, (and) establish rapport between the United States Congress and the Putin administration,” according to one of the group, Senator John Kennedy (Republican-Louisiana).
Kennedy told CNN that the group hoped to meet with Putin, though Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said a meeting wasn’t planned.
Why on earth would a group of U.S. politicians (all Republicans, and all allied or sympathetic to U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) want to go to a hostile state and meet with its officials on America’s national day?
Moreover, they were not accompanied by members of the U.S. press – the visit is being covered almost exclusively by the Kremlin’s propaganda media, which milked the event for all it was worth.
Perhaps the U.S. politicians didn’t want to appear impolite by turning down an invitation from the Kremlin to visit?
But they weren’t invited by the Kremlin – they were invited by U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, who is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of an Order of Lenin for organizing this propaganda gift to the Kremlin.
The visit is apparently being conducted in true Trumpian diplomatic style – give a lot, get nothing in return. Soon after the U.S. visitors arrived in Russia, the Republican-led U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on July 3 released a report that supports the conclusions of three U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to try to help Trump win election.
But Huntsman, instead of presenting a note of protest to the Kremlin at this meddling in the internal affairs of the United States, was probably shepherding the group of Republicans around Moscow to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, a close ally of Putin, and Konstantin Kosachyov, the chairman of the Federation Council’s International Relations Committee, according to RFE/RL.
Kosachyov, who is under sanctions by the United States because of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, later said on Russian state television that every member of the U.S. visiting group shook his hand. The Republican visitors also invited Kosachyov to visit Washington D.C.
During the meeting with Volodin, Senator Richard Shelby (Republican-Alabama) apparently had nothing to say about Russia’s election interference in the United States, France or Germany, or its occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea, or its war against Ukraine in the Donbas, or the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014 by a missile launcher of the 53rd Anti-aircraft Brigade based in Kursk, Russia, or the Kremlin’s likely poisoning of the former spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England in March, or Russia’s airstrikes on Syrian hospitals, White Helmet aid workers and civilians in Syria, or its shielding of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from punishment by the United Nations for carrying out chemical weapons attacks on his own people, or for the Kremlin’s support for far-right, far-left and extremist political groups in the West, or for the barrage of fake news and disinformation directed at Western social media users.
“I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth,” Shelby told Volodin. “I’m saying that we should all strive for a better relationship.”
Pathetic. Shameful.
Shame on Shelby, Kennedy and senators John Hoeven (Republican-North Dakota), John Thune (Republican-South Dakota), Jerry Moran (Republican-Kansas), Steve Daines (Republican-Montana), and House of Representatives member Kay Granger (Republican-Texas) for letting themselves be used as tools for Russian propaganda.
And shame on Jon Huntsman for making it happen.
