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
In the early days of the Internet, in the last couple of decades of the last century, there was a lot of excitement about the possibilities this new form of communication could bring to humankind.
Naturally, most of the excitement concerned the benefits: rapid exchanges of information and ideas, international scientific cooperation, new ways to build relations between customers and business, and, of course, the use of the internet as a news medium.
A lot of the predictions about how the Internet would change or lives have since come true, but not in the way we expected them to.
Ideas can be rapidly exchanges around the world, but they can be very bad ideas indeed. With the rise of social media, people from all over the world who never otherwise would have met can forge virtual relationships, form groups, and cooperate on real-world agendas – unfortunately these include terrorism, spreading neo-Nazi ideology and fake news, and now, it appears, interfering in democratic elections.
The problem is that the Internet, while releasing humankind’s vast potential, can also unlock our inner stupid: for example, more and more people actually seem to believe in the moronic Flat-Earth Theory.
Thankfully, there have also been some unexpected benefits to the spread of the Internet: it is now possible, as never before, to hold governments and their militaries to account for their actions. A skilled online researcher, from the comfort of their own home anywhere in the world, can carry out detailed investigations using open-source materials – evidence available to anyone online on the Internet. It can be done at a fraction of the cost of investigations by police or state intelligence services, and because the information is all available online, the results of investigations can checked, and analyses replicated.
As an example: techniques such as geolocation – establishing where a photograph or video was taken – can be used to verify evidence in an investigation. Anyone who posts a photograph or video on the Internet should be aware that, in many circumstances, a person skilled in geolocation could establish the camera-user’s location within minutes, and to an accuracy of within perhaps only a few meters.
Add to that other digital forensics skills, such as tracing online profiles, comments, and other publically available personal data, and a powerful new way to hold states accountable has emerged.
The best known open-source investigation outfit at the moment is Bellingcat, formed by the British open-source researcher Eliot Higgins, who developed his skills researching atrocities in the Syria conflict. Higgins and his team have also thrown light on the Kremlin’s murky doings in Ukraine, such that Bellingcat, and Higgins himself, are frequently the target of Kremlin smears and propaganda.
Bellingcat is also working with more traditional investigators, such as the Dutch police, who are investigating the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
Despite Russian denials, Bellingcat has provided compelling evidence that the aircraft was shot down by a BUK anti-aircraft missile, fired by launcher 332 of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade, based in Kursk, Russia. While the Dutch criminal investigation has leaked little about the results of its work, certain public requests for witness information it has made suggest that it is following a line of inquiry that is informed by the evidence Bellingcat has uncovered.
Interestingly, Bellingcat says that it even knows the names of the operators of the BUK anti-aircraft system – the ones that pushed the buttons that launched the missile that killed 298 people. It also knows the names of people higher up the chain of command. However, it has not released these names (probably at the request of the Dutch investigators).
However, on May 7 Bellingcat did publically identify a group of Russian army officers said to be directly involved in another atrocity perpetrated on Ukrainian soil – the Jan. 24, 2015 artillery attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, in which at least 30 civilians were killed and more than one hundred wounded.
According to Bellingcat, the operation was ultimately overseen by the Russian Defense Ministry. If so, this attack was not just a war crime – a deliberate attack on civilians – but an act of war by Russia on Ukraine.
Bellingcat said it based its analysis in part on evidence that has been submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where Ukraine is pursuing cases against Russia for its aggression.
The Bellingcat team is thus Ukraine’s friend of the week and a collective winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for helping to bring Ukraine’s foes to account, and hopefully one day to justice.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Gerhard Schroeder
Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is credited with coining a new word in the vocabulary of political analysts: “schroederization.” The meaning of the word, which has already spread to the Russian and German languages as well, is “the corruption of the political elite in another country.”
Unsurprisingly, the word owes its existence to Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, who has become a firm friend of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Just how important Schroeder has become to Putin was evident on May 7, the day of Putin’s fourth inauguration as Russian president. As Putin laid his hand on a copy of the Russian constitution to take the oath of the presidency, looking on from the first row of the crowd of attendees of the ceremony was Schroeder himself, standing between Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia (the head of the Russian Orthodox Church). The three were a couple of rows in front of Putin’s defense minister, Sergey Shoigu.
When Putin bounded off the stage after taking his oath to accept congratulations, he shook hands first with Kirill, and then with Schroeder, and only then with Medvedev. He gave a wave and a nod, returned to the stage, bowed to the crowd, and then bounced off to review his honor guard.
The prominent place given to Schroeder, the only well-known foreign personage in attendance, was intended to boost the Russian dictator’s sense of legitimacy. Putin, it seems, craves legitimacy, and the respect of foreign leaders. It was for this reason that he went through the “castling” maneuver of installing his faithful sidekick Medvedev as president from 2008 to 2012, as Putin was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term as president. Putin took the role of prime minister instead, and was still de facto head honcho, if not de jure.
It is also the reason Putin still bothers to hold elections, and rigs them in such a way as to produce a win that is overwhelming, but not ridiculously so. While other dictators who are less concerned about their foreign image award themselves “election results” in the high nineties percentagewise, Putin is content with a 70+/70+ formula (over 70 percent for him, on a turnout of over 70 percent). The use of this formula means that he wins in the first round and gains more than 50 percent of the overall vote. However, the winning result is not absurdly high. He can then use this “election” result as a prop for his shaky legitimacy.
The actual election process is a sham, of course. Rigging is so blatant as to be comical (it is also an expression of the dictator’s power – “Look, I can mess with the vote to get the result that I want, and there is nothing you can do about it.”) And no serious opposition candidates are permitted to run against the dictator in his sham electoral campaign.
But it’s also important to have at least one fawning foreigner to acknowledge one’s greatness, and this is where Schroeder comes in. To have a former leader of a Western nation associate so closely with him lends the Russian dictator the kind of legitimacy that only money can buy. Into the bargain, Putin sends the message to Westerners that their political leaders are no more virtuous and just as corruptible as those of authoritarian regimes. “Your leaders are for sale, and I’m buying,” Putin is mouthing at the Western public, with a smirk.
Schroeder is thus Ukraine’s Foe of the Week, and a winner of the loathsome Order of Lenin, for lending legitimacy to Ukraine’s chief enemy. The former German chancellor indeed seems to be a sellout.
In 2005 Schroeder stepped neatly from the Chancellery in Berlin to the chairmanship of Russia’s Nord Stream project – a scheme to pipe natural gas from Russia to Germany via an undersea pipeline, reducing the use of the overland pipeline network, which mainly runs through Ukraine. He will also chair the project’s next stage, the parallel Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. In 2014 Reuters reported that his salary in that role was 250,000 euros per year.
In 2017 he was made the chairman of the Russian state oil company Rosneft. Schroeder has indicated his salary as Rosneft chairman is around 600,000 euros (10 percent of a regular executive salary at the Russian company, which is around 6 million euros.
As a former German chancellor, Schroeder already gets a pension of around 78,000 euros a year, plus pensions from the German national parliament, the Bundestag, and the state parliament of Lower Saxony, which probably takes his pension earnings to at least 100,000 euros a year, and maybe a bit more.
His total salary is thus in the order of 1 million euros per year, though it may be somewhat more when various perks are thrown in. He gets another 500,000 euros to keep an office in Berlin, though much of that is said to go on costs and staff salaries.
So the most depressing thing of all, perhaps, is that it costs comparatively little to schroederize (to coin a verb) a Western European politician. How many more are there, who keep a lower profile than Schroeder?
