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, more than 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Friend: Former U.S. President Barack Obama
History is the ultimate judge of leadership. From its vantage point, we often see that past leaders’ successes were actually failures and their failures hid under-appreciated accomplishments.
But usually it takes a few decades to reassess the actions of past leaders. Not so with former U.S. President Barack Obama — and he can thank Donald Trump for that.
From their first meeting in the White House on Nov. 10, 2016, it was clear that Trump is the perfect foil for Obama. The current U.S. president is crude, superficial, unintellectual and self-involved to the point of prioritizing his personal business above the interests of the country. His predecessor is calm, thoughtful and responsible. In his speeches and his actions, Obama exudes a spirit of public service largely absent from the Trump administration.
In fact, Trump’s dumpster fire presidency burns so brightly that, in the short term, it will even blind us to some of Obama’s failures as president.
Recent news has again demonstrated Obama to be a responsible and civic-minded leader, unlike Trump.
On May 5, Buzzfeed News reported that Obama had decried a Republican request for documents about Ukraine-related meetings during his presidency. In line with U.S. legislation, the records in question had not yet been released, and Republican senators Charles Grassley and Ronald Johnson — who chair the finance and homeland security committees, respectively — wanted early access to them. Both men have been involved in a broad investigation into the Democrats and Ukraine.
In a letter to the United States’ top archivist, Obama’s office did not hide his opinion of the request: It was a political sham aimed at backing up Trump’s illegal search for dirt on former Vice President Joseph Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for the 2020 presidential election. The request aimed to buttress the very thing that got Trump impeached last year.
“It arises out of efforts by some, actively supported by Russia, to shift the blame for Russian interference in the 2016 election to Ukraine,” Obama’s office said in a statement.
“The request for early release of presidential records in order to give credence to a Russian disinformation campaign — one that has already been thoroughly investigated by a bipartisan congressional committee — is without precedent,” it continued.
However, the former U.S. president agreed to allow the documents to be released to Johnson and Grassley’s Senate committees “in the interest of countering the misinformation campaign underlying this request.”
Obama’s response to the records request demonstrates two qualities of his presidency that are completely missing in the Trump administration: honesty and transparency.
While the Trump administration and its supporters try to pin flimsy accusations of corruption on Biden and his son in the hopes of securing the president a second term in office, Obama recognizes that sunlight is the best disinfectant. He understands that the accusations against Ukraine and against Biden do not stand up to serious scrutiny. This is why he is not afraid of releasing the records.
What would we discover were Trump to throw open the curtains of his administration? Certainly a lot more than Johnson and Grassley will get from the Obama records.
For this reason, Obama is Ukraine’s friend of the week and merits the Order of Yaroslav the Wise.
Foe: Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church
As the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill is not just a spiritual leader for Russian Orthodox believers, but also parishioners at churchs in other countries that fall under the Moscow Patriarchate’s jurisdiction: Kazakhstan, Belarus and even Ukraine.
As the global coronavirus pandemic has engulfed the planet, Russian Orthodox churches have become centers of infection with COVID-19. And the church’s leadership has been slow and ineffective at stemming the disease’s transmission in these places of worship.
It is true that Kirill has not encouraged worshippers to attend services despite the strict quarantine measures imposed in Russia. Nor has he denied the existence of COVID-19 or promoted other dangerous conspiracy theories about the disease. In fact, he even threatened so-called “coronavirus dissident” priests with trial before church tribunals and called on churchgoers to stay home.
But as the New York Times reported on May 5, Kirill was slow to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and did not use the full force of his authority to close churches, instead allowing local diocese to decide whether to hold services. What was the result? Large numbers of infections in Russian churches and likely in the broader population.
In particular, this was a failure on Kirill’s part because the Russian Orthodox Church is an extremely hierarchical organization closely aligned with the Russian government, which has imposed strict quarantine measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. If Kirill wanted to close the churches, he would have had the full weight of the Russian state behind him.
Stronger leadership from Kirill would not just have benefitted Russia. It would also have helped other countries with Russian Orthodox believers.
In Belarus, thousands of worshippers came to celebrate Easter at St. Elizabeth’s Monastery on April 18-19, despite reports of mass infections among the clergy there. The monastery only closed to parishioners on May 1.
In Kyiv, the Pechersk Lavra was shuttered for quarantine on April 13, after more than 90 cases of COVID-19 were registered in the monastery, which belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.
While the other two major churches in Ukraine, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, called for parishioners to celebrate the Easter holiday at home, the Moscow Patriarchate church failed to tell worshippers to stay home — despite coronavirus infection reaching the highest echelons of the church. Even after two clergymen from the Perchersk Lavra died, the Moscow Patriarchate said it would hold Easter services at the monastery and encouraged worshippers to gather outside.
Later, Ukraine’s health ministry said it expected COVID-19 cases to spike in late April due to quarantine violations during the Easter holidays.
The Moscow Patriarchate churches in Ukraine — and, by extension, the Russian Orthodox Church — feel increasingly embattled since the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople granted the Orthodox Church of Ukraine canonical independence from Moscow at the beginning of 2019. One would think that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate would want to behave responsibly with the safety of believers and show a committment to public health in Ukraine, something that should transcend political divides, to demonstrate that it is a religious demonination, and not a trojan horse for the Kremlin — an accusation its enemies often hurl at it. But fact is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Is Patriarch Kirill entirely responsible for this? Of course not. But as the leader of large numbers of Orthodox Christians in multiple countries across the post-Soviet space — including, for better or worse, Ukraine – Kirill could have prevented the church from becoming a disease vector. He could have taken steps to force priests in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and elsewhere to obey quarantine measures, prioritize the health of their (often elderly) worshippers and help protect the broader society from COVID-19. He didn’t do that.
Sometimes, apathy and indecisiveness are just as dangerous as malice. For this reason, Patriarch Kirill is Ukraine’s foe of the week and deserving of the Order of Lenin.
