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: Ted Lieu
Devin Nunes can “shove it” in the words of Ted Lieu, a California congressman on the House Judiciary Committee. We couldn’t agree more.
Nunes, as it turns out, who as the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee largely led efforts to discredit the impeachment inquiry in the House, calling it the “Ukraine hoax” seems to have been directly involved in the shadow, dirt-digging mission in Ukraine he was publicly avowed was non-existent.
In early December, call records released in a House Intelligence Committee report showed that Nunes had exchanged calls with both Rudy Guiliani and Lev Parnas at key moments in April 2019, when Parnas was allegedly nosing around in Ukraine on Trump’s behalf.
He “has a lot of explaining to do,” Lieu said of Nunes in response.
The comment was followed by threats of a lawsuit in late December. On Jan. 17, Lieu tweeted a portion of a Dec. 31 letter from Nunes’ lawyer stating that Nunes would sue if Lieu did not issue a public apology.
Jan. 17 also brought the revelations from Lev Parnas, via released documents including text messages between Nunes staffer Derek Harvey and Parnas showing that the congressman’s office was directly involved in obtaining information around Ukraine, especially surrounding the conspiracy theory of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections leveraged as an effort to discredit Trump’s Democratic rivals.
As it turns out, “[Nunes] was looking into this Ukraine stuff also and wanted to help out… He knew everything,” as Parnas said in his Jan. 16 interview with Rachel Maddow.
And Lieu quite rationally, doubled down in response. “I welcome any lawsuit from your client and look forward to taking discovery of Congressman Nunes. Or, you can take your letter and shove it.”
Foe: Hassan Rouhani
While Iran officially acknowledged that the country had unintentionally fired two missiles at Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 on Jan. 8, killing all 176 passengers including 11 Ukrainians, the country is refusing to hand over the plane’s black box, impeding an investigation of the attack.
Responding to international pressure, Iran initially promised to send the plane’s flight data recorders to another country where neutral investigators could analyze their contents as Iran lacks the necessary technology to oversee the investigation.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office said that Ukraine requested the data be sent to Ukraine in a meeting on Jan. 20, and according to the statement from Zelensky’s office, “The parties agreed that all remnants of the aircraft preserved after the accident should be returned to Ukraine.”
But on Jan. 21, Iran’s aviation regulator reversed that promise, saying the country would instead request equipment from the U.S. and France in order to download the black box data, something that has never occurred in the last 30 years of civilian plane crashes.
The move sparks concerns that even with Iran’s admission of guilt after initially denying responsibility for the attack, the country will hinder an investigation of the incident.
And while Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed to punish those responsible for the crash and Iran claims it has already arrested multiple people in connection to the missiles fired, it has not released the names of the detained parties.
Both incidents point to lingering obfuscation from Iran, cause for concern that despite the admission of responsibility, Iran may still hinder Ukraine’s ability to investigate the crash.
