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.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Peter Strzok
By Matthew Kupfer
Everything Donald Trump touches turns into a book — quite an outcome for a man who is likely the least well-read president in United States’ history.
In fact, virtually anyone with a significant connection to Trump and an axe to grind can probably get a book deal today. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton published a memoir of his time in the Trump White House, which revealed the 45th U.S. president’s boundless hatred for Ukraine. Trump’s niece Mary Trump published a book that presented her uncle as an extreme narcissist who cheated on his SATs.
Now, Peter Strzok, a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and among the bureau’s top Russia experts, is also publishing a book — “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump,” scheduled for release on Sept. 8.
If the Bolton and Mary Trump books are any indication, this one should also be a doozy.
As an FBI agent, Strzok played a leading role in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, briefly, in special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Then, in summer 2017, Mueller removed Strzok from the investigation over personal text messages to Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer with whom he was having an affair. In one of the text messages, Strzok referred to Trump as an “idiot” and denigrated the then-Republican candidate. It wasn’t the only person he criticized in his text messages — in fact, many of the others were Democrats.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump from repeatedly lashing out at Strzok over Twitter and accusing the former FBI agent of being at the heart of a conspiracy to prevent him from becoming president.
Now, Strzok will respond. In a statement announcing the book, the publisher said that Strzok had become convinced that “the commander in chief had fallen under the sway of America’s adversary in the Kremlin.”
Strzok also said that he would explain in the book how “the elevation by President Trump and his collaborators of Trump’s own personal interests over the interests of the country allowed (Russian President Vladimir) Putin to succeed beyond Stalin’s wildest dreams, and how the national security implications of Putin’s triumph will persist through our next election and beyond,” the Politico news site reported.
Such strong rhetoric on Russia may win Strzok many fans in Ukraine, but that’s not why he is Ukraine’s friend of the week. Rhetoric alone — particularly comparisons to Stalin — only goes so far.
What may be extremely powerful in Strzok’s book is the window he can provide into the investigations into Russia’s election interference and whether Trump’s campaign actively coordinated with Russia in 2016 to gain an advantage in the election.
How will that help Ukraine? In the last several years, Trump and his supporters have alleged that the real election interference was not committed by Russia, but by Ukraine. The evidence for this claim is scant, but it has fundamentally altered his administration’s relations with Ukraine.
Trump’s belief in this unsubstantiated conspiracy theory moved him to condition military aid for Kyiv on the administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky investigating claims of Ukrainian interference in the election and false corruption charges against Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2020 race, former Vice President Joe Biden. Ultimately, Trump was impeached over this wildly unethical behavior, but not removed from office.
Strzok’s insights into Russian election interference and the Mueller investigation will add to the clear evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and will demonstrate that these investigations were serious, legitimate and unbiased.
In promoting his book, Strzok makes a big claim: that Trump is compromised. If he truly has convincing evidence that Trump’s strange fondness for Putin has undermined his presidency and U.S. national security, that will make “Compromised” one hell of a read.
That may seem unlikely, but after the revelations from Bolton and Mary Trump’s books, anything is possible.
Even without such a smoking gun, the book will help establish the truth about 2016. That can only benefit Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Russian mercenary army Wagner Group
By Illia Ponomarenko
“Death is our business, and business is good.”
These were the words in Russian written on one of the sleeve patches found by a Belarusian special task squad after it arrested a group of 32 men, mostly Russian nationals, at a recreation camp near Minsk.
The men, who had checked in just days before, looked suspicious. They all wore homogenous military-style fatigues, wouldn’t go out for fun and tried not to draw too much attention to themselves. They carefully studied the camp’s premises and surroundings, moving around in small groups.
Among their belongings, the Belarusian secret service also discovered U.S. dollars, Sudanese pound banknotes, condoms, documents in Arabic, bank cards, and even more sleeve patches bearing images of stylized skulls.
They were definitely not just another group of Russian tourists staying in a cheap, quiet hotel outside the city.
According to Belarusian authorities, these were none other than mercenaries of the Wagner Group — the notorious Russian private military company used by the Kremlin in its secret wars for money and power around the world.
Official statements from Minsk said the mercenaries came to Belarus to destabilize the situation in the country during its ongoing presidential campaign. Later, Belarusian law enforcement also arrested one more alleged Wagner mercenary in the country’s south and said nearly 200 of them had arrived in the country.
The shocking news triggered a loud diplomatic scandal, with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko demanding explanations from Moscow and, in cooperation with Ukraine, tightening border control.
What’s even more interesting is that at least 14 of the arrested men were identified as former militants who had fought against Ukraine in Russia’s war in Donbas in 2014-2015. That’s why the Ukrainian mission to Belarus was invited to have a say in the scandal, and it is already clear that Ukraine is going to seek their extradition.
The Wagner Group indeed has a phenomenally vibrant record in various wars all around the world. They are everywhere the Kremlin and its inner circle of oligarchs have business interests, secretly funded and armed by the Russian military and oligarch Evgeniy Prigozhin, who is very close to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
It was this mercenary army that fought in southern and western Syria to gain multimillion oil extraction contracts for their masters in Moscow. It was the Wagner Group whose traces were later found in Sudan and the Central African Republic, where the mercenaries are rendering their training, bodyguard and warfighting services in exchange for a share in local gem mining.
The geography of the Wagner Group’s dirty business overseas is expanding rapidly. As of early 2020, nearly 1,200 Russian fighters were confirmed deployed to Libya in support of Russian-backed rebel general Khalifa Haftar, who is fighting the country’s internationally-recognized central government.
The rise of the Wagner Group in recent years in many ways opened a new page in modern warfare, in which secret, unofficial, though fully-equipped mercenary armies act globally beyond any laws and ensure their masters’ political or economic benefits without any official affiliation to their nations.
What’s more, in 2014-2015, the Wagner Group took its first major steps in the battlefields of Donbas. According to Ukraine’s SBU security service, at least 40 Ukrainian nationals were recruited by the force, mostly among Russian-backed militants.
Moreover, it is believed that Wagner fighters were the ones who downed the Ukrainian Air Force’s Ilyushin Il-76 air transporter in the sky over the Luhansk airport in June 2014, killing 49 Ukrainian servicemen on board.
The Wagner Group left its blood-stained footprint in Ukraine — and now its mercenaries have likely been identified in neighboring Belarus.
It is still an open question what the alleged Wagner fighters were actually doing in Belarus, and if they were really ordered to destabilize the country in the run-up to troublesome presidential elections. Judging by their belongings, they could also be waiting to be transported for deployment in Sudan via Minsk.
In any case, Wagner’s ongoing and expanding activity around the world, not mentioning Eastern Europe, is a direct threat to Ukraine’s national security. This ill-fated force once set its foot on Ukrainian soil to kill and destroy for dirty money. And there can be no guarantees that this scenario cannot be repeated in Belarus, the Baltic countries, Kazakhstan, or wherever the Kremlin sees its vicious interests.
Killing is indeed the Wagner Group’s business, and they are increasingly successful at it. Meanwhile, the Kyiv Post’s business is to declare it Ukraine’s Foe of the Week — and to absolutely endorse the mercenaries’ rapid extradition to Ukraine for trial and, hopefully, extremely long prison terms.
