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 of the Week: USS Donald Cook
It’s nice to have friends come over to show some support when you’re being threatened by a very nasty neighbor – especially if that friend is large and heavily armed.
So the USS Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, was a welcome sight when it tied up in the port of Odesa early on Feb. 25, three months to the day after Russia’s brazen attack on three Ukrainian naval vessels in international waters in the Black Sea. Russia still holds 24 Ukrainian servicemen it captured in the incident, and in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the Kremlin is not treating them as prisoners of war, but is trying them for illegal border crossing in one of Russia’s sham courts.
The Kremlin takes the Donald Cook seriously, and hates it when the warship comes anywhere near Russian waters. On April 12, 2014, at the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in the Donbas, a Russian Su-24 military jet made 12 close passes over the Donald Cook while the warship was in waters of the western Black Sea. The incident lasted 90 minutes. Later, the Kremlin used the incident to falsely claim the Su-24 had disabled the Donald Cook’s Aegis Combat System – a missile defense system capable of simultaneously tracking up to 100 targets up to 100 nautical miles away.
While the U.S. warship is armed with an impressive array of missiles, anti-aircraft defenses and torpedoes, it is hardly a military threat to Russia, which has its Black Sea Fleet based nearby in Crimea, the Ukrainian territory Moscow invaded and started to occupy five years ago.
But such is the institutional paranoia of the Kremlin that it announced that its Black Sea Fleet had started to shadow the U.S. warship as soon as it entered the Black Sea on Feb. 19. While under international laws and treaties the United States has every right to operate in the Black Sea (before arriving in Odesa, the Donald Cook conducted training exercises with a warship of NATO ally Turkey), Russia views any lengthy stay of a U.S. warship in the Black Sea as a “provocation,” so such visits usually only last a couple of weeks.
Still, the Donald Cook and its crew are Ukraine’s Friends of the Week and joint winners of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for rallying round at a time when Russia is being especially threatening and bullying. Shows of force are practically the only thing the thuggish regime in the Kremlin understands.
And seeing this gray, hulking, heavily armed friend of Ukraine tied up in Odesa, some in the Kremlin might even start to realize that their master’s attempts to keep Ukraine in his grip have only succeeded in pushing the country into a closer relationship with the West.
Foe of the Week: Aymeric Chauprade
In the early hours of Feb. 27, 2014, Russian special forces troops stormed the Crimean parliament. Among them was Igor Girkin, the Russian military intelligence officer who claims to have later led a group of 52 special operations troops into the Donbas to create a fake civil war in Ukraine.
Girkin on Russian television in 2015 described how, after the takeover of the Crimean parliament, its lawmakers were rounded up and forced at gunpoint to dismiss the Crimean government and call a referendum “on greater autonomy from Ukraine.” According to Girkin, public officials, police, the army, and civil servants had shown little enthusiasm for Russia’s land grab.
“I did not see, unfortunately, the slightest support for the public authorities in Simferopol,” Girkin said. “There was none. The deputies were collected by the militia and driven into the hall, so that they could vote (for the decisions). And I was one of the commanders of the militia.”
So the claims of Aymeric Chauprade, a French far-right member of the European Parliament who went to Crimea to “observe” the sham referendum later held at gunpoint by Russia, that the referendum was legitimate and justified by “Russian and Ukrainian history,” are quite clearly shameful bunk.
Chauprade, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the odious Order of Lenin, even commentated on events live on Russian propaganda channel RT when the sham referendum was held on March 16, 2014. He was clearly biased in favor of Russia, telling RT of the Kremlin’s theft of Ukrainian territory that “we are talking about long-term history. We are talking about the Russian people, about the territories of the former USSR.”
So much for the Ukrainian people, Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, and international law.
Chauprade is a Western useful idiot: one of those whose support for nationalism, traditionalism, and isolationism makes them a natural ally of the Kremlin. Politically, Chauprade is on the far right, but there are plenty of examples of useful idiots from the far left of the political spectrum too.
But there is something more unsettling about Chauprade’s useful idiocy. On Feb. 25, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty revealed that the daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was working as an intern at the European Parliament — in Chauprade’s office.
As an intern, Yelizaveta Peskova may attend parliament committee meetings and general meetings in Brussels and Strasburg, and may have access to sensitive or even secret parliamentary documents. Chauprade is a member of both the EP’s foreign affairs committee and the subcommittee on security and defense, and he is part of the delegation of the EU-Russia parliamentary committee.
While Chauprade denies there is a conflict of interest here, it’s enough to make an intelligence officer weep.
And Ukrainians, who are fighting a very real war to fend off Russian military aggression on the eastern flank of the European Union, should rightly be upset at such a clear security risk deep within one of the institutions of a union that they aspire to join one day.
The revelation about Peskova also adds to the clear impression that the Kremlin is attempting to participate in Western institutions with the aim of undermining them. This has already happened at Interpol, the international police cooperation agency, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to name just a few.
And, to what should be the eternal shame of the West, the Kremlin is being aided by the likes of Chauprade.
