Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Michael Carpenter
While the situation is no better in Ukraine than it was a year ago, the country has slipped out of the nightly news, off political agendas and down in the list of international priorities.
This is largely because the current administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is more interested in mending fences with the Kremlin than shoring up Ukraine. In contrast, under the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited the country six times in office, addressed parliament and phoned Ukraine’s leaders every other week.
Biden’s message was that the United States supports Ukraine, but that even while the country continues to be under attack by the Kremlin, corruption behind the lines has to be fought as well. The United States helped Ukraine achieve some of its most notable reform successes so far – including the creation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU.
But since Obama and Biden left office, the insistent calls from the United States to Ukraine’s leaders to reform and fight corruption have ended. Many in power are at heart not reformers, but simply part of the former Ukrainian political elite who picked the right side during the Orange and EuroMaidan revolutions.
President Petro Poroshenko was already doing his best to sabotage judicial reform in Ukraine while Biden was in office, but since Trump came to power the Ukrainian president has launched an all-out assault on the NABU, the country’s only truly independent anti-corruption body, and civil society organizations and figures who fight corruption.
Ukraine’s top officials seem to think that since their triumphant return to the foreign debt market last September, when they raised $3 billion, they can safely end their reform drive, do without further support from the International Monetary Fund (which after all comes with strings attached), and even start to unpick the anti-corruption reforms that have already been made.
So in the absence of a strong voice from the Trump administration to remind Ukraine’s leaders to do the job Ukrainian voters elected them to do, Ukraine’s friends abroad have to take up the call. One of those friends is Michael Carpenter, our Friend of the Week and winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise, who has long been doing just that.
Carpenter, the senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and the former deputy assistant secretary of defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans and Conventional Arms Control, speaks with authority – even in the Trump age, when pernicious populists tell the public to despise expertise.
And Carpenter, writing in Foreign Policy on Jan. 4, summarizes the root of Ukraine’s current problem succinctly.
“Unfortunately, as a result of the distraction of their own elections (and the Brexit vote), leaders in the United States, Britain, France and Germany have paid scant attention to Ukraine over the last year. This has led entrenched interests within Ukraine’s ruling class to launch a broadside against the country’s nascent anti-corruption institutions. Correctly perceiving these institutions as a threat to all manner of corrupt schemes, the vested interests have tried to neuter or politically subordinate them to the government.”
It is probably too much to hope that the Trump administration will come to its senses and take both a firm stand on Kremlin aggression against Ukraine and a tough line on reform in Ukraine. In the meantime, it is crucial for Ukraine’s friends and supporters abroad to keep up the pressure on the country’s backsliding leaders. Poroshenko, for instance, should not be able to go to Davos and falsely present himself as a crusader against corruption without earning a vocal slapdown from Western officials and leaders.
This is particularly important as Ukraine enters its own election cycle, during which the country’s political elite will be even more distracted from the reform agenda. Time is running out for real change in Ukraine, and the country’s supporters abroad, like Carpenter, must keep up the calls for reform while there is still a chance that Poroshenko and co. will listen.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Igor Girkin
It emerged in late January that relatives of 25 of those killed when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down had on Dec. 2 obtained a U.S. court ruling against Igor Girkin, the Russian agent who claims to have started the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas.
The 25 victims were among 298 people to die when a Russian BUK missile shot down MH17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Subsequent investigations have revealed that the missile originated from Russian’s 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk, Russia – although this has yet to be proved in a court of law. Girkin’s accomplices are thought to have arranged the delivery to Ukraine of the BUK launcher, and organized its hurried removal the day after MH17 was shot down.
The relatives filed a lawsuit against Girkin in the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in the United States, demanding compensation for the murder of their loved ones. The court found against Girkin, and awarded $10 million in compensation and $10 million in punitive damages to each of the plaintiffs. The total amount of compensation will amount to more than $400 million, Dutch media reported.
It is of course unlikely that Girkin will pay anything, as it’s improbable that he has significant assets outside Russia that could be seized. He will probably never face justice for his crimes.
But such rulings are symbolic: despite the lies and denials by the Kremlin, when the evidence in the MH17 case was tested in a court of law, in a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a Russian citizen was found guilty.
It was the Dutch media who unearthed the ruling, and it is in the Netherlands that the criminal case on the shooting down on MH17 is being investigated. Most of those who died when MH17 was shot down (196) were Dutch.
It is not yet known how far Dutch investigators have come in identifying those directly responsible for shooting down MH17, but Girkin must surely be among them. The voice of his deputy appears in intercepted calls in which Russian-led forces discuss the deployment of the BUK anti-aircraft missile system in Ukraine – it is inconceivable that Girkin himself did not know about it. He had also earlier warned Ukrainian military aircraft to stay out of the airspace of non-government-controlled territories in the Donbas. Just after MH17 was shot down he wrote a post on social media (soon deleted) in which he crowed over the destruction of the aircraft – which he clearly thought had been a large Ukrainian military transport, and not a civilian airliner. He has never denied that Russian-led forces were responsible for shooting down MH17.
Neither has Girkin denied being responsible for starting the war in Ukraine – quite the opposite, he has claimed responsibility. In an interview with the Russian nationalist newspaper Zavtra published in November 2014 Girkin said he and his team of 52 special operations soldiers had “pulled the trigger of war in the Donbas” after crossing into mainland Ukraine from Crimea in early April 2014. A group of unknown men in unmarked military uniforms, but clearly professional soldiers, started seizing security service, police and government offices in eastern Ukraine in mid-April 2014.
So in addition to the 298 lives lost on MH17, Girkin bears responsibility, by his own admission, for the deaths of more than 10,300 people in the Donbas, plus possibly thousands more of his own compatriots – mercenaries and regular Russian soldiers – who have died in Ukraine, and whose remains were buried in unmarked graves in the Donbas, or secretly repatriated and buried in Russia.
It is very much to be hoped that Girkin and his accomplices in the Kremlin can one day be brought to justice for their crimes, but in the meantime he is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the odious Order of Lenin.
