Ukraine’s Friend of the week: Dan Coats
The U.S. director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, probably knows as much about Russia’s plans for Ukraine in the coming year as anyone outside the walls of the Kremlin, so it’s worth paying attention to what he says.
Speaking at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s annual hearing on worldwide threats on Feb. 13, Coats warned that the Kremlin would continue probing online for weakness in Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, and noted that in 2016 and 2017 Ukraine had been hit by cyberattacks. The attacks, on power grid management systems, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands.
Moreover, a ransomware attack last summer, which caused widespread disruption across Ukraine and then globally, turned out not to have been a typical attack by criminals to extort cash in return for a key to decrypt vital system files. Instead, the purpose of the attack was to spread chaos – the code lacked the ability to collect a ransom, and simply, and destructively, wiped various files to disable computers.
Analysts believe the computer virus, dubbed NotPetya because it was disguised to look like a known ransomware virus called Petya, was the work of a state actor: a known ransomware virus was used as the basis of the wiper virus to fool media into reporting it as the work of a criminal gang, rather than a state.
There is little doubt that the state actor was Russia, and Coats told the senate committee that Ukraine should expect more of the same this year. (On Feb. 15, the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States both blamed the Russian military for releasing the NotPetya virus.)
Coats also noted that as before, Ukraine would be used as a test site by Russia for unconventional methods of attack, later to be used on Western countries.
Ukraine, of course, has for years suffered from attacks from the Kremlin to undermine its sovereignty, limit its independence, and reduce its ability to defend itself. Ukraine’s information space was polluted for years by Russian propaganda media, its politicians were corrupted (further) by the Kremlin’s use of the gas trade – a trade that it could also use as a lever of economic and political influence on the country.
And under pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s military was hollowed out, and defense funds diverted to paramilitary police forces that were intended to protect Yanukovych’s budding dictatorship.
Such was the poor state of Ukraine’s military by the time Russia was ready to launch active military operations against its neighbor in 2014, Kyiv could field barely 6,000 loyal, combat-ready troops. When the military attack came, Ukraine was at real risk of collapse, such was the corrosive effect of years of efforts by the Kremlin to weaken it.
Now the same tactics that Moscow has long used against Ukraine are starting to be used against the West, and according to Coats an attack on the United States is already underway.
“At a minimum, we expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople, and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the (country),” he said.
He could easily have been speaking about Ukraine over any time in the last 15 to 20 years.
Coats is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of an Order of Yaroslav the Wise for his continued support for Ukraine in the face of Kremlin aggression, and drawing attention to the country’s plight. The West’s collective response to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and fomenting of war in the Donbas has been flaccid (Coats notes that “the Kremlin is coping with sanctions at existing levels”). It is good to know that the U.S. director of national intelligence takes seriously the threat the Kremlin poses to Ukraine and the West, even if his political masters, strangely, seem not to.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Andreas Maurer
While in recent years the Kremlin has been courting far-right politicians as agents of influence in the West, it continues its decades-old practice of exploiting a rich seam of useful idiots on the left to undermine those it sees as enemies.
One of those useful idiots is Andreas Maurer, a German politician from the leftist Die Linke party. According to recent reports in the Russian and Ukrainian press, Maurer plans to come to Ukraine in April to attend the Yalta International Economic Forum in Russian-occupied Crimea.
It is unlikely that Maurer will enter Ukraine legally, given his past statements and actions. In the past he has urged his local council to pass a resolution recognizing Russia’s illegal annexation of the peninsula, and he is known to have previously travelled to Ukraine’s Crimea illegally – in April 2017, and again in August 2017.
During the August trip, he was photographed standing in a group with Alexander “The Surgeon” Zaldostanov, the leader of the Russian Night Wolves motorcycle gang, and… Russian President Vladimir Putin. In another picture from the same trip he is pictured standing next to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
How did this lowly German politician, a bricklayer by trade who sits on the town council of Quakenbrueck, in Lower Saxony, come to be in such “exalted” company?
One factor may be his origins – according to the German press Maurer was born in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and is of Russian-German ancestry. Another is his leftist political orientation (though curiously he was in previous years associated with liberal-conservative German party, the Christian Democratic Union.) Leftists in Germany, as in other Western countries, often have a rose-tinted view of Putin’s Russia – which is an authoritarian, corporate-kleptocratic police state with imperialistic ambitions, rather than the inheritor state of a Soviet socialist paradise that they foolishly imagine it to be.
But it is actually no coincidence that Maurer and Zaldostanov should appear together, and in the presence of Putin – they are both tools of the Russian leader. Zaldostanov and the counter-culture movement he leads have been co-opted in classic Kremlin style to serve in a PR role for the regime, and so has Maurer. The German politician, though practically unknown in his own country, is well known in Russia as a talking head, appearing on Russian propaganda outlets such as RT, to give a pro-Russian view from the West. In the past, RT has described him as “an exceptional phenomenon, who stands in clear opposition to the German mainstream.”
But Maurer, who runs a project called “People’s Diplomacy” to improve Russian German relations, is also used as a source of disinformation to be fed back to his country via the German-language version of the Kremlin’s propaganda channel Sputnik. Sputnik reported glowingly on Maurer’s meeting with Putin in Crimea in August 2017, quoting him as he trotted out the Kremlin’s talking points:
“The latest polls show that more and more people in Europe want to have reasonable relations with Russia, and this anti-Russian policy of sanctions or anti-Russian rhetoric is no longer wanted by people in Germany.”
It is unclear what polls Maurer is citing – according to the latest Pew poll on Europeans’ attitudes to Russia, released in August 2017, 78 percent have a negative view of Russia, up from 69 percent in 2015.
Politicians such as Maurer are used by the Kremlin to give the Russian public the impression that their country is not as internationally isolated as it actually is, and to fool the public in the West into thinking the Kremlin is not aggressive and hostile. He is supporting an authoritarian regime that directly threatens Ukraine. For that, he is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin.
