Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Michael Gahler
During the Munich Security Conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was mocked and laughed at when he said Crimea willingly joined Russia, in line with the United Nations Charter.
But that was in 2015, just a year after the Kremlin invaded the Ukrainian territory and started its current occupation, having seized control of ports, airports and military bases, and organizing a sham referendum – held at gunpoint and “observed” by a motley collection of European fascists and loony leftists. Feelings were still running high, and the great and good at Munich could still muster some outrage.
In contrast, this year, Lavov’s equally false assertions – that Ukraine experienced a “coup d’etat” and that Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas is an “intra-Ukraine conflict” – were met with barely a snigger.
It seems that most attendees of the Munich Security Conference have become so inured to Lavrov’s lies that they no longer find them worthy of either laughter or outrage.
So it was refreshing when German politician Michael Gahler, the standing rapporteur on Ukraine in the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, took Lavrov to task for the Russian foreign minister’s hypocritical suggestion that Ukraine and other former Soviet states were somehow being forced to choose between Russia and the West.
“When someone doesn’t sign a treaty with us we don’t send in the tanks,” Gahler said during the question-and-answer session that followed Lavrov’s 21-minute, lie-laden speech.
It is of course an exhausting task to counter the ejecta of falsehood spewing continuously from the Kremlin’s mouthpieces, but it must be done: if at some point the West simply ignores the Kremlin’s lies and lets the likes of Lavrov get away with telling them unchallenged, Moscow will take it as a signal that it has won the argument. That will embolden it into taking further aggressive actions and lying about them as well, thinking that eventually the West will in the end give in and accept them.
We have already seen what happens when the West fails to react strongly enough to the Kremlin’s duplicity: In February 2014, when Russian troops were starting to invade Ukraine’s Crimea, there should have been an international outcry, immediate and loud, followed swiftly by a broad and painful sanctions regime.
There was not. The result was that barely a month later, the Kremlin felt ready to engage in further mischief. In early April it sent a team of 50 special operations soldiers under Russian citizen Igor Girkin (also known as Strelkov) into mainland Ukraine, there to foment the present war, which has since cost the lives of more than 10,300 people.
Absurdly, in the case of Crimea Western politicians and media were left tongue-tied by the Kremlin’s simple measure of making their troops remove identifying insignia from their uniforms. Even though it was obvious that these troops, wearing Russian-issue uniforms and carrying Russian-issue weapons and equipment, were undoubtedly regular Russian troops, the Western response to the Kremlin’s land grab was initially muted.
And ridiculously, the West went on to fall for it again, when Russia started its covert invasion of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Incredibly, it is not only Lavrov who still refers to a “civil war” in Ukraine – the phrase can occasionally be read or heard in Western media, four years after Russia launched its war on Ukraine. This is because Western politicians and media did not loudly and clearly denounce the Kremlin’s falsehoods early on.
And that’s why it’s important that Western politicians like Gahler, Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of an Order of Yaroslav the Wise, continue to call out the Kremlin for its perfidy. It might be tiresome, but repeatedly restating the truth really is the only antidote to Moscow’s poisonous lies.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Matteo Salvini
As the United States mulls the latest indictments concerning Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Kremlin is gearing up to meddle in the internal affairs of another country at election time – Italy.
Bloomberg reports that a network of bots, or automated accounts, sprang to life on the social network Twitter in late January, with 150 bots tweeting an identical message in support of an Italian populist politician, Matteo Salvini of the anti-euro and anti-immigrant Lega Nord party.
If previous experience is a guide, more such networks will be activated, and the online comments pages of Italian newspapers, television stations and the Italian-language communities of Facebook and Twitter will be flooded with anti-EU, nationalist, anti-immigrant, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-NATO “opinions” from Russia’s online army of trolls ahead of the Italian general elections on March 4.
Similar activities were seen during Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and the subsequent launch of the Kremlin’s war in the Donbas. There was also notable Russian online propaganda activity during the Scottish independence referendum September 2014, the Brexit vote on Britain leaving the EU in June 2016, the U.S. presidential election in 2016, the French presidential election in 2017, and the German general elections in the same year.
In each case, Russia intervenes on behalf the candidates, parties or positions that will serve to advance Kremlin goals of weakening the European Union, NATO, and the United States.
In the Scottish referendum, Moscow hoped for a “yes” vote, as that would weaken the United Kingdom and throw into doubt the future of its independent nuclear deterrent – the Trident nuclear submarine force, which is based in Scotland. In the case of Brexit, the Kremlin backed the “leave” vote, as Brexit will seriously weaken the United Kingdom and to some extent damage the European Union.
The Kremlin also supported the election of the far-left politician Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the UK’s Labour Party in 2015. Corbyn, an anti-Western leftist who has been strongly critical of the EU in the past, regularly used to make paid appearances on Kremlin propaganda television channel RT, and in the wake of the EuroMaidan Revolution parroted Kremlin lies that the popular uprising in Ukraine had been a “coup.”
In the French presidential elections and German general elections in 2017 the Kremlin supported far-right parties – the Front National in France and Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany, just as it has previously supported far-right parties in the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary and Greece.
And in the United States, the Kremlin has sought to weaken U.S. ties with NATO and the EU, increase divisions in society – primarily along racial but also along gender lines – and damage U.S. citizens’ faith in the electoral process, the free press, and the country’s security agencies.
That was achieved when Donald Trump was elected U.S. president.
Now the Kremlin is supporting Salvini, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the Order of Lenin.
Salvini, in common with other Kremlin stooges in the West, speaks out against the sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia as punishment for its aggression against Ukraine. He has also supported the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and has entered Ukraine illegally to visit the peninsula. He has even been pictured on Red Square in Moscow wearing a t-shirt featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Nationalist politicians like Salvini are attracted to Putin’s regime because the Kremlin presents itself as a defender of “conservative values” – far-right shorthand for racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious bigotry.
The alliances formed between the Kremlin and groups of nationalist-ethnocentric-xenophobes from various countries might seem unlikely (Lega Nord’s slogan is, of course, “Prima gil Italiani” or “Italians First”): Surely all these xenophobes from different countries should hate each other?
But there is another glue that binds them – cold Kremlin cash.
Salvini’s Lega Nord has been in financial difficulties – a former party leader, Umberto Bossi, was in July 2017 convicted of defrauding the Italian state of over 56 million euros, and the judge in the case ordered the seizure of 48 million euros in party funds.
Salvini is still confident of putting on a good show at the upcoming elections, and the reason for that may be the cooperation agreement his party signed with the Kremlin in March last year. It is already known that in 2014 France’s Front National benefited from 9 million euros in easy loans from a Kremlin-controlled bank in the Czech Republic. Other parties suspected by U.S. intelligence to have benefitted from the Kremlin’s coin include Golden Dawn of Greece and Jobbik of Hungary. Lega Nord of Italy may also have taken Russian money, U.S. officials say.
Salvini himself has declared that “Putin is great, and I think so for free,” according to the Italian press. That may be so, but it is also probable that his party has obtained financial support from Moscow, and it can expect campaign support from the Kremlin bot networks in the upcoming elections. Indeed, the support has already started.
Let’s hope Italian voters have been paying attention to the Kremlin’s recent attempts to influence elections and referendums in the West, and realize that a vote for a candidate or party supported by Moscow is a vote against their own country’s interests.
