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, 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: H.R. McMaster
We will probably have to wait until Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster publishes his memoirs to discover what motivated this outstanding U.S. army officer to serve under a charlatan like U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
Some speculate that it might have been out of a sense of duty to his country, a feeling that he had to take the role of sensible adult in the room to counter the childish, impulsive, ignorant Trump.
But the move tarnished him in the same way it has tarnished everyone who has been associated with the 45th president and his chaotic, rankly incompetent administration.
H.R. McMaster (he goes by his initials) in March 2017 joined the Trump White House as National Security Advisor, replacing General Michael Flynn, who was ousted from his post after only 24 days. Flynn was forced to resign after it was discovered he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.
It was not long before Trump’s buffoonish behavior and his own questionable links to Russia began to put McMaster’s judgement and reputation into question. In a meeting with Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on May 10 last year, Trump, bragging about U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities, revealed classified information about the terror group Islamic State gathered by a U.S. ally. The ally had not agreed that the information be given to the Russians. Officials said later that this could damage trust between the United States and the ally, and threaten future intelligence sharing between them.
Once news of Trump’s actions broke, McMaster was rolled out to defend the president. “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly,” McMaster told the press on May 15.
Technically, McMaster did not lie. But he did not address the issue of the breaking of trust with the ally, which was at the core of the scandal. He took no questions from the press. The first damage to his reputation was done.
He continued to take hits to his credibility in the Trump White House, with his conservative credentials and loyalty to Trump coming into question – especially after he removed Trump’s Chief Strategist Steve Bannon from the National Security Council in April 2017. He became the victim of a smear campaign by the far-right Breitbart news organization, which Bannon had once headed.
It was reported on March 15 that Trump had decided to fire McMaster, although the White House denied it at the time. A week later McMaster resigned. Typically for the cowardly, dishonorable Trump, the president first announced the dismissal of his National Security Advisor on the social network Twitter. Outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson earlier learned of his dismissal the same way.
To McMaster’s credit, he went out with guns blazing, directing fire at the West’s chief adversary, Russia – something that Trump has singularly failed to do. It was a sideswipe at his former boss.
“Russia has used old and new forms of aggression to undermine our open societies and the foundations of international peace and stability,” McMaster said at an Atlantic Council event on April 3.
“We have failed to impose sufficient costs (on Russia for its aggression),” he said.
Indeed, that is something this newspaper has been saying ever since Russia started its occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea. The West’s weak response to that outrage may have encouraged Russia to launch its subsequent attempts to destabilize the Donbas, which has resulted in war and over 10,300 deaths.
So despite being tainted by his association with Trump, McMaster is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for telling the truth about Russia, and the threat it poses to the civilized world.
It is to be hoped that the lieutenant general, who remained on active duty throughout his period of service in the Trump White House, will regain his honor and reputation as time passes. He is to retire from the military in the next few weeks.
After all, his only real error was to give his loyalty to a man who was not worthy of it, and who did nothing to earn it.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Thomas Greminger
While flying a mini-UAV over a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Luhansk Oblast on March 30, members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine suddenly heard long, raking bursts of gunfire – too many shots even to count.
The OSCE team then lost control of the drone as it was flying over a training ground about six kilometers southeast of the village of Miusynsk (62 kilometers southwest of the Russian-occupied city of Luhansk.) Attempting to retrieve the wreckage of the drone some 10 minutes later, the OSCE team was ordered out of the area by fighters from Russia’s proxy forces in Ukraine, who turned up in a military truck.
Earlier, on March 12, the OSCE obtained aerial imagery (the organization did not reveal by what means) of 10 tanks and 12 pieces of heavy artillery in the same area, the mission said in its report of the incident. It is not difficult to deduce why Russian-led forces thus wanted to shoot down the drone.
And this is not the first such incident. The OSCE mission in Ukraine announced on March 28 that it was relaunching its long-range drone surveillance operations. Relaunching, because operations were suspended in August 2016 after Russian-led forces shot down three of the organization’s four Schiebel S-100 long-range drones (each costing a minimum of $400,000 – more, if the cost of servicing is included).
The OSCE was using the costly S-100s for two good reasons. First, the mission is often restricted in its movements in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donbas, mainly in areas where weapons proscribed by the Minsk II peace agreements are thought to be kept. The long-range drones could be operated from outside restricted areas, giving the OSCE eyes in the sky where it could not have eyes on the ground.
Second, the sophisticated drones were equipped with night-vision sensors, meaning they could operate after dark, when most of the fighting in the Donbas occurs, and when OSCE observer teams are not allowed to operate for reasons of security.
S-100s are military-grade kit. They can even carry weapons themselves. Shooting them down thus requires top-notch weapons – which Russia’s proxy forces obviously have access to from their sponsors in the Kremlin. Two of the S-100s are thought to have been brought down by surface-to-air missiles (one of them actually spotted its probable killer, a 9K35 Strela-10 system, in images it transmitted shortly before contact with it was lost.)
The third S-100 crashed after communications with it were suddenly lost, probably due to signal jamming. The OSCE later photographed a Russian-made R-330ZH Zhitel electronic jamming system in the area where the drone was lost.
Speaking about the shooting down of the OSCE’s drones, Daniel Baer, the former U.S. ambassador to the OSCE, told Foreign Policy magazine in an article published on Oct. 28, 2016: “It was clear that this was a systematic Russian effort to limit the capacity of the (OSCE) to see all kinds of things, including the ongoing Russian resupply.”
In summary: Russia, which is a member of the OSCE, almost certainly supplied sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry and electronic warfare equipment to its proxy forces in Ukraine in order to defeat efforts by OSCE monitors to fulfill their mandate to help end the war the Kremlin started.
The shooting down of the drones should have brought damning condemnation from the OSCE’s senior leadership, should it not?
It did not. In fact, the OSCE did not even announce it was dropping its long-range drone operations – that only came out in Foreign Policy’s article.
Fast forward another year-and-a-half. OSCE General Secretary Thomas Greminger is in Russia for its International Security Conference, held on April 4-5. So, a week after Russian-led forces shot down another OSCE drone over the Donbas, what did Greminger have to say during his meeting with Sergey Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, according to an April 4 report by Russian news agency RIA Novosti?
“My message is that Russia is a key partner in European security, we need Russia, we need Russia to discuss and cooperate in the military and military-political spheres,” Greminger said.
What? What blithering drivel is this?
Russia is the key threat to European security, not its partner. Russia does all it can to foil the OSCE’s work in Ukraine. It carries out assassinations on European soil, interferes in elections in Western countries, and launches cyber attacks on them. It violates their airspace with its warplanes, menaces their waters with its warships, and pollutes their information spaces with corrosive propaganda.
Greminger is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the Order of Lenin for telling the Kremlin what it wants to hear, and not what it should hear. Not standing up to the Kremlin harms not only Ukraine’s security, but that of the whole of Europe.
