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: Angela Merkel
Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, which would transport natural gas from Russia to Germany in an undersea pipeline, got a boost from the German authorities at the end of March, when they permitted the laying of the proposed pipeline in German territorial waters.
Finland also looks set to give its permission. The positions of Denmark and Sweden are less certain.
If it were to be built, the pipeline would add another 55 billion cubic meters in annual gas transit capacity, doubling the overall Nord Stream supply volume. Critics worry that this would only deepen Europe’s energy dependence on a revanchist and aggressive Russia.
It also worries Ukraine.
While German Chancellor Angela Merkel has in the past said that the project is purely a business deal (it involves Russian, German, Dutch, Austrian and French companies) it plainly has a political significance. Ukraine, which in 2017 transported 90 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, would see its transit volumes and thus transit fees from Russia plunge dramatically, hurting its economy and thus its ability to defend itself against Kremlin military and political pressure.
However, even if Nord Stream 2 were to be built (along with a smaller pipeline with a capacity of 16 billion cubic meters from Turkey to the south of Europe) Ukraine’s gas pipeline system would still be needed to transport the full volume of contracted Russian gas to Europe. And as gas consumption from Europe is forecast to remain roughly stable until 2050, and production is expected to drop, imports of gas will have to increase over the next few decades, meaning Ukraine’s gas transport system indeed has a future.
Moreover, it would make little sense for the Kremlin to cut Ukraine out of its gas supply mix altogether: Russia has for all of the time of independent Ukraine’s existence used gas as a lever of influence on Kyiv. Even reduced transit volumes would still give the Kremlin some opportunity to put economic pressure on Ukraine by threatening gas cutoffs, (and also give it the chance to corrupt Ukraine’s politicians and businesspeople).
So Merkel’s sudden announcement on April 10 that Nord Stream 2 would be “impossible without clarity on the future transit role of Ukraine,” and that the project has “political considerations” is thus a curious, and perhaps hopeful sign of a shift of Berlin’s stance on the matter.
The chancellor’s comments were made during a visit to Berlin by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and may have been a diplomatic nicety, but there is a logic to them as well. Certainly, from a purely practical point of view, there is no doubt that Ukraine has to remain a gas transit route for Russian gas for the foreseeable future.
But Merkel well understands that the Kremlin could again cut supplies to Ukraine to exert political pressure, which in turn could threaten gas supplies to central and southern Europe. By stressing the “political considerations” of the Nord Stream 2 project, Merkel could be signaling to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin that, while she accepts that the Nord Stream 2 project will probably go ahead, if it does, attempts to use gas as a weapon against Ukraine and other countries will be more strongly resisted in Berlin.
For this reason Merkel is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise. While some in Ukraine might grumble about Berlin letting the Nord Stream 2 project go forward, it does not alter the fact that Germany continues to be one of Ukraine’s strongest allies in Europe.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Mark Zuckerberg
Speaking during a hearing at the U.S. Congress on April 10, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said one of his greatest regrets was that Facebook had been “slow in identifying the Russian information operations in 2016.”
Ukrainians, on the other hand, were not slow in recognizing the threat, and were bearing the brunt of Russian “information operations” – barefaced lies and propaganda – from at least late 2013. It was then that the phenomenon of Russian internet trolls started to become known – conversations on Facebook would be polluted by obnoxious Kremlin supporters, who would deride Ukrainians’ uprising against the corrupt regime of former President Viktor Yanukovych, and spread fake news.
Worse, there were reports of cases of prominent Ukrainian commentators’ Facebook accounts being suspended or their posts deleted, allegedly due to mass reporting by Russian trolls falsely complaining that the Ukrainians had posted hate speech or nudity.
The situation got so bad that the deputy head of Ukraine’s Presidential Administration, Dmytro Shymkiv, had a personal meeting with Facebook representatives in 2015 to complain about Russian abuses of the social network, in particular the spread of fake news.
Yet only now, in 2018, does Zuckerberg admit that Facebook was slow in realizing that the Kremlin was using the social network to pollute the civilized world’s information space, sow discord, attempt to influence elections, and spread fake news. And according to Zuckerberg, this slow realization only started a two years (at least) after the Kremlin started full-scale information operations on Facebook.
Those claims, frankly, are not credible. Zuckerberg was made aware of the problem in May 2015 at a Facebook online “town hall” meeting. It appears he simply chose not to take it seriously. Moreover, according to an article published by Business Insider UK on Sept. 27, 2017, shortly before Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in 2016, former U.S. President Barack Obama warned Zuckerberg that fake news could influence the result of the election. Only about a week before that, Zuckerberg had dismissed the problem saying it was a “crazy idea,” and that fake news “surely had no impact,” on the election campaign.
Even after Obama’s warning, Zuckerberg said fake news wasn’t widespread on Facebook, the Business Insider UK article said.
So as late as late September 2016, Zuckerberg was still not taking Russian information operations on Facebook seriously. These were operations that had been going on for almost three years already.
Zuckerberg, who is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of an Order of Lenin, is probably not in league with the Kremlin. But while Ukrainians have been dying for the sake of democracy, Zuckerberg, through what appears to be negligence, has allowed his social network to undermine democracy. He only agreed to appear before Congress because news broke in the United Kingdom that a company called Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge, in an alleged attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Had that news not emerged, and the abuses of his social network had only concerned Russian actions against Ukraine, it looks like Zuckerberg would have done nothing at all to tackle the problem, going by his past shameful record of inaction.
