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: Andrew Parker
Andrew Parker, the chief of the UK’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency, is quite clear about the scale of the threat facing the West from an aggressive and revanchist Russia.
Speaking in Berlin on May 15 to his German colleagues, he said Russia risks becoming an “isolated pariah” due to its “aggressive and pernicious” actions – which include the continuing military occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, the ongoing war that the Kremlin launched in the Donbas in April 2014, interference in Western elections and the recent poisoning in the United Kingdom of a former Russian spy.
The last case, in which former Russian military intelligence officer Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, has focused public attention on Russia activities and propaganda methods, at least in the UK.
It’s high time the wider public was made more aware of the true extent of the threat posed to the civilized world by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – a threat Ukraine has been facing directly since Russia started its war on Ukraine in the Donbas. Parker is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for speaking so forthrightly. It can only be to Ukraine’s benefit if its friends in the West wake up to the problem.
In fact, Parker’s first ever public comments as head of MI5 (the first made by any incumbent head of MI5), made on Nov. 1, 2016, also focused on the threat from Russia.
“Russia has been a covert threat for decades. What’s different these days is that there are more and more methods available,” Parker told the UK’s Guardian newspaper at the time. “(Russia is) using its whole range of state organs and powers to push its foreign policy abroad in increasingly aggressive ways – involving propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyberattacks.”
However, it wasn’t until the horrifying attack on the Skripals, which also made a British policeman seriously ill, that the British government and public has started to take the Russian problem more seriously, it appears.
That’s irksome, since the threat has been obvious for years, even before Russia attacked Ukraine. In 2008 the Kremlin attacked Georgia, and before that, in 2006, the Kremlin is widely thought to have launched the first state-on-state cyber attack – against the tiny Baltic republic of Estonia.
Unlike, Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia (and the other Baltic states) the United Kingdom does not share a border with Putin’s Russia. That perhaps, is one of the reasons why the Russian threat has been underappreciated there for so long.
But it is important for the public in the United Kingdom and in other Western states to understand that the Kremlin has already developed a long reach. Russia can of course project military power abroad, and has recently been developing its armed forces, but these are not the only weapons at its disposal: It now uses propaganda TV channels masquerading as genuine news sources, the manipulation of social media, election hacking and cyber attacks to weaken and divide members of the Western alliance – which has long been the goal of the Putin regime.
The “information warfare” threat posed by Russia, the lies, propaganda and manipulation of public debate, can best be countered with open, honest and direct statements by public officials in the West. Only if governments are truthful will it be possible to undo some of the damage the Kremlin has done in undermining the Western public’s faith in democratic institutions and the media. Well done to Andrew Parker for stepping out of the shadows again to keep the public informed, and cut through what he called the “fog of lies” generated by Russia.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Gunnar Lindemann
Another German politician from the far right, Gunnar Lindemann of the AfD, has joined the growing ranks of European politicians who have illegally entered Ukraine.
Lindemann showed up in the part of Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast that is under the control of Russian-led forces on May 11 – the anniversary of the holding of a sham referendum organized by the Kremlin in 2014 on independence for the area. He appears to have stayed in Ukraine until the next day, and was back in Germany by May 13.
During his visit, Lindemann had a meeting with a French member of Russia’s proxy army in occupied Donetsk, former paratrooper Erwan Castel, who told him that NATO officers were fighting on the side of the Ukrainian army.
That’s nonsense of course, and in the absence of either photographic or video evidence (because there is none) even Lindemann was unable to repeat the claim – although one gets the impression from his comments that he desperately wishes he could. He also expressed concern for civilians hiding in basements from Ukrainian shelling, and children who have been orphaned by the war.
Lindemann also repeated the tired old claim that Ukraine is violating the Minsk agreements, without mentioning, of course, that the Russian side is responsible for the majority of the violations, according to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
Lindemann and his type (he’s also a fan of the murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad) try to present themselves as honest brokers in the war between Russian and Ukraine, claiming they just want to find out more about the “forgotten war” in Ukraine. But almost invariably they only really want to hear one side of the story. By entering Ukraine illegally, he is also displaying obvious contempt for the legitimate Ukrainian authorities.
If Lindemann really had wanted to learn more about the situation in the Donbas, where civilians and children are suffering on both sides of the lines, he could easily have entered Ukraine legally, gone to the government-controlled parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and then applied to enter the parts of Ukraine that are under the control of Russian proxy forces.
The fact that he did not, and that he (almost) unquestioningly repeats the Kremlin’s propaganda about its war on Ukraine, shows that Lindemann has no interest in finding out the truth and informing the German public about the actual situation in the Donbas. He is simply passing on the skewed message that he and his voters want to hear.
Does it really matter that this minor far-right politician, a member of the Berlin House of Representatives, the Berlin state parliament, should be able to come to Ukraine illegally and help the Kremlin spread its propaganda?
Although a member of an extremist party, with the AfD’s recent electoral successes, Lindemann is now, like it or not, a member of the political mainstream in Germany, and he and his ilk have been given a bigger political platform and a wider public reach for their poisonous politics – which now includes Kremlin talking points.
It is difficult, probably impossible, for Kyiv to stop European politicians from entering Ukraine illegally, and difficult for European countries to stop the likes of Lindemann from breaking Ukrainian law.
However, Europe is not powerless: It could, for example, ban a Russian politician from visiting the European Union every time an E.U. politician enters Ukraine illegally. The invitations to European politicians to visit Russian-occupied Crimea and the Donbas would probably very soon stop coming.
Realistically, given Europe’s record on imposing sanctions on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine, that is unlikely to happen.
In the meantime, we in Ukraine must content ourselves with naming Lindemann Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and bestow an Order of Lenin on him, for his contempt for Ukraine and “services” to Russian propaganda.
