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, more than 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Friend: Edward Lucas
This British journalist has written a great deal about what he calls the West’s retreat from the world stage, having authored, for example, “The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West.”
In a Feb. 17 column about the Munich Security Conference days earlier, Lucas wrote in the Times of London about how today’s democratic leaders are failing to rise to the geopolitical challenges of today.
It is reasonable to assume that he had one eye on the Kremlin delegates in the room as he penned notes and planned this column.
One of the challenges Lucas writes of was personified at the conference by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who as Lucas wrote, “snarled from the main stage.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the other hand, had been “rudely consigned to a side-room,” but nonetheless “outshone Russia’s foreign minister,” argued Lucas.
While most, including Zelensky, grappled in Munich with potential solutions for the West’s so-called decline, Lavrov seemed to gloat, blaming the West for what he framed as a fallacious embrace of liberalism and an inability to allow other powers to ascend to global leadership.
Indeed, as Lucas wrote in a 2014 updated preface to his 2008 book: “Russia has become more authoritarian and corrupt, its institutions are weaker, reforms have fizzled” in addition to being militaristically emboldened.
Russia’s invasion of Crimea that year fits squarely within Russia’s longtime push for great power status and regional hegemony. Human rights have no place in this world, which is being built around the egotistical ambitions and greed of men like Lavrov, and his master Putin, while the West largely fails to act.
Edward Lucas, who knows Ukraine well, does the country a service by making the strong case that an emboldened Russia has capitalized on the West’s failure to appreciate the dangers of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism and adventurism abroad.
For this, we recognize him as a friend of the country, deserving of our Order of Yaroslaw the Wise.
Foe: Sergey Lavrov
With shadowy backchannel negotiations, blackmail and other manipulative practices, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov uses diplomacy to spread the Kremlin’s influence, secure its goals, and export its corruption. It is not difficult to find reasons to dislike and distrust this lieutenant of Putin.
On Feb. 15, Lavrov showed his undiplomatic face when he used his platform at the Munich Security Conference to try and humiliate the West. He denounced NATO and accused Europe of indulging in mythology that perpetuates “the phantom of the Russian threat.”
As if that threat is not real, said a collective voice from Ukraine, Georgia, Syria, and the Baltic States.
The theme of the conference was “Westlessness,” and most speakers shared concerns over the “decay of the Western project” in the words of the conference organizers.
Lavrov and the Kremlin embrace the decline of Western political dominance and are, of course, enemies of rule of law and democracy. Lavrov derided the West, especially for what the foreign minister called a “crisis of confidence” against Russia.
“The stoking of tension, the advance of NATO’s military infrastructure to the east, military exercises of unprecedented scale near Russia’s borders, increase of defense budgets beyond every measure; this all generates uncertainty,” he said.
Lavrov’s statements are incendiary and characteristically Orwellian; he made no mention of the war Russia started against Ukraine that is approaching its sixth year with continual treaty violations by Russian forces. Feb. 18 saw the sharpest escalation in the conflict in months, with a Russian offensive near Zolote forcing Ukraine to withdraw from an observation point, with one Ukrainian soldier dead and five wounded.
Lavrov grandstanded with bogus claims that “Russia is and always has been opposed to coercive measures and has welcomed political and diplomatic means of resolving disputes.”
A moderator might have asked why Russia continues to violate Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty on a daily basis in a war that has killed 14,000 people. Alternatively, they may have asked about Russia’s bloody intervention in Syria, or its war against Georgia, or a multitude of problems and repressions within its own borders.
Contrary to Lavrov’s blustering that NATO and the Western alliances are to blame for frigid relations with Russia, it is Russia’s never-ending violations of international law and its attacks against life and liberty – especially in Ukraine – that are to blame for the state of affairs.
In this, Lavrov only echoes the one who is pulling his strings, Putin, who claims the liberal ideal has become obsolete.
We disagree. We think that tyranny and dictatorship are obsolete. It is just taking Lavrov some time to come to terms with that idea.
