Office of External Relations
November 15, 2019
If you are to read any one article about U.S.-Ukraine Relations - - This is it !




Impeachment, America’s Orwellian Legacy in Ukraine, and Why It Matters
POSTED BY:  VICTOR RUD  22 NOVEMBER, 2019

22 November 2019 – New York, USA
by Victor Rud

“It is especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements–extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics. . . . Russia should also work toward isolating Britain from Europe, introducing discord both within the EU and between the US and the EU, and destabilizing Turkey. Russia must annex Ukraine because its independence is an enormous danger. Aleksandr Dugin, with General Nikolai Klokotov (Russian General Staff Academy), The Foundations of Geopolitics, 1997.

“Whether Russian led integration on the territory of the former USSR will pose a serious, long-term military challenge to the West, depends in large part on the role that Ukraine plays or is compelled to play. . . . Ukraine will do much to determine whether Europe and the world in the twenty-first century will be as bloody as they were in the twentieth.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1997.

* * *

President Trump’s alleged impeachable offense is trading $400 million of established, bi-partisan security assistance to Ukraine and an Oval Office visit for the new Ukrainian president in exchange for personal political gain. Assessment of the  gravitas  of the offense– whether it merits impeachment–cannot be made in a vacuum. This, after all, is not a case of abuse of Presidential power by withholding a propane heater for a Ukrainian weather station in the Antarctic in exchange for a fawning letter from Kyiv to the editor of a community newspaper in Big Sky, Montana.  The issue therefore is the consequence to our foreign and national security policy interests if the allegation is true. That cannot be established without understanding (a) the pivotal importance of Ukraine for our own national security, and (b) the results of our failure to comprehend that very fact–for generations. That the Trump Administration earlier provided more military assistance than did the Obama Administration is not determinative of the issue, and paradoxically makes the matter even more acute.

As one of America’s most reliable  allies  in our war on terror and in our peacekeeping missions for the last 27 years, Ukraine is far more than 45,000 pairs of boots. Ukraine’s independence is a  sine qua non  for not just American, but global, security and stability. Supporting Ukraine is the safest, most effective and cheapest strategy to stymie accelerating Russian aggression, including its contemptuous subversion of America. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, larger than England, Germany and Hungary, combined. With a democratic and civic tradition that Russia never had, Ukraine produced Europe’s first constitution for a representative democracy, preceding Philadelphia by 77 years It harbors a sense of individualism and a drive toward civil society that any American would recognize. [ The Pylyp Orlyk Constitution - RAM en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Pylyp_Orlyk ]

However, Washington’s Russo-centric DNA helix has always been tightly wound. Contrary to Washington’s importunities that it not do so, Ukraine’s reassertion of its independence in 1991 ensured the fall of the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” saving the West from an apocalyptic trajectory. We were no longer a button away from being reduced to nuclear afterglow. Anomalously, Washington abruptly pivoted and celebrated its own prescience in “ winning the Cold War ,” anchored by the very implosion that bizarrely we sought to  prevent .

But if that was good, then ensuring that it remains that way is not just good, but paramount. But that was not to be.  We hectored Ukraine  into surrendering the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal (to Russia, of all things), in exchange for America’s assurances of Ukraine’s sovereignty and national security. (North Korea and Iran took note. The impeachment hearings thus far have not.) We then also stripped Ukraine of its conventional weaponry, again betraying the victim and embracing the criminal. We guaranteed Russia the USSR’s seat on the UN security council, placed Russia into the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a host of other organizations, and expanded the G7. Former Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev  dismisses  Putin’s lament about being “humiliated”–” these ‘humiliations’ are just myths and lies which are convenient for the Kremlin today.” Likewise, Putin’s siren song about Russia feeling “surrounded,” “threatened”, “insecure” and “unloved.” (This, from the largest country in the world, the quintessential terrorist state that laments being “treated like a loser”– did we hear the refrain from Nazi Germany?)

No wonder Putin’s smug self-assurance. Since he goose-stepped into Ukraine in 2014, Putin has been using Ukraine as a fulcrum to up-end the world order that has prevailed since WWII. Western fecklessness has been the lever allowing him to do so. Well into the sixth year, with less than 3% the size of Russia, Ukraine is alone in battling the re-invading colossus to the North. Disemboweled infants, beheaded teenagers, tortured prisoners of war, 14,000 killed, 2 million refugees. With flaccid Western sanctions dissolving by the day, North Korea, China, Syria, Iran and Venezuela are taking copious notes of America’s flailing impotence as the international order we established implodes around us.

But our astigmatism about the strategic importance of Ukraine has a far longer history. The very lessons not learned have circled back with a vengeance to Capitol Hill and the first impeachment proceeding in America’s history implicating its foreign policy–or lack of it.

After WWI, there was no room for Ukraine in Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.’’ Ukraine’s warnings at the Paris Peace conference about Moscow’s impending threat to the West were stark–and were breezily dismissed. So were Ukraine’s pleas for surplus arms and medications in the face of concurrent onslaughts by Russia’s Red and White Armies. Ultimately, Ukraine was dismembered, with the lion’s share tossed to Russia.
Russia’s ensuing reoccupation of Ukraine was pivotal to the formation and viability of the rebranded Russian Empire, now the “USSR.” [ It should be noted that Wilson’s ill-advised approach had Congressional opposition. Congressman James Hamill (D-NJ) travelled to the Paris Peace conference to argue in favor of Ukrainian independence beginning a more than 100-year bipartisan Congressional approach of support for Ukraine. RAM ]  Stalin resolved Ukraine’s resistance to Moscow’s reoccupation by simply starving the nation into submission in 1932-33. Not only were the borders of Ukraine blockaded but, tellingly, so were the heavily Ukrainian populated regions of Russia itself. No people out. No food in. Millions were starved to death. Estimates begin at 4 million and rise to some 10 million. It was anomalous, and therefore hugely probative, that it was the  larger  number that was furtively whispered at the time by members of the Soviet  nomenklatura . “Furtively,” because uttering the word “famine” was a capital crime.

In his May 31, 1933, report #474/106 to the Royal Embassy of Italy in Moscow, Sergio Gradenigo, Italy’s Royal Consul in Kharkiv, Ukraine, wrote that Moscow engineered its  starvation of Ukraine “to dispose of the Ukrainian problem.” Gradenigo quoted a top OGPU (“KGB”) officer that the purpose was to “change the “ethnographic materials” of Ukraine” by massively resettling Russians into a “cleansed” Ukraine. (Note–“ethnographic materials.” Hitler soon afterward implemented that same dehumanization, however, preferring  untermenschen  [sub-humans].)

Moscow’s goal, said the OGPU officer, was “to dispose of the Ukrainian problem within a few months at a cost of 10-15 million souls.” The Italian consul continued: “However monstrous and incredible such a plan might appear, it should nevertheless be regarded as authentic and well underway . . . [It] will bring about a predominantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon . . . Ukraine will become a  de facto  Russian region.” Little wonder that Raphael Lemkin, father of the UN Genocide Convention, vehemently condemned as classic “genocide”  both  the resulting necropolis  and  destruction of Ukraine’s national ethos.

Ukraine’s keystone importance was described in the 1930s by a British journalist, Lancelot Lawton, to the British House of Commons:

“It would be hypocrisy to deny that an independent Ukraine is as essential to this country as to the tranquility of the world. . . .  On the solution of the Ukrainian problem will depend the fate of Europe. . . .So great an event [as the independence of Ukraine] would most likely be accompanied by, or cause remarkable changes elsewhere. It would influence, if not determine, the fate of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union.”

Washington was nonplussed, and on November 16, 1933 extended diplomatic recognition to Moscow. It seemed inexplicable: (a) we declared legitimacy and approval of the regime sworn to our demise, (b) concurrently with that regime’s genocide of the very nation that was our biggest asset in ensuring against that very demise. Both (a) and (b) advertised that we were bereft of any strategic sense. But explanation there was– business, money, trounced our national security imperatives. “Corruption.” American capital fed the Third Horseman in Ukraine. Fortunately, we at least had the Kremlin’s take-it-to-the-bank  promise  “to refrain from . . . any act overt or covert liable in any way whatsoever to injure the tranquility, prosperity, order, or security of the whole or any part of the United States, in particular, any agitation or propaganda.” [ It should be noted that the Roosevelt Administration did not proceed to its gross recognition of the Soviet Union blind to the genocide being conducted in Ukraine. As further evidence of bipartisan congressional support for Ukraine Congressman Hamilton Fish (R-NY) had spoken openly and loudly about the artificial famine and introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution urging the government of the Soviet Union to end its “genocidal policy toward the Ukrainian people and to place no obstacles in the way of American citizens seeking to send aid to the famine-stricken regions of Ukraine.” The Roosevelt Administration strenuously opposed the legislation. RAM ]


Ten years later, during WWII the  Lend-Lease program  of the Roosevelt Administration (itself massively  penetrated  by Soviet agents) allowed Moscow to crush resistance movements in Ukraine and the Baltics. If that wasn’t enough, it was the Ukrainian underground that warned our Office of Strategic Services of Stalin’s plan to assassinate General George C. Patton. The warning was intercepted by a Soviet agent, Duncan Lee, the top assistant to OSS head “Wild Bill” Donovan. Washington then turned on the Ukrainian informants, tipping off NKVD Maj. General Davidov at the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force in Frankfurt, Germany. Add to that our “Operation Keelhaul,” where American GI’s joined with the same NKVD General in the forced repatriation to the Gulag of Ukrainian famine survivors and other Soviet refugees in post-war Europe. It was a bloody dragnet of the truthtellers. Lest there be any doubt of our  bon homie , American troops  confiscated  several thousand copies of George Orwell’s  Animal Farm , translated into Ukrainian by one of the refugees and for which Orwell had written a special introduction. We delivered the copies to the same NKVD General.

Why does any of this matter today? One answer is our surreal legacy in Ukraine. Today, Ukraine is dealing with the offal of a system that we abetted, both politically and through the decades financially and economically. It left a legacy of war crimes, death marches, homicidal russification, atrocities, recreational torture, arson, plunder, assassinations, predation, massacres, kidnappings, pillage, rape, executions dungeons, ethnic cleansing, murder quotas, slave ships, stupefying terror, thoughtcrime, and . . . forced starvation.

The other answer is that our failure to connect the dots, our self-inoculation against our own experience with Russia, are spiraling us down a strategic sinkhole. Globally. How, for example, do we think the credibility of our denuclearization efforts around the world will be impacted if we do not stand by our security assurances to Ukraine?

Whatever the outcome of the impeachment process, American support of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be unbending. An independent Ukraine as the anchor of democracy is the only realistic counterweight to Russia in the region. Geopolitically, sitting atop the Black Sea, and then entry into the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Ukraine is also the necessary alternative to a maverick Turkey. With China rising, our national security and defense studies ring the alarm about our ability to deal with both China and Russia. Read the assessment of  The National Defense Strategy Commission ,   National Security Strategy , the  Worldwide Threat Assessment , the Institute for the Study of War’s “ Confronting the Russian Challenge : A New Approach for the U.S. “  and the Defense Department’s “ Russian Strategic Intentions .” Ukraine is the most consequential factor in securing America’s security posture vis a vis Russia and, by extension, our security interests globally.

But what of President Trump’s  reported  “loathing” of Ukraine, its ” horrible, corrupt people” and that he “doesn’t give a s–t about Ukraine”? The Trump Administration having previously provided more military assistance to Ukraine than the Obama Administration, why the now the about face? Who implanted the thought in his mind that it was Ukraine, and not Russia (as our intelligence community unanimously and consistently warned), that invaded our 2016 elections?

And “Ukrainian corruption?” Of course, it exists, but  progress  has been huge. Putin has repurposed sanctimonious cries about “Ukrainian corruption” into a Pavlovian dog whistle for “toxic.” It was the  de rigueur  catechism in the impeachment hearings. Putin’s purpose is to supplant our understanding of Ukraine as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, thus immunizing ourselves against our predictive capacity. “Corruption” is also the blood-brain barrier to our understanding that it is the Kremlin’s very occupation of Ukraine in the 1920s–that we officially recognized and for which we were an artificial life support system–that begat that very corruption. What of Russian corruption?  And what of our own corruption? Why do we think Putin keeps his money in  our banks ? Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just been  indicted  on multiple “corruption” charges. So? We withhold military aid and betray Israel because of “corruption”?

If it is established that President Trump in fact sought to barter security assistance to Ukraine for political dirt on Vice-President Biden as his anticipated rival in 2020, what does it tell Putin about our comprehension of our own vital national interests, our seriousness of purpose, our grip on reality? There is no one-word answer, but there is an analogous question: What would Iran conclude if a parallel bazaar were played out against the background of our having Israel’s back? Or of any other ally? [ And, again it should be noted that whatever President Trump’s attitude and/or policy toward Ukraine, there is over 100 years of bipartisan and uniform congressional support for Ukraine. That support for Ukraine must continue. The treating of Ukraine as some sort of political ping-pong ball on the impeachment stage must not undermine bipartisan support for Ukraine as essential to our American national security interests. RAM ]

As we celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, on the fourth Saturday of November Ukrainians will commemorate the “ethnographic material” scythed out of existence in 1932-33. If we again condemn Ukraine to the coffin air of Lubyanka, if we again toss that “ethnographic material” under Putin’s tanks, we will forever justify a tyrant’s strutting contempt and the deserved internment of who we are and what we represent. Putin’s wannabee’s around the world are in tow, and our security will vaporize. It is, after all, our Republic that is the ultimate prize. To prevent that, bi-partisan support for Ukraine must  increase . The predicate is to absorb Leon Trotsky’s aphorism –“You may not be interested in the war by the war is interested in you.” In that war, we need Ukraine as much as Ukraine needs us.
 
Feature Photo – Ukrainian President Zalensky meets with President Trump –  Flickr , The White House DefenceReport’s weekly recap is a multi-format blog that features opinions and insights from DefRep editorial staff and guest writers. The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and are separate from DefRep reports and analysis, which are based on independent and objective reporting.

In addition to Defence Report, Victor Rud’s commentary on US/Russia/Ukraine affairs has been carried by, among others, Forbes, the Atlantic Council, Foreign Policy Association, Centre for Global Studies, and the Kyiv Post. He has been practicing international law for 35 years, and among other matters served as special counsel to a member of the US delegation to the Helsinki Accords Review Process. Mr. Rud is the Senior Advisor to Open Court, an NGO in Ukraine, and a graduate of Harvard College and Duke University School of Law.


Bob McConnell
Coordinator, External Relations
U.S.-Ukraine Foundation’s Friends of Ukraine Network

Robert A. McConnell is a co-founder of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation and Coordinator of External Relations for the Foundation’s Friends of Ukraine Network. He is Principal of R.A. McConnell and Associates. Previously, he has served as head of the Government Advocacy Practice at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Vice President – Washington for CBS, Inc, and Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice during the Reagan Administration. rmcconnell@usukraine.org
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