Tag: democracy

War in Ukraine ‘stems from the Orange Revolution, a humiliating ordeal for Putin’

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One year into the war that Russia launched against Ukraine, FRANCE 24 takes a closer look at the anti-Western rhetoric President Vladimir Putin used to justify the conflict, which is rooted in events in the early 2000s, according to historian Françoise Thom, an expert on post-Communist Russia.

On February 24, 2022, as a Putin speech was broadcast on television, Russian troops were penetrating into Ukrainian territory, initiating the most important military operation on European soil since World War II.

During his speech, the Russian president tried to justify the invasion with a brutal tirade against the Kyiv government, which he described as “neo-Nazi”, and against the perceived threat posed by NATO and the US against Russia.

This rhetoric, far from being new, dates back to Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2014 and Orange Revolution in 2004, according to historian Françoise Thom, an expert on post-Communist Russia, who spoke with FRANCE 24.

FRANCE 24: In February 2022, Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine by citing the necessity to shield Russia from NATO and the West. When was the first time the Kremlin used this rhetoric?

Françoise Thom: Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric is long-standing. We can date the change in the Kremlin’s discourse to the colour revolutions between 2003 and 2004. At that time, a wave of anti-corruption and pro-democratic liberal movements were sweeping across several post-Soviet states, namely Georgia – the Rose Revolution – and in Ukraine where the Orange Revolution took place in 2004.

In my opinion, the ongoing war stems from the Orange Revolution, which was a humiliating ordeal for Putin. The candidate he backed, Viktor Yanukovych, lost the popular vote to a pro-European candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, in the 2004 elections.

The outcome was a slap in the face for Putin and he developed an intense hatred towards Ukraine and its people. Interpreting the turn of events as the result of US interference, the ex-KGB agent saw scheming by the US as the only reason for his candidate’s loss.

Putin’s paranoid rhetoric took root from that point on. As illustrated by Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov in a 2004 text: “The enemy is on our doorsteps, we have to defend every Russian and every household against the West”.

During the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin challenged the West, especially the US. He then followed up by launching a reform of Russia’s military in 2008. The war against Ukraine therefore has very old roots. Far from an improvisation, the current conflict is part of a wider context tied to Russia’s row with the West.

US foundations were quite active in Ukraine and Georgia in the 1990s and 2000s. What was their role that Putin condemned?

Indeed, there were US foundations operating in Ukraine as well as in Georgia during the colour revolutions. They aimed to train a new generation of executives, which was expected to succeed apparatchiks from the Soviet era. However, we should not see them as manifestations of US foreign policy: They did not necessarily align themselves with the sitting president’s political agenda.

In order to build a starting block for the development of political parties based on liberalism, the role that these foundations played during the colour revolutions was chiefly structured around promoting various tools of election campaigning and on-the-ground organising among these new elites. Even so, the uprisings that took place between 2003 and 2004 were definitely not orchestrated: The population was incensed by post-Communist corruption and the elites were themselves divided.

Putin, who accused the foundations of anti-Russia tendencies that were not necessarily true, thus heavily exaggerated their participation in the colour revolutions. They mainly sought to lend a helping hand to the establishment of liberal democraties ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

What is the relationship between the Kremlin and the EU? Did the annexation of Crimea in 2014 mark a turning point?

In 2013, an association proposed by the European Union to post-Soviet countries, namely Ukraine, set off the powder keg. The project clashed with Putin’s desire to integrate Ukraine into a customs union, the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), led by Russia.

Putin seeks to build a large European space, from Brest to Vladivostok, where Russia can establish its supremacy while dispelling US influence. In 2013, Ukraine’s then president Yanukovych, under pressure from the Kremlin, rejected the association agreement with the EU while opting to join the EEU. Massive protests erupted in Ukraine, which led to the 2014 Maidan Revolution, an insurrection that Yanukovych tried to repress but failed. He absconded and a new government, which Putin labelled as Nazi, came into power.   

Putin annexed Crimea several days later, claiming that it was to defend Russia from NATO and that Crimea has always been Russian despite the transfer to Ukraine in 1954, an error he said was committed by the USSR’s then leader Nikita Khrushchev. Putin also attempted to conquer southern and eastern Ukraine, but had to settle for two separatist enclaves in the east. The armed conflict ended with the ratification of the Minsk agreements on September 5, 2014.

With the Kremlin’s hostility directed towards the US, Putin seeks to re-enact the Cold War but with a different outcome this time, one that would restore Russia to power. In this respect, Putin’s anti-European discourse is principally a consequence of the ties between the UE and the US and NATO.

Until February 2022, Europe was not considered a real political issue by Putin, but rather as an object of dispute with the US. He thought he was subjugating the region via its reliance on Russian gas, which worked until the invasion of Ukraine that month. Putin’s dsicourse with regard to Europe has become more and more hostile as it became apparent in February that the continent was closing ranks around NATO.

This article is a translation of the original in French.

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Ukraine hunts collaborators in its divided church

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KYIV — “He consecrated their tanks — blessed military equipment!”

Kyiv’s regional police chief Andrii Nebytov doesn’t hide his disgust as he describes how Father Mykola Yevtushenko, a priest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate, collaborated with the Russians, offering benedictions and urging his parishioners to welcome the invading forces.

The 75-year-old cleric, whose trial is underway in Kyiv, is accused not only of trying to stamp an ecclesiastical imprimatur on the invasion, but also of identifying locals most likely to resist Russia’s savage 33-day occupation of Bucha, the suburban town just northwest of Kyiv that has become a byword for war crimes.

Yevtushenko is far from being the only clergyman in the sights of the Ukrainian authorities over accusations of collaboration. More than 30 priests are under investigation, and the intelligence services mounted a series of raids in monasteries and churches across the country to root out pro-Russian clerics.

The investigations cut to the heart of a profound and highly political schism that divides the churches of this predominantly Orthodox nation. The growing tensions raise significant questions over how far President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can go in ratcheting up pressure on what is ostensibly a religious institution over fears that it is a hotbed of dangerous fifth columnists.

Ukraine’s church splintered in 2018 into two bodies with unhelpfully similar names. In the teeth of opposition from the Kremlin, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was granted ecclesiastical independence by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2019. In a sign of the political fault lines underpinning the feud, OCU churches had offered support to the Maidan protesters of 2014, who toppled Viktor Yanukovych, Moscow’s satrap in Ukraine. 

This left the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which was still loyal to Moscow and is the church to which Yevtushenko and the other investigated clergy belong. The UOC has more land and buildings but the OCU claims at least double the number of worshippers. Although the UOC claimed in May to have ended its subordination to Moscow’s Metropolitan Kirill, a vociferous supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, few believe the split is sincere. Kirill casts the invasion as a religious war, an apocalyptic battle against evil forces determined to shatter the God-given unity of Holy Mother Russia, and Ukrainian lawmakers and other critics accuse the UOC of faking its rupture with his authority.

Butchery in Bucha

The army that Yevtushenko blessed in Bucha committed atrocities.

As they withdrew, they left behind 458 bodies, mostly civilians, including those of children. All were victims of a reign of rape and murder, that saw an old man shot dead in his garden and a family machine-gunned to death in their car as they tried to flee to safety. After the Russians withdrew, the town was littered with bodies, some buried and others not. Eighteen mutilated corpses of men, women and children were found in a basement — and on a roadside under a blanket, three naked women, whom Russian soldiers had attempted to incinerate before retreating.

The bestiality didn’t deter Yevtushenko.

As the rampage unfolded, he persisted in supporting the Russians, singling out local officials, Ukrainian army veterans and the “houses where wealthy people live, which were later robbed by the occupiers,” according to investigators.

The priest’s defense is that he was forced into his actions, but the police chief has little sympathy.

“He doesn’t accept his guilt and says the Russians threatened to kill him, or something like that,” Nebytov said, with a shake of his head.

Among the other 30 priests under investigation is Oleksandr Boyko from the village of Deptivka in Sumy Oblast, detained on suspicion of having “propagated hostile ideology, justified the actions of the aggressor country in Ukraine and supported the occupation,” according to prosecutors. Locals have told Ukrainian media that Boyko accompanied the Russians in his car around the village, delivering a pro-Moscow sermon: “We must love Russia. Without Russia, we are nothing.”

Ukrainian prosecutors announced Wednesday that a priest from the Luhansk region had been convicted of collaborating with the Russians and sentenced to 12 years. He was found guilty of supplying the Russians with intelligence on Ukrainian forces. 

“A priest from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate in Luhansk region has been sentenced to twelve years in prison for informing the enemy about Ukrainian defense positions. The prosecutors proved in court that the priest from Lysychansk-based church assisted the Russian armed groups during hostilities against the Ukrainian army,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said on its Telegram channel.

As more evidence emerges about treacherous priests, public clamor is swelling for a ban on the UOC. A public petition last week calling for the UOC to be shuttered rapidly attracted the required 25,000 signatures for it to be referred formally to President Zelenskyy.

To ban or not ban

Even before the petition reached Zelenskyy’s desk, more than 30 Ukrainian lawmakers led by Kniazhytskyi and drawn from a variety of political parties, sponsored legislation that would ban the church and transfer its property to the OCU.

In the past, Zelenskyy’s government has been wary of acting against Moscow’s church in Ukraine, not wanting to cross any lines on the freedom of religious belief, or fall foul of the European Union or international norms in protecting worship. It has wanted to avoid offending the church’s adherents, acutely aware that within the ranks of its priests and worshippers are plenty of patriotic Ukrainians, some fighting on the frontlines against the Russians.

But evidence that church leaders have acted to varying degrees as cheerleaders for the enemy has prompted a change of heart.

In one of his nightly addresses, Zelenskyy announced his government was working on legislation to protect the country’s “spiritual independence” and to make it impossible for “religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence” in Russia to function in Ukraine. He has called for the naming and shaming of leading church figures and priests who have aided Russia.  

The Ukrainian leader has also ordered a probe into the management of the UOC and its canonical relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate, to be completed within two months.

Talk of banning the UOC has prompted fury from the Kremlin. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has accused Kyiv of mounting a “war on the Russian Orthodox Church” — an odd turn of phrase considering the UOC’s claims to be no longer affiliated with its mother church in Moscow.

Moscow Patriarchate spokesman Vladimir Legoyda has dubbed the proposed moves as an “act of intimidation” and the latest round in the persecution of Orthodox faithful that he claims began in 2014 after Yanukovych’s ouster. He offered no examples of persecution. The Moscow Patriarchate and Putin and his aides cited Kyiv’s oppression of the UOC as justification for military moves into Ukraine’s Donbass region after 2014.

Russian world

Among the institutions targeted by Ukraine’s security service was the 11th-century Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, also known as the Monastery of the Caves, a preeminent center of Orthodox Christianity. In western Ukraine, agents raided the Koretsky Convent and the Volyn monastery of the icon of the Mother of God.

In a statement, Ukraine’s security agency (SBU) said it needed to conduct inspections to check for weapons and to ensure saboteurs or collaborators wanted by the police weren’t being sheltered in church buildings. “These activities are being carried out to prevent the use of religious communities as cells of the ‘Russian world’ and to protect the population from provocations and terrorist acts, among other things,” the SBU said. Ukrainian officials say material was found during the raids that indicated the UOC had maintained links to the Russian Orthodox Church throughout the war. (The phrase “Russian world,” or Russkiy mir, is a concept Putin evoked to justify his annexation of Crimea and has cited as his reason for invading Ukraine.)

Speaking to POLITICO, Metropolitan Klyment, the UOC’s spokesman, initially made light of the raids, saying “the security service was more looking into health measures in terms of COVID.” But then added: “It is political manipulation — they want to accuse the Lavra of wrongdoing, but in the end, they didn’t find anything incriminating, weapons or saboteurs or anything like that.”

Weapons maybe not, but the SBU has charged several clergymen from the Lavra with “glorifying Russia” during church services, leading hymns and songs about a Russian awakening and offering justification for the invasion of Ukraine. “Those who wait for the ‘awakening of Mother Rus’ during the full-scale war that Russia is waging against Ukraine need to understand that this harms the interests and the security of Ukraine and its citizens,” SBU head Vasily Malyuk said. “We will not allow such expressions.”

Pro-Kremlin pamphlets, books and newspapers such as the “Russian Messenger” were found during the raids, say SBU officials.

Since the 2014 Maidan uprising, there have been episodic calls for the Russian-linked church to be banned, with detractors accusing it of being a Trojan Horse. Around 600 parishes defected to the OCU from 2014 to early 2022. After the invasion, that turned into a torrent with another thousand parishes switching affiliation.

With criticism mounting — and in a bid apparently to try to stem defections — the church announced in May that it had rewritten its charter, ending its subordination to the Russian Orthodox Church and Metropolitan Kirill. But the UOC has failed to publish its new constitution and continues to hold services where priests pray for Russia and promulgate a vision of the Russian world.

Still loyal to Moscow

The rewriting of the charter “is just a game,” Archbishop Yevstratiy of the breakaway OCU told POLITICO. “It is cosmetic and just rhetoric; it is not a real decision to break with Moscow. They said they changed the laws of the church to omit their ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. But that was more than six months ago and they have still not published the new version,” Yevstratiy said.

He says a ban is justified. “Ukraine resists Russian aggression not only on the battlefield but across different spheres. Ukraine prohibits the activity of Russian banks, of Russian media, and Ukraine has banned pro-Russian political parties, and I think there should be a law that prohibits a church tied to Russia, which Moscow uses as a tool of ideological aggression. That doesn’t mean people can’t believe what they want and pray how they want, but we can’t have Ukrainian religious entities controlled by Moscow,” he said.

The archbishop highlighted the origins of the Moscow Patriarchy and its establishment in 1943 by communist dictator Joseph Stalin as the governing body to run Orthodox religious affairs in the Soviet Union. “The Moscow Patriarchy is a Russian state agency,” Yevstratiy said.

That is also the view of the late KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected in the early 1990s to Britain. In a subsequent book, Mitrokhin revealed that the Patriarchy was set up as a front organization of the Russian intelligence services, with its priests used as “agents of influence” and even for “active measures” and spying missions.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not much has changed, say some Western analysts and Ukrainian lawmakers, including Kniazhytskyi, who has long campaigned for a ban on the UOC.

Kniazhytskyi told POLITICO the Russian Orthodox Church and UOC are one and the same — “part of the Russian state” used by the Kremlin in Ukraine and elsewhere in subversive hybrid warfare and as a tool of foreign policy as well as an agency for Russia’s intelligence services. 

Kniazhytskyi and others say the use of the church for state purposes predates Stalin — orthodoxy was used by Russian leaders, including Catherine the Great and Czar Nicholas I, as an ideological justification for the expansion of the Russian empire in the 18th and 19th centuries.

“The church is not religious in nature; it implements the state policy of the Russian Federation,” he said.



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Liz Truss’ empty ambition put her in power — and shattered her

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Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

Liz Truss resigned as prime minister on the 45th day of her tenure. As I write, the day after, the Tory Party — Britain’s “natural party of government” for two centuries — is polling at 14 percent. They may go lower, and they will not unite behind any candidate. Like alcoholics who cannot stop drinking because they are already insane, the party is beyond the point of renewal. 

But why is Truss, 47, a former accountant, the crucible of apocalypse? 

Many narratives meet in her. Some of it is not her fault, much of it is absolutely her fault. No child looks in the mirror and longs to be a paradigm when grown, but sometimes fate demands it. Her rise was undeserved, and so is the brutality of her fall.  

I met Truss at university, long before she entered real politics, and she mirrors and watches, as if trying to learn a new language. That is why she is stilted and ethereal: that is why she cannot speak easily or from the heart. 

She is at her most expressive on Instagram, a medium both vapid and vivid. There is nothing to her beyond ambition, which explains the need for mirroring, and, I think, rage: the Britain she dreams of is not a kind place. 

Born in Oxford to a mathematics professor and a teacher, she was raised in Leeds in the north of England. Her parents are left-wing and do not share her politics: I sense an oedipal drama there. She went to a good state school, but with her tendency to rewrite her life for advancement, she trashed its reputation during the summer race to lead the Tory Party, though it got her to Oxford University, the nursery for Tory prime ministers. There she studied politics, philosophy and economics, which gives the young politician the appearance, rather than the actuality, of knowledge. 

She was, notoriously, a Liberal Democrat then, and she gave it her all, advocating for the abolition of the monarchy at their party conference in 1994. Whatever line Truss takes, she gives it her all, as compensation, I suspect, for uncertainty within. She smiled as she resigned. I don’t think I ever met a more isolated woman. 

She became a hard right Tory — presumably to distance herself from her youthful Liberal Democracy, and because Margaret Thatcher is the obvious person to mirror in the Tory Party — worked under three prime ministers and spent eight years in the Cabinet. The niceties and collusions of a liberal democracy do not interest her. She notoriously did not defend the judiciary from a powerful tabloid’s “enemies of the people” headline when Britain was puzzling over how to leave the EU and she was lord chancellor, and she prefers to summon Britain’s fantasy of exceptionalism by insisting, for example, that we eat more British cheese. There is something intensely prosaic and unimaginative about Truss: if she were a year, she would be 1951. Nor can she unite people: when she won, she did not even shake Rishi Sunak’s hand, and she largely excluded his supporters from her cabinet. 

A scandal — she had an affair with her mentor, the former Tory MP Mark Field, though both were married at the time — did not damage her reputation or, apparently, her marriage and this is interesting too: the betrayal of her most intimate relationship. (She likewise betrayed Kwasi Kwarteng, her chancellor and closest friend in politics, sacking him last Friday to try to save herself when the markets rejected her unfunded taxation, and her poll ratings collapsed.) Her husband, Hugh O’Leary, stood outside Downing Street as she resigned, but as they went in, they did not touch each other. 

When Boris Johnson fell, two things put Truss in his place: the Tory Party membership, and Johnson himself. Truss was Johnson’s choice — though he did not say so explicitly, leaving his most avid lieutenants to back her — and his sin-eater. She never repudiated him personally, though she tore up his 2019 manifesto and offered tax cuts and public services cuts, the opposite of his promise to “level up” opportunity across the country. Dominic Cummings — Johnson’s chief strategist, who left politics after losing a power struggle with Johnson’s third wife — says Truss is obsessed with optics and has no idea how to be prime minister. He also says that Johnson chose her aware she would self-destruct, and he might plausibly return. That was the first trap.

Then there is the Tory Party membership, largely affluent, male, southern and white. They were offered Sunak and Truss by the parliamentary party, who preferred Sunak. The membership disliked Sunak for destroying Johnson (his resignation was blamed by Johnson acolytes for triggering the former prime minister’s downfall) and raising taxes and loved Truss because she mirrored them. She spoke to their self-absorption, and their desire for low taxes and a smaller state — being affluent, they do not think they need one. She told them mad things which thrilled them, reanimating the empire: she would ignore Scotland’s first minister; she was ready to bomb Russia if she could find it. (She once told the Russian foreign minister parts of Russia were not in Russia.) A long leadership contest enabled her to impress the party membership and, equally, enabled the wider country to despise her. You can only mirror so many people at once. That was the second trap. 

UK NATIONAL PARLIAMENT ELECTION POLL OF POLLS

For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.

Then Queen Elizabeth II, a far more experienced and successful mirror than Truss, died. Britain was grieved and unwilling to tolerate Truss’ tinny authoritarianism, avoidable errors, and superficial arrogance: humility was required from Johnson’s successor, especially if she were to tear up his manifesto. When she has no one to guide her, she does not know how to do the simplest things. When she entered Westminster Abbey for the queen’s funeral she smirked, presumably because she had precedence over other living prime ministers. That was the third trap. 

Beyond her obvious inability to do the job, Truss is largely a victim of circumstance and bad actors. I see her as a character in a gothic novel: perhaps the second Mrs. de Winter of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” a nameless girl fleeing through Manderley (the burning Tory Party), obsessed with Rebecca, the first Mrs. de Winter, who in this conceit is either Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher, or both: more powerful ghosts overshadow her. She has no identity and is better understood as a paradigm than an autonomous figure.

She is a paradigm of the Tory Party membership’s distance from the rest of the country, which is an abyss after 12 years in power; a paradigm of the political class’ tendency toward optics above substance; a paradigm of common narcissism, which is thriving; a paradigm of the paranoia, taste for culture war and will to power that Brexit incited in its supporters — Truss was typically a late and fervent convert — when they realized they were wrong. 

All these threads met in Truss in a combustible fashion that has left her — and the Tory Party — in ruins. I think I see hope for our democracy because these are all endings. Truss did not fall: it is worse than that. Rather, and obediently, she shattered. 





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