Editorial: Fight Fascism at Home and Abroad

 Some on the Left are wary of supporting Ukraine, given the history of US foreign policy misadventures. But the US didn’t force Russia to invade Ukraine in February under the pretense that it needed to “de-Nazify” its neighbor. 

The Russian military’s scorched-earth campaign that has targeted residential neighborhoods, hospitals, markets and other civilian areas with missiles and airborne bombing attacks has put the lie to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence that the Russian army was in Ukraine on a peacekeeping mission, and that Ukraine was bombing its own neighborhoods, hospitals and marketplaces. 

Ukraine’s army and territorial defenders, armed with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile launchers provided by the US and NATO member countries in Western Europe, continue to put up heroic resistance to the armored columns of the Russian army. Ukraine is protecting its 30-year-old democracy while Putin hopes to put the Soviet Union back together — but this time as a fascist regime.

Ukraine moved toward independence as the Soviet Union disintegrated. In a referendum on Dec. 1, 1991, 92% of voters approved independence and Leonid Kravchuk, chairman of parliament, was elected first president of Ukraine. On Dec. 21, 1991, leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine formally dissolved the Soviet Union. 

In December 1994, leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Britain and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum, which provided security assurances to Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons — the third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile in the world — and joining the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Among other things, Russia, as well as Britain and the US, promised “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”

Those assurances didn’t survive the rise of Putin, the former Soviet KGB officer who was chosen by Russian President Boris Yeltsin to become prime minister in August 1999. Putin became acting president when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned in December 1999, and Putin was elected president the following March 2000.

The Second Chechen War started one month after he became prime minister. The war against Chechen separatists bolstered Putin’s popularity at home, but the conflict caused deep changes in the Russian politics and society, as young veterans returned to their home towns traumatized and embittered, The Economist reported in 2007. 

Tens of thousands of Russian police and security forces in Chechnya learned patterns of brutality and impunity and brought them home, often returning with disciplinary and psychological problems, human rights groups Memorial and Demos reported in a 2007 study. A nationwide poll in 2005 found 71% of Russian respondents said they didn’t trust police at all; another poll found 41% Russians said they lived in fear of police violence. According to Amnesty International, torture of detainees in Russia is now endemic.

After Putin became president, he seized control of the nation’s TV stations but tolerated pluralism and an independent press as long as he retained popularity. He served two terms, then switched places with prime minister Dmitri Medvedev in 2008. But the global financial crisis ended years of economic growth and weakened support for the government. “Three years later in 2011, the Arab Spring exploded in the Middle East, toppling some dictators, challenging others, and requiring the international community to respond,” former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wrote in an essay on “Russia’s Road to Autocracy” in the October 2021 Journal of Democracy. 

“Amazingly, Medvedev shared the West’s analytic framework and agreed to abstain on UN Security Council resolutions authorizing the use of force against Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi’s regime. Putin publicly disagreed, believing that the United States was orchestrating these revolutions, just as he believed it had in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and Ukraine in 2004.” A few months later, Putin announced he would seek a third term, which he won in March 2012, but Putin witnessed the largest popular mobilization against his regime ever. In fact, they were the country’s biggest demonstrations since the Soviet collapse in 1991, McFaul noted.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian prime minister, was declared winner of the presidential election, which the Ukraine’s Supreme Court later ruled had been rigged. Opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko challenged the outcome. During the tumultuous months of what became known as the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko suddenly became gravely ill, apparently poisoned by dioxin, and he suspected Russian involvement in his poisoning. Yushchenko recovered and took office as president, pursuing closer relations with Europe, with Yanukovych in opposition.

Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican consultant, was hired by oligarchs supporting the pro-Russian party and Yanukovych, who returned to power in 2006 as prime minister, until snap elections in September 2007 made Yulia Tymoshenko, an ally of Yushchenko, prime minister. After the 2008-09 Ukrainian financial crisis shrank the Ukrainian economy by 15%, Yanukovych was elected president in 2010 with 48% of the vote.

One of Manafort’s key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia,” Ilya Marritz reported at ProPublica.

After Yanukovych’s government proposed new anti-protest laws in January 2014, anti-government demonstrators occupied buildings in the center of Kyiv, including the Justice Ministry building. Riots left 98 dead and 15,000 were injured in what was called the Maidan Revolution. Parliament removed Yanukovych, who fled to Russia.

Putin sent Russian forces to annex Crimea in March 2014, which Putin said was precipitated by the removal of Yanukovych. Separately, pro-Russian groups started a rebellion, with suspected assistance of the Russian military, in the Donetsk and Luhansk areas of eastern Ukraine, collectively called the Donbas. Petro Poroshenko, running on a pro-European Union platform, won the Ukraine presidency in May 2014 with over 50% of the vote.

Meanwhile, Manafort found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He offered his services free of charge to Donald Trump in early 2016 as his convention manager, wrangling delegates for the real estate developer and reality-TV star. He also stripped language from the Republican Party platform that would have expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.

According to the US Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.

By 2018, Rudolph Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian involvement in the election, and looking for “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who served on a Ukrainian energy company’s board. 

Volodymyr Zelensky, a former actor and comedian, got 73% of the vote in an April 21, 2019, runoff to replace President Poroshenko. Donald Trump, in a July phone call, asked Zelensky for a “favor” in return for clearing the way for a $400 million military aid package Congress had approved for Ukraine. The dirt blew back. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2022

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