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Ukraine took a potential landmark step toward judicial reform in mid-July when members of parliament adopted two laws that should establish credible foundations for the reboot of the countrys legal system. On July 13, the Ukrainian parliament backed legislation to relaunch the deeply compromised High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ) and the High Council of Justice (HCJ). Crucially, independent international experts will participate in the envisaged future selection process.

For the past seven years, Ukraines flawed judicial system has been the Achilles heel of the countrys reform efforts. Since the 2014 Euro-Maidan revolution, Ukraine has achieved progress in a range of reform areas including government procurement, corporate governance, banking industry transparency and the fight against corruption.

However, the dysfunctional Ukrainian court system has hung over this entire reform process like a sword of Damocles, threatening to reverse anti-corruption gains and undermine Ukraines Euro-Atlantic aspirations.

In addition to damaging the countrys reform efforts, this has resulted in significant economic costs. Ukraines inability to provide genuine rule of law reform has served to stunt GDP growth and scare away potential international investors who might otherwise have entered the Ukrainian market.

Ukraines judiciary is governed by two bodies. The HCJ is the main body in the system of judicial governance of Ukraine. It has full control over the appointment and dismissal of Ukrainian judges. Key responsibilities include protecting judges from unlawful interference by other agencies and holding judges accountable for professional misconduct, including the granting of permission to pursue criminal prosecutions against individual judges.

The HQCJ is often referred to as the human resources department for the Ukrainian judiciary. It is responsible for the selection of future judges and it vets current judges who do not meet professionalism and integrity criteria during re-attestation processes.Both of these bodies have long been seen as under the sway of existing interest groups within the judiciary. Instead of cleansing the judiciary of tainted judges, they stand accused of providing cover for them and successfully blocking all prior attempts to overhaul the Ukrainian court system.

Between 2014 and 2019, the HCJ and the HQCJ stand accused of securing the appointment of politically controlled and dependent judges to Ukraines new Supreme Court. Critics also say the two bodies failed to remove judges who persecuted protesters during the Euro-Maidan, and did not act against judges caught making false statements in their asset declarations. Meanwhile, the HCJ was involved in efforts to cover up for tainted judges and silence whistleblowers using disciplinary sanctions.

By 2019, it had become painfully clear that reforming the judiciary without changing the approach to composing these vital judicial governance bodies was impossible. The idea of a new approach was supported by reformers within government, civil society experts and Ukraines international partners. During his successful presidential election campaign in spring 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy also promised comprehensive reform of judicial governance.

Despite the fact that the recently adopted approach goes beyond established European recommendations on the judiciary, the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe positively evaluated the proposed international engagement in the cleansing of Ukraines judicial governance bodies.

These reforms are in line with the expectations of the International Monetary Fund, which made it one of the key conditionalities for their ongoing program with Ukraine. The reboot also features in the EU-Ukraine macro-financial assistance agreement, while the G-7 Ambassadors Reform Support Group included it in its roadmap for strengthening the rule of law in Ukraine.

After a number of judicial reform false starts, the engagement of foreign professionals in the selection of members of Ukraines judicial governance bodies has led many to take the recently adopted reforms particularly seriously. A similar approach has previously been used during the competition to recruit members of Ukraines High Anticorruption Court and proved effective.

For the HQCJ, three foreign experts will be part of a six-member selection panel, which will shortlist 32 candidates for 16 HQCJ offices. For the HCJ, three foreign experts will be part of a six-member Ethics Council, which will assess HCJ candidates on the basis of integrity and shortlist the best candidates. The Ethics Council will also conduct a one-time integrity screening of current HCJ members and request the appointing bodies to fire or reconfirm the HCJ members in question.

Ukraine is now in the early stages of what promises to be one of the most decisive battles for the historic transformation of the country. The new laws adopted in July are only the first step in a necessarily long and complex journey toward establishing genuine rule of law in Ukraine.

Much still has to be done in order to fully and transparently implement the adopted laws. Far too often in Ukraines reform story, legislation that looks good on paper has fallen flat when it comes to implementation. Moreover, it is also important to note that the laws themselves are not ideal and contain some flaws that opponents of reform will likely seek to exploit.

Despite these concerns, there is good cause for optimism. The recent adoption of these new laws is arguably the closest Ukraine has been to genuine judicial reform since the country renewed its independence in 1991. As Ukrainians prepare to celebrate the 30th anniversary of statehood on August 24, this reform progress is also worth toasting.

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication of the Atlantic Council that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraines politics, economy, civil society, and culture. The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff or its supporters.

The article above is reprinted from UkraineAlert with the permission of its editor. It was first published online at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-takes-a-big-step-towards-judicial-reform/.

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Ukraine takes a big step toward judicial reform - The Ukrainian Weekly

The 5,000-year-old skeleton of a man with the fingers of a pianist has sparked a nationwide controversy in Ukraine over heritage, antisemitism and national identity.

The body was the last of 27 sets of human remains discovered this summer by Ukrainian archaeologists in a dig south of the city of Dnipro. They had been exhuming an ancient burial mound threatened by the encroachment of a housing development.

He is a mystery, explained Professor Dmytro Teslenko, 49, head archaeologist for the region, of the ancient man whose discovery has prompted a modern-day furore that began when activists denounced the dig as an assault on Ukrainian heritage.

At the base of a burial mound excavated in Ukraine was the 5,000-year-old skeleton of a mystery man in his thirties with the fingers of a pianist

YAROSLAV YAROSHENKO

The burial mound was originally made just for him, probably between 3,400-3,200BC, Teslenko continued. Yet he had not the build

Continued here:
Row over ancient tombs gets to the heart of modern Ukraine - The Times

Political conspiracy theory

The BidenUkraine conspiracy theory is a series of unevidenced claims centered on the false allegation that while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt activities relating to the employment of his son Hunter Biden by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.[1] They were spread primarily in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign.[2] United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration."[3] The New York Times reported in May 2021 that a federal criminal investigation was examining a possible role by current and former Ukrainian officials, as well as former Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was the subject of a separate federal investigation.[4]

The conspiracy theory alleges that then-Vice President Biden withheld loan guarantees to pressure Ukraine into firing a prosecutor to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma and to protect his son. Although the United States did withhold government aid to pressure Ukraine into removing the prosecutor,[5] this was the official and bipartisan policy of the federal government of the United States, which, along with the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, believed the prosecutor to be corrupt and ineffective, and too lenient in investigating companies and oligarchs, including Burisma and its owner.[6][7]

In October 2020, during the last weeks of the presidential election, the New York Post published an article, with the involvement of Donald Trump's personal attorney Giuliani and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, about a found laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden which contained an email, whose authenticity has never been verified, that appeared to reference a meeting between Joe Biden and a Burisma executive in 2015.[5] The article's veracity was initially strongly questioned by most mainstream media outlets, analysts and intelligence officials, and no evidence validating the email has emerged.[8][9][10] Hunter Biden has stated that he is unsure whether the laptop was his.[11]

Hunter Biden is a lawyer whose career previously included a period as an executive vice-president at MBNA and three years at the United States Department of Commerce. He then worked as a lobbyist until 2006, when George W. Bush appointed him to the board of directors of Amtrak. Hunter Biden resigned from Amtrak in February 2009, shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, when his father Joe Biden became vice-president. He resumed lobbying, and was counsel at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, until the Ukrainian oil and gas firm Burisma Holdings hired him in April 2014.[12] As Hunter Biden had no prior experience in Ukraine or the energy sector, some viewed this as a likely attempt to buy influence via his father. Hunter Biden's employment was described by commentators as creating a conflict of interest, and advisors to the Obama administration considered the situation awkward.[13]

The conspiracy theory holds that Burisma used Hunter Biden's position to influence then-vice president Joe Biden, who subsequently conditioned the release of $1billion in US government aid on a requirement that Ukraine fire its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin (who had held this post from February 2015[14] until March 2016[15]), to prevent the company from being investigated for corruption. This narrative is inconsistent with contemporaneous reports and has repeatedly been found to be false.[1] No evidence has been found showing Hunter Biden engaged in influence peddling with his father.[16] While Vice President Biden did withhold $1billion in government aid to Ukraine in 2015, this was done as part of a wider American and international policy to induce Ukraine to remove Shokin, not to prevent an investigation into Burisma. Shokin, viewed by the American government as both corrupt and ineffective, had failed to launch a serious investigation into the affairs of the country's corrupt oligarchs, including Burisma's founder Mykola Zlochevsky.[5] The Ukrainian prosecutor's office continued to examine Burisma under Shokin's successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, but Lutsenko clarified that the cause of concern was a transaction unrelated to Hunter Biden and stated that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by either Hunter or Joe Biden.[13][17]

Shokin was appointed by, and loyal to, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. Representatives of the EU and the United States pressed Poroshenko for his removal[18] as did the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.[19][20] An overwhelming majority vote in the Ukrainian Parliament in March 2016 led to Shokin's removal from office[21] after an investigation into extortion of another company led to associates who were found in possession of diamonds, cash and other valuables[22] as well as documents and passports belonging to Shokin.[23]

Reports of a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, where then-President Trump demanded an investigation of Burisma and Hunter Biden in exchange for the release of congressionally mandated financial and military aid to Ukraine, triggered Trump's first impeachment. During the hearings and trial of President Trump in 2019-20, he and his allies repeatedly alleged that Joe Biden and his son were engaged in corrupt activities in Ukraine.[24] Trump said he planned to make it a major issue during the 2020 United States presidential race,[25] while a Republican-controlled Senate committee carried out an investigation into the allegations in spring 2020.[26] The investigation by the Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees concluded in September 2020 that Hunter Biden "'cashed in' on his father's name to close lucrative business deals around the world" but that there was no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by Joe Biden.[27]

Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, spearheaded an effort to gather information in Ukraine to advance the allegations, and Attorney General William Barr confirmed that the Justice Department had created an "intake process" to review Giuliani's findings.[28] Giuliani and his associates worked with individuals linked to Russian intelligence and organized crime, including Andrii Derkach and Dmytro Firtash.[29][30] Derkach released snippets of a supposed conversation between Joe Biden and Poroshenko, in which Biden linked loan guarantees to the ouster of the country's corrupt and ineffective prosecutor general.[5] The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared to be heavily edited,[31] did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son.[32] In June 2020, Poroshenko denied that Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma and characterized the recordings as fake.[30][33] In September 2020, the United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Derkach, stating he "has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services". The Treasury Department added that Derkach "waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election," including by the release of "edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials".[34][35]

In late 2019, it was revealed that the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which Giuliani had once led, was investigating him for multiple felonies relating to his activities in Ukraine.[36][37] Intelligence officials warned Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate committee investigating the Bidens, that he risked spreading Russian disinformation.[38] The Washington Post reported in October 2020 that American intelligence agencies warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence operation, and National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien warned President Trump about accepting what Giuliani told him. American intelligence monitoring Russian assets intercepted Giuliani communicating with them.[39] According to officials interviewed by The Daily Beast, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton told his staff not to meet with Giuliani, as did his successor Robert C. O'Brien, because Bolton had been informed that Giuliani was spreading conspiracy theories that aligned with Russian interests in disrupting the 2020 election. These officials were also concerned that Giuliani would be used as a conduit for disinformation, including "leaks" of emails that would mix genuine with forged material to implicate Hunter Biden in corrupt dealings.[40] Interviewed by The Daily Beast, Giuliani would later declare that Derkach's being sanctioned was the result of a conspiracy led by George Soros and that "the chance that Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50".[41]

Ukrainian businessman Hares Youssef told The Times that an associate of Dmytro Firtash asked Youssef to lie about Hunter Biden's business dealings to damage Joe Biden's presidential campaign, in exchange for a United States visa.[42]

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published articles containing purported emails of unknown authorship which suggested that Hunter Biden provided an "opportunity" to Vadym Pozharskyi, an advisor to the board of Burisma, to meet his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden.[43][44][45] Joe Biden stated in September 2019 that he had never spoken to his son about his foreign business dealings.[46] His presidential campaign denied such a meeting took place and stated the New York Post had never contacted them "about the critical elements of this story".[47] Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden's foreign policy adviser in 2015, told The Washington Post that he had accompanied Biden during all of his meetings about Ukraine and that, "He never met with [Pozharskyi]." He added, "In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke."[5] One of the purported emails showed Pozharskyi saying he would share information with Amos Hochstein, a State Department advisor close to Vice President Biden, though Hochstein stated, "The Republican Senate investigation subpoenaed all my records, including emails and calendars and found no mention of this man. I led the US energy efforts in Ukraine and never even heard of him before yesterday."[48] The New York Post published images and PDF copies of the alleged emails, but their authenticity and origin have not been determined.[49]According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.[8] In its opening sentence, the New York Post story misleadingly asserted "the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" Burisma, despite the fact that Shokin had not pursued an investigation into Burisma's founder.[5] The opening sentence also misleadingly stated that Hunter Biden introduced his father to Pozharskyi, but the purported email from Pozharskyi only mentioned an invitation and "opportunity" for the men to meet.[50][51]

Rudy Giuliani provided the materials to the paper after they were allegedly found on a MacBook Pro left at a Delaware computer repair shop owned by John Paul Mac Isaac. Mac Isaac contacted Giuliani, who he said was his "lifeguard"voicing credence to the conspiracy theory that the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign was behind the murder of campaign worker Seth Rich.[52] Steve Bannon informed the New York Post of the laptop,[53] and he and Giuliani delivered a copy of the supposed laptop hard drive to the publication.[54] Weeks before, Bannon had boasted on Dutch television that he had Hunter Biden's hard drive.[54] Giuliani was later quoted as saying he hawd given the copy to the New York Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out".[8]According to the New York Post story, an unknown person left the computer at the repair shop to repair water damage, but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up.[55] Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[55][52] When interviewed by CBS News, Mac Isaac offered contradictory statements about his motivations.[56] Thomas Rid, a political scientist and disinformation expert at Johns Hopkins University, noted that the emails could have been forged or that forged material could have been mixed with genuine materials, a "common feature" of disinformation operations.[57] The Daily Beast reported that according to two "individuals with direct knowledge", multiple senior officials in the Trump administration and reelection campaign were aware of the laptop hard drive "several weeks" prior to the New York Post story.[58] Giuliani later confirmed to The Daily Beast that he had informed Trump about the material before the New York Post story.[41]

The New York Post reported it had been shown an image purporting to show a federal subpoena that resulted in the computer and an external hard drive being seized by the FBI in December 2019.[5][failed verification] NBC News reported the FBI had acquired the devices via a grand jury subpoena, though it was unclear if this was the subpoena cited by the New York Post, and was investigating whether the contents were linked to a foreign intelligence operation.[59] The Associated Press confirmed the existence of the FBI investigation into possible foreign-intelligence activity.[60] Citing a "US official and a congressional source briefed on the matter", CNN reported the FBI was specifically investigating possible connections to ongoing Russian disinformation efforts against Biden.[48]

Material similar to the alleged hard-drive contents was reportedly circulating in Ukraine during 2019. One individual interviewed by Time magazine stated that he had been approached in late May 2019, and a second person stated that he had been approached in mid-September. The seller, according to the second individual, wished to sell compromising information about Hunter Biden to Republican allies of Donald Trump for $5million. "I walked away from it, because it smelled awful", he told Time. Igor Novikov, a former advisor to the Ukrainian president and a disinformation researcher, said that the market for kompromat (damaging material) had been very active in the past year in reaction to political events in the United States, with political operatives rushing to respond to Giuliani's call for damaging information on the Bidens. Novikov characterized the materials available on the market as "extremely hard to verify, yet very easy to fake". On October 19, Derkach posted on social media that he had a second Hunter Biden laptop, stating, "The facts confirming international corruption are stored on a second laptop. These are not the last witnesses or the last laptop."[61] Lev Parnas told Politico that Giuliani had been told about compromising material regarding Hunter Biden on May30, 2019, during a visit with Vitaly Pruss, an associate of the corrupt oligarch Zlochevsky.[62]

Earlier in the month and before the Post's report, a White House lawyer and two others affiliated with Trump had already pitched a story about Hunter Biden's business dealings in China to The Wall Street Journal, which the Trump affiliates saw as an ideal outlet for its combination of conservatism and industry credibility. While the Journal conducted due diligence and unbeknownst to the Trump affiliates, Giuliani and the Post published a version of the story with unclear provenance that alleged but did not prove Joe Biden's involvement in his son's affairs. Bannon had anticipated the Journal story would appear on the 19th, and Trump told reporters to expect a major story in the Journal. Internally, the insinuation that their journalism was affiliated with or on behalf of Trump irritated the Journal editors. Tony Bobulinski, a business partner of Hunter Biden who was interviewed for the Journal's report, was spooked that the Journal would not run the piece and issued his own statement on the 21st, which Breitbart News published unedited. At the next day's presidential debate, Trump made vague reference to the emails and hosted Bobulinski as his special guest. After the debate, the Journal published its brief story that Bobulinski and corporate records assessed by the Journal "show no role for Joe Biden".[63]

After a scandal narrative failed to gain traction in the mainstream press, conservative media and personalities pivoted to a "meta narrative" that the press, social media platforms and the "deep state" were suppressing news of the scandal. This was one of many instances during the 2020 campaign where conservatives accused tech companies of aiding Biden's campaign by suppressing negative coverage of him.[64] During an April 3, 2021 interview with CBS News Hunter Biden stated that he did not know whether the laptop in the New York Post story was his but that it could have been. He said that his laptop could have been stolen or hacked, or the information in the New York Post story could have been from Russian intelligence.[11]

The New York Times reported in May 2021 that federal investigators in Brooklyn began a criminal investigation late in the Trump administration into possible efforts by several current and former Ukrainian officials to spread unsubstantiated allegations about corruption by Joe Biden. Investigators were examining whether the Ukrainians used Giuliani as a channel for the allegations, though he was not a specific subject of the investigation, in contrast to a long-running investigation of Giuliani by the US attorney's office in Manhattan.[4]

On October19, a group of over 50 former senior intelligence officials, who had served in the Trump administration and the three previous, released an open letter stating that the release of the alleged emails "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation".[10][65]

During an interview with Fox News on October19, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said the laptop was "not part of some Russian disinformation campaign" and accused Adam Schiff of mischaracterizing the views of the intelligence community by describing the alleged emails as part of a smear campaign against Biden.[66] Schiff's spokesman accused Ratcliffe of "purposefully misrepresenting" the congressman's words.[67] Ratcliffe is considered a Trump loyalist,[68] and a number of commentators had expressed concerns previously over his partiality.[69][70] The New York Times reported that no solid evidence had emerged that the laptop contained Russian disinformation.[2] An FBI probe seeking to determine whether the laptop was part of a foreign intelligence operation is still ongoing.[48][59] Several security officials criticized Ratcliffe for appearing to pre-judge its outcome.[71] The FBI has publicly stated they had "nothing to add" to Ratcliffe's remarks in response to a request for more information made by Sen. Ron Johnson.[72]

A United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence had promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration".[3][73]

Twitter and Facebook both implemented measures on their platforms to prevent sharing of the New York Post article. Twitter first deprecated the story (prevented its algorithm from highlighting it due to its popularity) but eventually banned links to the story from being posted.[47] It did so according to their Hacked Materials Policy and Facebook per a policy that "in many countries, including in the U.S., if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker."[74][75][76] The Hill reported on the Facebook action, "it is unclear what 'signals' triggered the limit on the New York Post article".[74] Twitter briefly locked President Donald Trump's presidential campaign Twitter account for sharing a controversial Hunter Biden video earlier on October15. The account was unlocked later that day.[77] Between October14 and23, the original New York Post story received over 54million Facebook views.[78]

Commentators from varied political backgrounds criticized the actions taken by Facebook and Twitter, arguing that they could have amplified disinformation thanks to the Streisand effect.[47] Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noted, "Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great", adding that "blocking URL sharing via tweet or [direct message]" without explaining the context was "unacceptable".[79]

President Donald Trump tweeted twice on October14 in response to Facebook and Twitter's actions: "So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of 'Smoking Gun' emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost," and, "It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!!".[80]

Congressional Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify before the committee in response to their platforms' actions. Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Josh Hawley announced that the committee would vote on subpoenaing Dorsey to appear on October23.[75] Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the restrictions made by Facebook and Twitter as "absolutely reprehensible" and stated that the companies were acting as "speech police".[81]

Dorsey stated that "Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix," adding "Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that."[82] Facebook also said that it was restricting spread pending input from third-party fact-checkers. Associated Press noted that the story had, as of October 17 2020, "not been confirmed by other publications".[82]

The Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign press secretary Jamal Brown stated that Twitter's action with regard to the New York Post story indicated that the allegations in the story were false.[83] They specifically denied that Joe Biden ever had a formal meeting with Pozharskyi, and said that if they had ever met, it would have been a brief encounter.[84]

On January 21, 2021, the day after Biden's inauguration, Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia filed articles of impeachment against Biden that cited the claims.[85] No fellow members of Congress co-sponsored the articles.

Fellow press outlets The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal stated that they could not verify the data provided by New York Post independently.[8] NBC News requested a copy of the hard drive from Giuliani, who told them that he would not provide one; they say Guiliani offered them copies of a small number of emails but would not give them the full set.[86]

David Folkenflik of NPR observed that the New York Post story asserted as facts things it presumed to be true. He also noted that the credited lead author of the story, deputy political editor Emma-Jo Morris, had virtually no previous bylines in reporting, and her most significant prior employment was a nearly four-year position as a producer on Sean Hannity's Fox News program. Hannity, a close Trump advisor, has repeatedly suggested wrongdoing by Biden in Ukraine.[49]

Vanity Fair observed the story had exposed an ongoing journalistic "cold war" within Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which includes The New York Post, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal. In particular, it described an internal rift over coverage by the Journal which published an opinion article by conservative columnist Kimberley Strassel inflating the claims, only to have the news section publish an article which "swept the legs out from under their Opinion colleague's argument" four hours later. Ryan Lizza, reporter for Politico, was quoted as saying "reporters at the WSJ, Fox News, and NYP have all come to the same conclusion about these documents but they are being drowned out by bad faith activists on the opinion side at these Murdoch companies who favor Trump's re-election."[87]

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BidenUkraine conspiracy theory - Wikipedia

Writing long, historically focused opinion pieces is an activity more characteristic of think tankers than heads of state, but Russian President Vladimir Putin is anything but conventional. Last week he published a 5,000-plus-word article that reviews the last millennium to conclude that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians share a common history, faith and destiny.

In Mr. Putins view, Western powers have tried for centuries to separate them, but those efforts are doomed to fail. He argues that the anti-Russia project has been rejected by millions of Ukrainians in Crimea, the Donbas and elsewhere. The Russian president believes that after centuries of common development and trade, the Ukrainian economy simply cannot flourish without close integration with Russia. Without his country, Ukraine will flounder, despite the occasional aid it receives from its Western paymasters, Mr. Putin writes. Even before the pandemic, Ukraines gross domestic product per capita was below $4,000. This is less than in the Republic of Albania, the Republic of Moldova, or unrecognized Kosovo. (Moscow doesnt recognize Kosovos independence from Serbia.) Nowadays, Mr. Putin writes, Ukraine is Europes poorest country.

Some observers dismissed the essay as an empty propaganda ploy aimed at distracting Russian public opinion in the face of a surging pandemic. Others saw it as an announcement that Russia will escalate its support for the pro-Moscow forces in the smoldering conflict in eastern Ukraine. Since deception and surprise are fundamental tools of Mr. Putins statecraft, anything is possible, but Western powers would be well advised to take the essay seriously. The Russian presidents policies will always and inevitably reflect his calculations about the opportunities and risks he faces at any given moment, but his strategic objectives are unmistakable. Mr. Putins quest to rebuild Russian power requires the reassertion of Moscows hegemony over Belarus and Ukraine.

In Belarus, where the Kremlin enabled the embattled government to survive months of pro-democracy protests and Western sanctions, Mr. Putin has crushed any hopes President Lukashenko had of escaping Moscows embrace. Ukraine is a tougher nut to crack. But the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is moving inexorably toward completion, weakening Ukraines influence over European policy making. Infighting and disorganization also continue to prevent the European Union from becoming a significant geopolitical actor. Amid all this, Mr. Putin has served notice that he will patiently but relentlessly pursue his strategic goals at Kyivs expense.

The best way to think of Russia these days is as being constrained but not contained. That is, the West has failed abysmally to develop a coherent policy to stop the Kremlins attacks on its neighbors or its opposition to the EU and the American-based world order. Sanctions dont deter Mr. Putin; the West is hopelessly disunited on Russia policy, and the resulting incoherent policies offer Moscow opportunities from the Middle East to Myanmar to advance its foreign-policy agenda and bolster its commercial interests. Under these circumstances Russia will continue to test the West, and Mr. Putin will look to victories abroad to bolster his standing at home.

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Why Putin Still Covets Ukraine - The Wall Street Journal

Belarus is among the most likely places where a war could break out between Russia and the West. News from Belarus has flashed in and out of headlines in the past year. When a wave of protest washed over the country in the summer of 2020, it was a major story. The diversion of an airplane traveling between two E.U. member states, followed by the kidnapping of a Belarusian opposition journalist and his (Russian) girlfriend from this plane, captured the worlds attention for more than a week. Otherwise, this country of almost ten million people tends to get ignored, which is unfortunate. The future of Belarus poses urgent and acutely unpredictable questions for the entire region. Bearing this in mind, Western policymakers should do what they can to articulate a viable policy toward Belarus before the next round of crises comes. They can begin this difficult job by reviewing the relationship between Belarus and Ukraine.

Compared to Belarus, Ukraine is much bigger in territory and population. It has a more developed national sensibility: a commonly spoken Ukrainian language, a distinctively Ukrainian culture, and a strong sense of its own historical accomplishments and grievances. Ukraines post-Soviet political trajectory was, from the beginning, more pluralistic and more chaotic than that of Belarus. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been a dictator close to Moscow for decades, while Ukraine has vacillated in its politics and its geopolitics. In 2008, NATO stated that, one day, Ukraine and Georgia would become members. No such promise has ever been extended to Belarus, an isolated country without a visible diaspora and without much to offer economically. Belarus is typically regarded as a county in Russias orbit, whereas Ukraine, ever since its Orange Revolution of 2004, has been more of a wild card.

Despite these differences, Belarus and Ukraine present similar policy challenges to the West. A former Soviet socialist republic, Belarus (like Ukraine) was a part of the Eastern Partnership program, established by the European Union in 2009. Policymakers in Europe and the United States the West for short believe that both Belarus and Ukraine should determine their own relationships to Europe. These leaders also champion the machinery of reform in Belarus, preferring it for obvious reasons to the agonies of authoritarian rule. They would like to see civil society prosper and serve as the precursor to democratic renewal. A similar Western preference was palpable for Ukraine when protestors thronged Kyivs Maidan Square in opposition to Viktor Yanukovich. The West emphasizes sovereignty and hopes for democracy. Hence a joint U.S. and E.U. policy of punishing Russia for violations of state sovereignty and, at the same time, of encouraging a regional transition to democracy, which is likely to entail Euro-Atlantic integration, an explicit aim of the American and E.U. Ukraine policy.

The example of Ukraine over the past 10 or so years should inform Western policy toward Belarus. In Ukraine, there has been a stark difference between the stated aspirations of Western policy and the realities on the ground. U.S. and European policy has often been more aspirational than effective, validating the principle that modest goals successfully accomplished are preferable to grandiose goals that float free from reality. Furthermore, if Western policymakers were to apply their past experiences in Ukraine to Belarus, they are likely to overlook two important factors: 1) Belaruss vertical integration and its lack of democratic experience, which bodes ill for whatever political chapter will follow Lukashenkos reign; and 2) the high degree of political and military connection between Belarus and Russia. The loftier and more immediate the policy goals are regarding Belarus, the more they are likely to mislead its opposition movement into presuming a degree of support and commitment that American and European states will be unwilling to deliver.

***

Circa 2014, Western policy on Ukraine rested on three pillars. One was the return of Crimea to Ukraine, reversing Russian annexation. Another was the elimination of a Russian military presence in Donbas. A political process was supposed to follow, restoring Donbas to the Ukrainian body politic through free and fair elections. A third pillar was the reform of Ukraine itself, a more nebulous objective than the other two pillars. Ukraine had been an oligarchic democracy since 1991, and Yanukovich was elected president in 2013, when his decision not to sign an association agreement with the European Union sparked protests that culminated in his fleeing Ukraine for Russia. After Yanukovichs exit, the reform of Ukraine meant a reduction in corruption, the minimization of oligarch rule, and the progress of civil society, building upon the participatory democracy that had flowed from social media and from the street protests of 2013 and early 2014. The eventual benefit of such reform would be Euro-Atlantic integration, an embedding of Ukraine in some European and trans-Atlantic institutional structures.

European and U.S. policy instruments were also threefold. Most prominent were the U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia, which were tied to the annexation of Crimea and eventually to the Minsk diplomatic process. Hammered out in 2014 and 2015, this process was intended to expedite a Russian withdrawal and to initiate the political procedures through which Donbas could be reintegrated into Ukraine. An additional policy move was to enhance military cooperation between Ukraine and the West. NATO committed itself to the training of Ukrainian troops; Washington provided non-lethal military aid and, after a few years of back and forth, the Trump administration decided to furnish Ukraine with lethal military assistance. As for reform, the West gave Kyiv both money and advice. The foundations of partnership were supposed to incentivize further reforms in Ukraine, a virtuous circle. In the long run, NATO and E.U. membership might be the fruits of such incremental reforms.

The balance sheet for these policy objectives is not especially encouraging. Crimea has receded since 2014 as an active area of disagreement among Russia, Europe, and the United States. The annexation has by no means been recognized, nor is it ever likely to be. At the same time, it does not figure prominently in the public statements of Western politicians, from Boris Johnson to Angela Merkel to Joe Biden. Donbas remains in Russian hands. The Minsk diplomatic process has stalled completely. The United States and the European Union have conceded nothing, and its Minsk-related sanctions have been scrupulously maintained, but not one of the Western aims for Minsk has been realized. The Russian military shows no signs of leaving the area, and the prospect of elections that would rejoin Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukraine is impossibly distant at the moment. France and Germany, the prime movers of Minsk diplomacy for the West, have ceased investing political capital in the issues that had made Minsk necessary in the first place. Meanwhile, Belarus did not appear to be on the agenda of the Biden-Merkel talks in Washington, D.C.

Political reform in Ukraine is much harder to evaluate. It admits no obvious metric. The glass is half full in the sense that Ukraine has survived under adverse circumstances. It has not sued for peace with Russia. It has not gone under economically, and it has remained pluralistic and basically hospitable to civil society. The glass is half empty for several reasons. Corruption has not been curtailed. Oligarchs play the same outsized role in the Ukrainian political economy that they did under Yanukovich; Petro Poroshenko, Ukraines first president after Maidan, was himself an oligarch; and Volodymr Zelensky, who followed Poroshenko, has been unable to diminish the power of oligarchs. Rule of law is tenuous: Ukraines judiciary is effectively a branch of executive power. Nor is Zelenskys government especially popular. Ukraines Euro-Atlantic integration is a misleading phrase in 2021. It overestimates the prospects for a rent-seeking, mostly unreformed, government, and it underestimates Russias capacity to shape Ukraines future.

U.S. and E.U. policy has not failed. It has done much to keep Ukraine alive as an independent country. It may boast of considerable success in the future. But neither has it succeeded. Seven years out, it has fallen conspicuously short. Western sanctions and military aid may have deterred Russia from either annexing or dominating a greater swath of Ukrainian territory. That is a hypothetical worth debating. They have so far not achieved the goals that were set in 2014. It is doubtful that they will ever do so, while the high hopes of the Maidan Revolution have slowly fizzled. In Western policy, a truly reformed Ukraine is a noble idea. It is nevertheless a low priority, so low in fact that the provision of Western military assistance has never been conditioned on genuine reform in Kyiv, which, given the state of Ukrainian politics in 2021, is a missed opportunity. Reasonable in theory, the U.S. and European Ukraine policy has done a poor job of marrying words and deeds.

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U.S. and European policy on Belarus should assimilate four lessons from the Ukrainian precedent. But first a word about the inner dynamics of such policy. As with Russia, the West is not a monolith vis-a-vis Belarus. The Baltic republics and Poland seem committed if only rhetorically to regime change in Belarus. Southern Europe does not have a pronounced opinion on what to do. France and Germany are interested in reviving diplomatic contact with Russia, and, at the same time, they are concerned about the prospects for democracy and human rights in Belarus. So too is the United States. Throughout Europe and in the United States, the Belarusian opposition movement is held in high esteem. The trans-Atlantic discrepancies on Belarus are too modest for Vladimir Putin to exploit. The revival of U.S.-European relations under the Biden administration suggests that a unified policy on Belarus is not just possible but probable. The key will be a high degree of coordination between Berlin and Washington.

Lesson Number One

Speak softly but carry a big stick: Teddy Roosevelts famous aphorism is evergreen. In Ukraine, the sweeping expectations that have been so often articulated have undermined Western policy. They expose too great a disparity between intention and will, or between hope and capacity. That disparity over time offers a punishing commentary on the actual Western commitment to Ukraine. Since America and the European Union cannot bring democracy to Belarus, they should not promise democracy. One might reference Syria policy here as well. No matter how many times the words Assad must go were voiced, they did not guarantee the departure of Bashar al Assad or the arrival of Syrian democracy. Europe and the United States can confront Lukashenko on specific issues, such as his horrendous hijacking of the flight from Athens to Vilnius. Yet, Western rhetoric should be sober and free from any confusion of the normative with the possible: Democracy in Belarus is, at the very least, a massive undertaking. A Libya-style removal of the tyrant would have to be followed by the sustained commitment of time and resources to the reconstruction of Belarus or, more precisely, to the construction of a Belarusian democracy. For the time being, limited influence on internal Belarusian affairs should be seen for what it is limited influence. Because their influence is limited, American and European deeds should be bolder than their words.

Lesson Number Two

Be honest about the scope of Russian military involvement. Ukraine and Belarus are integral to Russias national security. Russias hard line on Ukraine should have been anticipated in 2013, and, overall, the Russian military calculus is extremely difficult to redirect from the outside. It would take a formidable array of coercive measures to get Russia to change gears and, in Ukraine, to accept a Ukrainian Crimea and Euro-Atlantic integration at the same time, not to mention NATO membership for Ukraine. The application of these measures would risk escalation, and quite possibly war, before Russia would consider backing down. This logic applies, if anything, more directly to Belarus. Belarus is already honeycombed with the Russian military. Lukashenkos fall, provided the Kremlin has not engineered it, would generate a tightening of the military connection between Russia and Belarus. Russia will not tolerate a government in Belarus that appears pro-Western, even if it is sometimes said that the opposition movement in Belarus eschews geopolitics and tries not to position itself as anti-Russian. Perhaps the opposition movement in Belarus can thread the needle and separate domestic politics from geopolitics in search of a Belarusian democracy that does not challenge Russias suzerainty. Most likely it cannot, and the more American and European leaders actively encourage an opposition movement in Belarus, the less likely it is that this movement can prevail. No Western promise of democracy in Belarus can skirt a military dynamic that gives Moscow considerable sway over the political future of Belarus. Nor can the United States and European Union pretend that they are neutral bystanders in the region, a kind of well-intentioned transnational non-governmental organization. The West is very much enmeshed in the geopolitical destiny of Belarus.

Lesson Number Three

Jaw-jaw is better than war-war. The relationship between the West and Russia is too weak to sustain a serious diplomatic conversation about Belarus. There is too little trust, and the respective interests too strenuously clash. Russian leaders and Western leaders also speak two irreconcilably different languages when it comes to international affairs. Their mutual incomprehension is deep. That said, where any consultation on Belarus is possible, it should be pursued. In Ukraine, the diplomatic efforts of Russia, the European Union, and the United States, which were thrown into disarray when Yanukovich ran for his life in February 2014, were too little too late. They were undone as much by rapid-fire circumstances as by anything else. Were this situation to repeat itself over Belarus, the stakes would be higher. Minsk is 115 miles from Vilnius, with Kaliningrad, a province of Russia, tucked behind Poland and Lithuania. Russia, Belarus, and two NATO member states all occupy a small and potentially combustible quadrant of territory. France and Germany were right to push for talks with the Kremlin after the Putin-Biden summit in Geneva, though they did so in a way that backfired. Not talking achieves nothing, even if talking may yield only most modest gains in understanding and cooperation, and, as far as Lukashenkos rule is concerned, the clock is certainly ticking.

Lesson Number Four

The long game. The West has done something remarkable in Belarus. Without even trying, it has made a remarkable display of its soft power. In the face of terrible oppression, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have challenged Lukashenkos tyranny. Their courage and vision derive, in part, from what has been accomplished in the neighboring Baltic states, which were once as Soviet as Belarus was. Freedom of both speech and assembly are European goods that many in Belarus would like to see imported, no less than the rule of law and Western prosperity. It may take decades for this to come to pass, if Belarus ever becomes a democracy. For it to come to pass, the United States and the European Union should invest more in people than in transformative outcomes which it cannot deliver. Policies that make it easier for Belarusians to travel and study in the European Union should be encouraged. Gradual changes in political sensibility, whereby the habits of political liberty are internalized, should be advanced. Tempting as it is to build a wall around Lukashenkos regime, and to consign it to being Europes North Korea, Western policy should really do the opposite. Build a wall around Lukashenko himself. Yet, open Belarus, however one can, to the political currents that have already and unexpectedly been changing it.

Foreign policy thinking rests on history and, often enough, on pithy phrases extracted from the historical record. With China, we worry about falling into the Thucydides trap, retracing the fears and suspicions that drew Athens and Sparta into a terrible war. With Europe, cautionary remembrance circles around 1914 and the continents sleepwalking into war, or around 1939 and the risks of appeasement. With Russia, the analogies are usually derived from the Cold War, stemming from containment or dtente or the annus mirabilis of 1989. With Belarus, the past to be remembered and studied is right before our eyes. Call it the Ukraine trap. No tale of inevitable victory is etched into Western Ukraine policy from 2014 to the present. The worst-case scenarios have been avoided in Ukraine not because Russia has been coerced into backing down but because of the unspoken moderation of Western policy. Limitless rhetoric has been backed up by limited actions, in an instance more of strategic luck than of strategic patience. In Belarus, the worst-case scenarios should be avoided. It is hard to know whether the Wests core interests in Belarus involve the degree of Russian military influence (actual and possible) or the security of neighboring NATO member states. That will have to be worked out over time, and Russias military influence in Belarus is, at any rate, intertwined with NATOs security. Whatever the immediate security dilemmas, and however they evolve, they should not stand in the way of a decades-long project of discrediting authoritarian rule in Eastern Europe and of journeying toward a regional order based not on repression and violence but on the consent of the governed. The ultimate power of the West in Belarus as formidable as it is subtle and gradual happens to be the power of its example.

Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and was most recently the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy, published by Basic Books in April 2020. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the secretarys policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.

Image: President of Belarus

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Belarus and the Ukraine Trap - War on the Rocks