Tag Archives: Ukraine

From Fall of the Wall to Quid Pro Quo

Thirty years ago, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Country after country of the former Soviet Union took fledgling steps toward democracy.

Writes Louis D. Sell, a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Yugoslavia at the time: “No one who has ever had the opportunity to witness people standing with patient enthusiasm in long lines to vote for the first time in their lives . . . could ever doubt the power of democracy as an ideal.” (“1989: Seen From Yugoslavia,” The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019)

But we in Western democracies couldn’t comprehend the difficulty of people who had no tradition of democracy attempting to make it work.

Western democracies have centuries old traditions of struggle for people power, from at least 1215, when the Magna Carta limited the power of English king. A free press was a unique Western invention.

Many of the former Soviet nations lacked these traditional defenses against tyranny and against powerful oligarchies seizing wealth and power from collapsing regimes. Democratic practices in some of the countries began to reverse, governments coming under the sway of corrupted newly rich.

The United States and its allies began diplomatic policies to support the fight against corruption in these countries.

Imagine what the secret efforts of a U.S. president to bribe officials in one of those countries, Ukraine, for political gain have done to compromise these policies.

Big Brother Has You in His Sights

Reading the Mueller Report side-by-side with a U.S. diplomat’s recent memoir, The Back Channel, makes frightening reading.

William Burns, author of The Back Channel, spent most of his adult life, from 1982 until his retirement in 2014, serving the United States as a diplomat. He held several top jobs, including ambassador to Russia from 2005 until 2008.

In his book, Burns goes out of his way to compliment almost all the people he has worked with in a long diplomatic life, both American and foreign. One exception is Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Putin, according to Burns, harbors something close to paranoia about the United States. Among other views, Putin doesn’t see the movement in Ukraine to topple a Russia-friendly autocrat as a people’s movement, but an effort by the United States to keep Russia down.

Burns writes: “Putin gradually shifted from testing the West in places where Russia had a greater stake . . . like Ukraine . . . to places where the West had a far greater stake, like the integrity of its democracies.”

Then read even the outlines of the Mueller Report, beginning with the section titled “Russian ‘Active Measures’ Social Media Campaign.” (The term “IRA” is the Internet Research Agency, a Russian agency used to spread disinformation on the internet.)

“The IRA Targets U.S. Elections. The IRA Ramps Up U.S. Operations As Early As 2014. U.S. Operations Through IRA-Controlled Social Media Accounts. U.S. Operations Through Facebook. U.S. Operations Through Twitter.” And so on.

The unquestionable conclusion of the Mueller Report is that the Russian government actively interfered in U.S. elections in an attempt to manipulate voters its way.

And next time?

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”