Outright falsehoods

If this newspaper feels bound to feature columns by the Russian ambassador, Andrey Lopukhov, it might at least perform a service to its readers by not placing them under such patently misleading headlines as ‘Relying on indisputable facts’. That is hardly an apt description of a piece that amounts to a litany of distortions, selective quotations and outright falsehoods. Though brief, the article manages to compress an extraordinary density of misrepresentation.

To begin with the big stuff, the ambassador’s characterisation of the culmination of Ukraine’s Maidan protests as a “coup d’état” is anything but “indisputable”. Lopukhov’s government bandies around this concept entirely selectively.

At the time of the Euro-Maidan uprising, I was working as head of the English service at Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, during the brief spring interregnum of the then-sane former president Dmitry Medvedev. We operated with commendably little interference from above, except, on occasion, when terminology touched a nerve.

Once, we carried a story on Egypt and referred in passing to the fact that General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had come to power in a series of events that more closely matched the general understanding of what a coup constitutes; namely, the armed overthrow of an elected leader, the suspension of the constitution and the installation of a military-backed regime. The Russian government happened to be eagerly courting Cairo at the time and, so, within the hour, we received a call from “upstairs” advising us to refrain from describing what happened in July 2013 as a coup.

For a fresher sense of contrast, consider the fact that the Russian government never alludes to Burkina Faso as having undergone a coup in 2022. Accordingly, a Kremlin readout of President Vladimir Putin’s face-to-face meeting in July 2023 with the uniformed leader of the Burkinese military junta, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, refers to him simply as the “interim president”. For anybody interested, we are still in the same interim phase. No elections have yet taken place in Burkina Faso but Moscow, which backs the military dictatorship there, is untroubled by this fact.

What is an indisputable fact is that the Maidan protests were driven by Ukrainians who wanted their country to pursue closer economic and political ties with Europe and, conversely, to loosen its dependence on Russia. And it is for this reason that its success remains so painful to the Kremlin.

Elsewhere, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is quoted by Lopukhov as stating in November 2021 that, “if you want to be Russian, go to Russia”. Leaving to one side that the misrepresented remarks were made in August that year, Zelensky was in fact addressing these remarks narrowly at people who believed eastern regions of Ukraine should be absorbed into Russian territory.

If Zelensky ever referred to Russians as “subhumans”, he should be condemned for that, although I am aware of no such instances. Another figure, former prime minister Arseniy

A fiction that the Kremlin has long sought, Goebbels-like, to transform into reality through endless repetition- Peter Leonard

Yatsenyuk, did reportedly use such language in June 2014, although he was referring specifically to perpetrators of a deadly assault on Ukrainian troops, not the population of east Ukraine in general.

The ambassador, as he has done in previous correspondence, raises once again the claim of alleged discrimination against Russian-speaking people in Ukraine in the post-Maidan period. This is a fiction that the Kremlin has long sought, Goebbels-like, to transform into reality through endless repetition. It is, however, arrant nonsense.

Why not take Zelensky himself as a helpful illustration of the point?

Back in 2014, Zelensky was a popular comedian and television performer whose shows aired widely across Ukraine and were delivered almost entirely in Russian. In fact, Russian remained Zelensky’s preferred language of communication well into his presidency, right up until the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

To depict Zelensky, a Jew, as a “Nazi” or pathological persecutor of Russian speakers is so offensively absurd that it hardly merits elaboration.

Even when playing his trump card, the deadly events in Odessa in May 2014, Lopukhov cannot resist his reflexive impulse to distort. I do not propose to rehearse the details of that day, which are well documented and hardly reflect credit on the Ukrainian authorities. But some context is in order.

At the time of those events, I was working as the Associated Press’s Ukraine correspondent, reporting from the city of Sloviansk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which was then under the control of irregular armed groups, many of them Russian nationals and all heavily supported with weapons and logistics from across the border. These men held the city in a state of terror, committing wanton acts of murder, detaining journalists and threatening civilians.

While no act of violence, anywhere, can be excused, it is important to understand the climate in which passions in southern and eastern Ukraine reached a breaking point. The forces of “self-defence” that Lopukhov romanticises were, in reality, anything but peaceful. For Ukrainians who still believed in the integrity of their country, resistance to such groups, however chaotic or excessive at times, was not an expression of hatred but of survival.

To return to my initial point: the ambassador is entitled to express his government’s views. What he should not be entitled to do is to trade in outright falsehoods. It should not fall to either the newspaper or its readers to have to engage in exhausting after-the-fact corrections such as the one you are reading now. If this paper chooses to provide him with a platform, it should at least make that privilege conditional on the most basic standard of intellectual honesty.

Peter Leonard is a specialist on post-Soviet affairs, an occasional foreign correspondent and the author of Havli, a Substack-based newsletter focusing on current events in Central Asia.