“The unquiet Ukrainian.”
July 12, 2022
Nazis are people, too. The unspeakable Melnyk. (Bundestagsfraktion Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, cc by 2.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)12 JULY—Interesting. Few readers are likely to give any more of a damn about Andriy Melnyk that I do, but let us take note together: The Kiev regime’s ambassador to Berlin has just been dismissed. This was reported a few days ago in Bild, the German tabloid. I read of the Bild report on RT.
I have taken note of Melnyk on several occasions since the Russian Federation launched its intervention into Ukraine on 24 February. The man is a body part The Scrum, being a publication for the whole family, will not name. He makes Liz Truss, who has to be the stupidest foreign secretary in modern British history, come over like Clemenceau.
Melnyk has been kicking around the foreign ministry in Kiev for most of this century. He was first appointed ambassador to the Federal Republic in December 2014 by Petro Poroshenko, who assumed the presidency after the U.S.–cultivated coup the previous February. The chronology is not quite clear, but he appears to have been reappointed to the same post two years later. And there he has ever since served, a man who has met, at least to date, the approval of the Zelensky regime and, to one or another extent, the regime in Washington that controls the Zelensky regime.
Melnyk’s first crack out of the box, in April 2015, remains among the most interesting of his many crude moves. Four months into his tour in Germany, he took time out to visit the grave of Stepan Bandera, the fanatically anti–Semitic Russophobe who collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of most of a million Ukrainian Jews. He tweeted on this occasion:
This was not a one-time mention of Bandera, an indelicate and regrettable reference on the part of a new ambassador, as will shortly be clear.
There were a series of infelicitous utterances in the ensuing years, but the fun got seriously under way after the Russian military intervened in Ukraine last February. Melnyk has hounded the Germans over the scale and pace of their military aid to the corrupt regime he represents—utterly insensitive to the profound questions raised by whatever role Germany might play in the U.S.–led provocation of the Russian operation and the arming of the regime.
Three months into the war, Melnyk famously posted an image of a snail with a bullet taped to its shell, His caption read: “German help is already on its way to us.”
Later in the same month he publicly attacked Chancellor Scholz, calling him “an offended liverwurst” in response to Scholz’s refusal to visit Kiev. Scholz, to be noted, didn’t go to Kiev because the Ukrainians had recently declined to receive German President Frank–Walter Steinmeier. Steinmeier, previously Germany’s FM and a man for whom I have some admiration, sinned by asserting that diplomatic channels to Moscow ought to remain open in the interest of the negotiated settlement everyone in the world other than the Zelensky regime knows will have to come.
A month later—this clod simply does not stop—Melnyk dressed down a group of German public intellectuals who argued against German arms deliveries to Ukraine (see above) and, in the Steinmeier camp, called for a negotiated settlement. “What a bunch of pseudo-intellectual loosers [sic],” Melnyk tweeted this time. “They should go to hell with their defeatist advice.”
Reminder: The man I quote is an ambassador-rank diplomat from a nation that purports to be European.
Most recently came the caker. In an interview with a German journalist earlier this month Melnyk was asked about Bandera again, and the fanatic’s role in the Nazis’ extermination of 800,000 Jews in Ukraine and 40–odd thousand more Poles residing there. “There are no laws for those who fight for freedom,” Melnyk replied coolly.
Swiping at the egregious Melnyk is like shooting at the side of a barn. But my point lies elsewhere. What are we to make of this man’s performance as a Ukrainian diplomat?
A few things of use, I think.
For one thing, there is the tip-of-the-iceberg thesis. In my view Melnyk can be read as a good measure of the extent to which Nazi–inflected ideology, complete with apologias for mass murders of Jews, is prevalent in what passes for the upper ranks of the Kiev regime. We can confidently surmise that this bunch is indeed as dangerous to humanity as the Russians asserted as they began their intervention to de–Nazify Ukraine. But precisely.
For another, there is the question of Melnyk’s assigned role and what this tells us about what is going on in the land of propaganda and narrative management.
We are subject daily to the harangues of President Zelensky and those around him: Small thanks for the guns, but they are not enough and not enough and not enough, you cheap cowards, you gutless stuffed shirts disloyal to us, we a European people on the front lines of civilization.
We have all heard it: More weapons, more powerful weapons, and more money—the latter on the order of $5 billion a month.
I have read this from the beginning as rehearsed rhetoric aimed not at Joe Biden or Olaf Scholz or Emmanuel Macron but at us, we ordinary citizens of the Western post-democracies. The leadership listens to this stuff and takes no offense because it understands: It is meant to keep the NATO nations’ voting publics eager to help a nation that simply needs more and more and more help.
This posture is scripted, almost certainly, in Washington. It is acknowledged that the Biden White House talks to Zelensky daily by telephone. It is difficult to accept any notion that what Zelensky says on any given next day is other than what he is told to say. These shrill pronouncements remove the potential for public controversy as Western governments spend excessive amounts of taxpayers’ money on an irresponsible regime that is of passing geopolitical use.
Melnyk has been part of this operation in a more extreme register than his colleagues, although not by much in some cases. We would all do well to understand that he is shouting, in the end, at us in an effort to manipulate our thoughts and emotions.
“The information age is actually a media age,” John Pilger, the noted Australian–British journalist, said in a speech delivered in Berkeley a few months after the 2014 coup. “We have war by media, censorship by media, demonology by media, retribution by media — a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.”
This is the war Melnyk wages—more crudely than his colleagues, but it is the war they wage, too.
The next little while will be interesting yet again for those following the fortunes of Andriy Melnyk. Has he been fired for his excesses? Or is he, as some press reports have it, about to be promoted to deputy foreign minister?
Where are the clowns? No need to ask. They’re already here.