The end of Jens Stoltenberg’s term as NATO Secretary General may still be delayed – it has been extended until September 2023.
However, the discussion about his succession has been “ignited” for good, in view of the final decisions that are expected to be announced – unless of course – at the summit of the Alliance in Vilnius, in July 2023.
Although the post of NATO Secretary General is often described as more of a facilitator than a decision-maker, the choice of the next NATO chief comes at a critical juncture, amid a new Cold War landscape, growing international challenges and with Europe to live under the heavy “shadow” of the war in Ukraine, which shows in its ninth month that it is taking on increasingly dangerous dimensions for global security.
By the time the next Secretary General is appointed, meanwhile, NATO membership is expected to have increased to 32, with the completion of the membership of Sweden and Finland.
Against this backdrop, the choice of Stoldenberg’s successor (who in turn heads to Norway’s Central Bank) is seen as crucial.
Names come and go. Until now, those who held the office were all men, from European countries. The EU, 21 of whose 27 member states are currently members of NATO, is considering a list of candidates, mostly women.
The US has traditionally stayed out of the proposals formally, as it commands NATO forces in Europe. However, US is said to be favoring one option: that of 54-year-old Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s current finance minister and deputy prime minister.
Origin from Ukraine…..but with ties to Nazism
Minister of Foreign Affairs in her country in the period 2017-2019, former journalist and wife of a New York Times journalist, Chrystia Freeland’s name as a “chosen one” of the USA was mentioned a few days ago by the NYT itself, highlighting – among other things – multilingualism her and that she has Ukrainian “roots”.
She had written about them in 2015 in an essay for the Brookings Institution, under the title: “My Ukraine” and subtitled: “A personal reflection on a nation’s dream of independence and the nightmare that Vladimir Putin has in store for it.”
It said her maternal grandparents “left western Ukraine after the signing of the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. They never dared to return.”
“My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany before the family immigrated to western Canada” after World War II, he recounted. “They managed to get a visa thanks to my grandfather’s older sister, who had immigrated there” between the two World Wars.
“For the rest of their lives they considered themselves political exiles, with a duty to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine (..) This dream was passed on to the next generation and in some cases to the next,” he pointed out.
What Freeland did not mention is that her grandfather, Mihailo Chomiak – later known as Michael Chomiak – was a close collaborator of Nazi Germany, serving for five years as the editorial director of Krakiws’ki Visti, until its closure.
It was a Ukrainian-language daily newspaper originally printed in Kraków, Nazi-occupied Poland, and later in Vienna.
It was an instrument of Third Reich propaganda, strongly anti-Semitic and full of praise for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated closely with the Nazis and was involved in the murders of thousands of Jews and Poles in the name of establishing a “nationally pure independent Ukraine” .
After Chomiak’s death in 1984, his son-in-law, Freeland’s uncle and University of Alberta history professor John-Paul Himka, used his father-in-law’s archives—including back issues of Krakiws’ki Visti—as the basis for several scholarly publications that focused on news coverage of mass killings of Ukrainian civilians during the USSR. They also considered the use of these massacres as propaganda against the Jews.
In 2017, when Russian-linked websites published more evidence of Chomiak’s ties to Nazi Germany, Freeland spoke of a disinformation campaign aimed at damaging her appointment as Canadian foreign minister and undermining Canadian democracy.
Her office later denied that her grandfather was a Third Reich collaborator. However, a publication by the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail – of which Freeland was an executive in the past – stated that Kristia had known of her ancestor’s Nazi ties since at least 1996.
In that decade meanwhile, as she reports in her Brookings article, “my late mother returned to her parents’ homeland when Ukraine and Russia became independent states.”
“Using her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she became the managing director of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO, which she herself helped to found” and eventually even participated in the drafting of the Ukrainian constitution…
Her entry ban to Russia
In March 2014, in the wake of the pro-Western Maidan uprising that toppled pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and while Russia’s annexation of Crimea was underway, Freeland traveled to Kyiv as a member of the then-opposition Liberals of Canada.
He met officials and members of parties, as well as the then government of Ukraine. In retaliation, Moscow included her on a list of 13 Canadians banned from entering Russia. She called it her honor at the time. It wasn’t the first time.
In the late 1980s, during perestroika and while Freeland was studying Russian history and literature at Harvard University, she participated in a student exchange program with Kyiv University. There he studied Ukrainian, although he was already fluent in the language.
While in Ukraine she had worked with a NYT reporter investigating unmarked mass graves that the official Soviet position said were the result of Nazi atrocities, but she herself was gathering evidence that they were a Stalinist crackdown on dissidents.
Freeland then attracted the attention of the KGB and Soviet newspapers, who accused her of meddling in the internal affairs of the USSR. Despite being under surveillance, he sent material abroad in a diplomatic pouch through a Canadian diplomat.
He worked with foreign journalists on investigations into life in the Soviet Union. He organized marches and rallies abroad against Moscow.
In 1989 she was banned from entering the USSR. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she began working as a journalist in Ukraine, working with international media. For a time he was head of the Financial Times bureau in the Russian capital.
Years later, in 2013, she left journalism to work in politics, as an executive of the Liberals in Canada – the party of the later and current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau – always proud of her roots.
“Hawk” of the war
Characterized in the meantime by many as a “hawk” of the war, the Canadian politician had stood since 2017 – when she was Minister of Foreign Affairs – in favor of the decision to increase more than 70% of Canada’s military spending within a decade. She had also since called for a defense overhaul, naming China a “challenge” and Russia a “threat.”
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, at the end of last February, she was the first – now as Canada’s finance minister – to call for sanctions on the Central Bank of Russia.
If she is ultimately qualified and chosen to succeed Jens Stoltenberg, she will be the first woman and the first Canadian to hold the post of NATO Secretary General.
Her country already ranks among the top five contributors to the ranks of the Alliance in military, humanitarian and economic aid to war-torn Ukraine, in sheer numbers. It also participates in NATO’s military buildup in Europe.
Her vision for the world
After the war in Ukraine, and very much in line with the view of the Canadian high-ranking government official, “it will be a very different world from the one we knew before the pandemic hit us, Europe plunged into an energy crisis and the rest of the world starts choosing camps”, reports the publication.
“She wants Canada and its allies to move toward a NATO-style economic arrangement,” she explains, “where they deal with like-minded trading partners, reject countries run by rogue dictators, co-opt middlemen, and rush to defense.” any friend of ours is under attack.”
“Trading with less bellicose dictators could be okay though, as long as we protect our own supply chains from vulnerabilities. We also need to commit to climate change,” the Canadian newspaper describes Friedman’s positions as she developed them last month in a speech at an American think tank in Washington.
It is a vision that she has also raised during the pandemic, finding supporters at the highest levels of the US and the EU.
