Unicef Courts Russia 

Russia, nearly six months into its war in Ukraine, is being offered a route to rehabilitating its reputation by an unlikely source — the United Nations Children’s Fund, which is looking to entice Russia to fund a series of children’s health initiatives across Europe and Central Asia.

A draft proposal from Unicef that I obtained, which describes an “unfolding strategic partnership,” turns out to be based in part on an agreement Unicef signed with Russia in 2019. The goal, it says, is for Russia to provide “sustainable support” to Unicef programs. 

Savor the irony: A United Nations agency devoted to protecting children is — according to the draft strategy that covers development goals between 2022 and 2025 — now trying to make a “sustainable growth partner” out of a nation engaged in the dispossession, repatriation, and killing of Ukrainian children.

If the United Nations Children’s Fund goes through with the partnership, it would undermine its current fundraising appeal, which says Ukrainian children are the least responsible for the war but “suffer most from its consequences.” It’s hard to recall a situation quite like this.

A spokesman with Unicef, Kurtis Cooper, told me over the weekend that the document was “an early technical draft, which has not been reviewed or approved by Unicef’s senior management.” He added, “It is not a statement of Unicef’s resource strategy for the region.”

A Unicef source, though, said the draft was approved by Unicef’s European division and represented the thinking of that bureau in respect of a future Russian partnership. The source refused to go on the record. 

That brings me to Mary Kissel, who is willing to go on the record. Ms. Kissel, who served as a senior adviser to a former secretary of state, Michael Pompeo, tells me that the state department under Mr. Pompeo attempted to reform international organizations to serve the interests of member states that created them. That would be a strategic departure for the department.

“It’s unclear to me how rewarding Russia for starting a war that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and killed tens of thousands more, serves Unicef’s mission,” she says. 

After President Putin invaded Ukraine, the General Assembly suspended Russia from the Human Rights Council. The Kremlin’s representatives in the Council of Europe were sent packing. Russian athletes were banned from competition. Even the UN World Tourism Organization kicked Ivan out. 

So a Russian partnership with Unicef would launder Russia’s reputation when most of the western world is seeking to shun its regime. 

The Haman Accords 

One consequence of the West’s censure and sanction of Russia has been a strengthening of Russia’s relationships with other global pariahs. Feature a deal inked last week between Moscow and Tehran for Iran to supply Russia with aircraft components and military drones.

Russian-Iranian military cooperation is not particularly new. An Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, traveled to Moscow in 2015 after the negotiations on the Obama administration’s nuclear deal to formalize a military alliance in Syria. In January, Iran, Russia, and China held joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean. 

The new Iran-Russia deal also suggests Mr. Putin’s regime is getting desperate. Usually it’s a great power like Russia that provides a rogue state like Iran with technology. One result of the latest sanctions, though, has been that the Western aircraft industry has been closed to Russia.

So it now must rely on a country that has spent most of the last 40 years under various sanctions restricting what aircraft components it is allowed to purchase from the West. Iran’s isolation, it turns out, has failed to deter its military development. In recent years Iran has manufactured cheap, lethal drones.

Iran’s proxies have used such drones to great effect in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Rich Goldberg tells me, “Clearly in the drone aspect, the Iranian perfection of making lethal platforms on the cheap works to the advantage of its revisionist power allies like Russia.” 

Russia’s deepening relationship with Iran can be seen as an analog to the Abraham Accords, the series of agreements brokered by America under President Trump to normalize ties between Israel and its Arab neighbors. That diplomacy was driven by mutual interest of the parties to oppose Iran’s aggression in the region.

The alliance between Russia and Iran that threatens Jews and Arabs in the Middle East deserves its own name. Call it the Haman Accords, for the Amalekite adviser to Xerxes I who tried and failed to kill all of the Jews in the ancient Persian empire. The Jewish people remember Haman every year during the holiday of Purim. 

Bury Me at Mount Russiagate 

A New York magazine columnist, Jonathan Chait, did not like my latest piece for the Spectator World on Special Counsel John Durham and his investigation into Russiagate. In his newsletter, he writes that a former special counsel, Robert Mueller, did indeed find evidence of a conspiracy between Mr. Trump and the Kremlin.

To say otherwise, as I did in my Spectator piece, is, Mr. Chait asserts, “patently false.” Writes Mr. Chait: “Mueller found plenty of evidence of conspiracy.”

Mr. Chait focuses on what Mr. Mueller found out about Paul Manafort, who served for three months as the Trump campaign chairman in 2016. Manafort ordered a deputy to send polling data during the campaign to a Russian national named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI believed had ties to Russian intelligence.

A subsequent report from the Senate Intelligence Committee described Mr. Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer. All of that said, it’s also true that Mr. Kilimnik for many years served as Manafort’s deputy in his lobbying business and that Mr. Kilimnik himself was in regular contact with U.S. diplomats at Kiev. He was granted a visa to travel to America in 2016. 

Mr. Chait concedes, “Mueller did not obtain proof of conspiracy sufficient to charge it in court.” Yet he says this is because Manafort and Trump associate Roger Stone refused to cooperate fully with Mr. Mueller’s investigation. Really? 

Now, I understand why Mr. Chait would cling to the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to aid its interference in the 2016 election. He spilled a lot of ink bolstering that claim, including a 2018 magazine feature on how Mr. Trump may have been a Russian asset since the late 1980s.

Mr. Chait and the other bitter clingers to Russiagate, though, really need to move on. To start, the actual Mueller report says, “The evidence uncovered in the investigation did not establish that the President or those close to him were involved in the charged Russian computer-hacking or active-measure conspiracies, or that the President otherwise had an unlawful relationship with any Russian official.” 

As for Mr. Chait’s claim that Mr. Mueller’s investigation established a conspiracy, one is tempted to ask whether it’s really a conspiracy if it could not be proved in a court of law. 

The Mueller report says it doesn’t know what Mr. Kilimnik did with the polling data Manafort sent him, which he received on August 2, 2016. The Russian hacking and influence operation was already well under way at that point. Manafort himself has said he provided the polling data to Mr. Kilimnik in the hopes of getting another Russian oligarch to forgive his debt, to prove he was an insider in the Trump world. 

On this point, the Mueller report says, “The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2 meeting. The investigation did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-interference efforts.”

Mr. Chait says that Mr. Mueller was hindered by Manafort’s deceptions and his use of encrypted communications. That excuse might make sense if the Trump campaign was being probed by a local sheriff. 

Mr. Mueller, though, had the support of the FBI and several cooperating witnesses, including Manafort’s deputy when he ran Mr. Trump’s campaign. If Mr. Mueller couldn’t find evidence of collusion after nearly three years of looking, why can’t Mr. Chait take his word for it?