Norwegian Christian politicians criticised for sympathy with Putin

“I am annoyed by what is happening in Ukraine right now.” With these words starts KrF politician Daniel Myhren Hovind a Facebook post. In the post, he criticises NATO’s expansion towards the East.

According to the second deputy leader of Trøndelag KrF, Russia feels threatened by these movements of NATO. “Ukraine is particularly suited to attack Russia from and control the Black Sea”, Hovind says. He then states that, from the Western point of view, “sacrificing Ukraine to portray Russia as aggressive is very beneficial in a propaganda context.”

Hovind ends his post by saying that the West has “deserved Russia’s distrust”. “We must not get carried away with the war agitators (…). Ukraine’s arms distribution has little military utility and is yet another strategy to create a bloodbath to gain sympathy.”

Hovind receives support and criticism for his post. Among others, the KrF county leader of Troms and Finnmark, Truls Olufsen-Mehus, praises Hovind for having made a “thorough analysis” and familiarised himself well with “the sides and history of this case”.

However, other people disagree with Hovind. KrF county leader in Trøndelag, Geirmund Lykke, comments on the Facebook post that he thinks it is “striking and disturbing” that Hovind assesses the war based on Putin’s narrative. He says that Hovind needs to “clarify your views on Ukraine’s right to make its own choices.”

Distance

KrF party leader Bollestad is not happy with the remarks. She says so in the Christian Norwegian daily Dagen.” First and foremost, I want to distance myself from the statements. This is not KrF policy. I think it’s sad to see where Hovind has landed in these questions.”

Although multiple KrF members had expressed their understanding of Putin, Bollestad does not think it is a widely shared opinion. “I am completely convinced that most KrF members condemn Putin’s war”, says the KrF party leader to Vart Land.

Nazi

Hovind went even further in an earlier post on Twitter. There, he compared Ukraine with Nazi Germany, saying that Ukraine’s recruiting of foreign forces reminded him of “Germany’s Volkssturm solution for Rhodesia.”

Rhodesia is the former name of Zimbabwe, from the time when a white minority ruled the country. The Volkssturm was a German militia established towards the end of World War II. The force was outside the regular defence force and was under the command of the SS commander Heinrich Himmler.

When asked whether it is relevant to open an exclusion case, party leader Bollestad points out that Hovind has been elected at the county level. “I have great confidence that the county team in Trøndelag will be able to handle this. The county leader in Trøndelag has been clear about KrF’s policy.”

Escalation

Earlier, the (much smaller and more conservative) Norwegian Christian Party (PDK) was criticised for previous statements about Russia’s relations with Ukraine. In an editorial in Dagen, Vebjørn Selbekk accuses Erik Selle, the PDK leader, of placing responsibility for the war in the West. However, the deputy leader of the PDK, Tomas Moltu, says on behalf of his party that he has “not perceived that Selle has blamed the West”. “We have warned against the escalation of tensions with Russia over time. We experience that no one benefits from building an enemy image of each other.”

However, the debate is not yet over. In a Dagen op-ed, Johny Oddleif Røst, former PDK member, thanks Selle and Moltu for distancing themselves from Putin and Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Røst, however, thinks that the PDK leadership should publicly demand that Putin and Russia immediately return military control over the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas to Ukraine.