Ukrainian news round-up while I’ve been away

I’m back from vacation, and boy have I missed a lot of news. While I can’t recap it all, I will try and highlight some of the more notable stories that have been published in July:

Obama: Russia must respect borders of Georgia and Ukraine

From the Telegraph:

Mr Obama struck a conciliatory tone for much of his wide-ranging and televised speech to students at the New Economic School.

But he pointedly mentioned Georgia and Ukraine by name.

"State sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order," said Mr Obama.

"Just as all states should have the right to choose their leaders, states must have the right to borders that are secure, and to their own foreign policies.

"Any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy. That is why this principle must apply to all nations – including Georgia and Ukraine."

Ukrainiana points out this was a much different tune than the more NATO friendly speeches Obama was giving on Ukraine during his election campaign.

Holodomor denial back like it’s in style

From the History News Network, economics professor Cormac Ó Gráda:

People born in countries with relatively recent histories of famine—such as Ireland or Ukraine—sometimes like to see themselves as vicarious victims, but many of the ‘victims’ must also be—and this is the part that is difficult to accept—vicarious child abandoners, thieves, land-grabbers, black marketeers, and worse.

…

Demographers nowadays reckon the Soviet famines of 1931-33 to have cost up to six million lives in total, including one million in Kazakhstan.  Yet a joint statement adopted by sixty-five UN member-states in 2003 refers to "the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor), which took from seven million to ten million innocent lives and became a national tragedy for the Ukrainian people."  It must be said that no serious historian, even in Ukraine, accepts this propagandistic toll, which incidentally exceeds the six million usually associated with the Jewish holocaust.

You can barely find Communist apologetics still denying the Holodomor these days (now they just claim it’s not genocide). Only one (sympathetic) comment was ever published on the website which makes me wonder why the author of ‘Jewish Ireland’ is so quick to denounce any catastrophe other than the ‘Jewish Holocaust’.

Monument to Lenin is damaged in Kyiv

From BBC Ukrainian:

The recent damage caused to Lenin’s monument in Kiev has provoked a debate about the future of the capital’s only public monument to the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Ukrainian Nationalist Congress party is proud to proclaim that it smashed the statue’s nose and left hand.

Kiev police have arrested a number of men suspected of causing the damage.

After 19 years of Ukrainian independence, statues of Lenin are still quite common, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

Continue reading Ukrainian news round-up while I’ve been away

US VP Joe Biden arrives in Ukraine

Photo: Biden in Ukraine, Dipping Bread into Salt

From the Washington Post:

KIEV, July 20 – US Vice-President Joe Biden arrived in Ukraine on Monday to reassure its leaders Washington has not forgotten the ex-Soviet republic following President Barack Obama’s push to improve ties with neighboring Russia.

…

"This is the balancing trip by Biden to Obama’s Moscow visit but the balance is very different to that under the Bush administration," said Christopher Granville of Trusted Sources, an emerging market research firm in London.

"It is the vice-president making the balancing trip and not the president, after all."

…

Biden is expected to signal support for Ukraine but the Obama administration is less strident than Bush in backing Yushchenko’s NATO bid.

At the bottom of the article it lists additional reporting by a Moscow correspondent and you can see that reflected in some of the suspicious wording in the article:

A snap poll by the English-language Kyiv Post found that 66 percent of respondents wanted Biden to tell Ukraine’s leaders: "Get your act together" while only 5 percent suggested "Resist Russia with all your might."

The author uses a newspaper website poll (as opposed to a more credible Angus Reid poll) to downplay the Russian threat.

President Viktor Yushchenko, vaulted to power in the 2004 Orange Revolution, has angered Moscow with an aggressive bid for Ukraine to join NATO and his promotion of Ukrainian nationalism.

There’s been a recent trend by Russian media to erase the Orange Revolution – labeling it ‘so-called’ as to downplay its importance and inferring Yushchenko was somehow placed into leadership by a coup as opposed to the reality that was a re-vote from a rigged election. And nationalism is just media slang for xenophobia.

Anyways, we’ll see what Biden does in Ukraine and on Wednesday he leaves for Georgia.

Update – UNIAN reports on what Biden is doing in Ukraine:

As UNIAN reported earlier, during the visit it is planned that Joe Biden will meet with President of Ukraine Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko.

It is expected that V. Yushchenko and J. Biden will honour a memory of victims of Holodomor (the Great Famine) in Ukraine in 1932-1933.

It is also planned that J. Biden will deliver  a speech before the representatives of business circles of the Ukraine.

It’s easy for those who have never been on the receiving end to downplay or dismiss rampant discrimination against the Ukrainian language. But those who have can tell you that it’s very real and has been going on a long time.

From the vantage point of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, it has been fascinating (if distressing) to watch it happening in Ukraine. Still. Even 18 years after independence, there remains the possibility (if slightly less probability) that the Ukrainian language could well end up like aboriginal languages in Canada have.

As time goes by, it’s getting harder to justify opposition to Ukrainian being the official language of Ukraine. Nonetheless, as this article illustrates, some people still insist on trying their best to turn back the clock and hinder progress.

The Odessa court of appeals has upheld the decision of the Nikolayev City Council [which] on May 26 adopted a resolution granting Russian the status of a regional language…

Similar litigations are underway in Odessa, Donbass and the Crimea.

The councils of different levels in the south and east of Ukraine have been providing funding in order to protect and support the Russian language spoken by a large portion of the population.

As a presidential election slated for January 17, 2010 nears, the preservation of the Russian language and its status as a second official language become increasingly relevant for leading centrist and left-wing parties and organisations in Ukraine.

Now it just so happens that the city of Nikolayev, whose proper Ukrainian name is Mykolaiv, is a major ship-building centre of Ukraine … as it was during the former Soviet Union and tsarist Russian empires. Not that a minor detail like that would have anything at all to do with the chauvinistic attitudes of Ukrainian citizens in that part of Ukraine towards the Ukrainian language. I’m just sayin’.

Fortunately, as another article  shows, some people are a lot more sensible, enlightened, and progressive.

Yevgeny Kisiliev, the television anchor who was the face of the Yeltsin revolution … [and] who had been Russia’s most influential TV journalist, [is] commuting to his new job as an anchor in Ukraine. … He speaks Russian and his guests speak whichever language they prefer. When they opt for Ukrainian, he understands “90 to 95 per cent”; “I practise Ukrainian every day,” he said.

Would that the good people of Mikolaiv, Odessa, and elsewhere in Crimea, as well as the Donbass, etc. would follow his example. Perhaps they’ll watch his program and eventually start to understand and practice Ukrainian as well.

 To my mind, those who actually do view and treat the Ukrainian language with the respect it deserves are cut from the same cloth as English-speaking Canadians who enroll their kids in French language immersion classes (and vice-versa).

Such smart and visionary folk instinctively know what scientists recently revealed in a study. There is clear evidence that knowing how to communicate in more than one language is good for you… and your brain!