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