"O lovely maidens fall in love, But not with Moskaly. For Moskaly are foreign folk, They do not treat you right." - Taras Shevchenko, Kateryna (1838)
Russia achieved an important strategic ambition yesterday by striking a deal to keep its Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine until the middle of this century.
President Medvedev said that the fleet would remain at its port in Sevastopol for 25 years after its present lease expires in 2017, following talks with Viktor Yanukovych, his Ukrainian counterpart. The agreement allows a further five-year extension to 2047.
In return, Ukraine will receive a 30 per cent discount on the price of gas imported from Russia. President Yanukovych said that the concession amounted to $40 billion (£26 billion) in Russian aid over the next decade.
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Ukraine at present pays $330 per 1,000 cubic metres under a ten-year contract agreed last year by Yuliya Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, and Vladimir Putin, her Russian counterpart.
With Ukraine’s economy reeling from the global economic crisis, Mr Yanukovych was desperate to secure concessions from Russia. A lower gas price allows his Government to set a budget for 2010 and release the final tranche of a $16.4 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund that was suspended late last year.
Mrs Tymoshenko is certain to seize on the agreements to rally opposition to Mr Yanukovych, who beat her in the presidential contest. She described the lease extension as illegal. Mr Yushchenko, who defeated Mr Yanukovych in the 2004 Orange revolution, is also likely to encourage protests after denouncing his rival as a Kremlin lackey.
A very interesting video from Stratfor about how the Russian sphere of influence can extend Eastern Europe to Poland since losing their leaders last week:
Kaczynski, 60, who was elected president in 2005, forged close relationships with Ukraine and Georgia, and pushed for their inclusion in NATO, arguing passionately that a stronger NATO would keep Russia from reasserting its influence over Eastern Europe.
And he was a major supporter of the American antiballistic missile defence system to be based in Poland, infuriating Russia.
A monument to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin will be put up in the southeast Ukrainian city of Zaporozhie ahead of May 9 Victory Day celebrations, the head of the city’s Communist Party said on Thursday.
“A monument to Joseph Stalin…whose leadership led to the great victory over the Nazi invaders, will be put up in Zaporozhie at the request of World War II veterans,” Oleksandr Zubchevskyi said.
The statue will be guarded day and night to prevent attacks on it, he added.
He also said that a statue to Stalin would soon be erected in the capital, Kiev. He did not give further details.
The news comes after plans to decorate Moscow with billboards explaining Stalin’s role in World War Two ahead of Victory Day celebrations caused controversy in Russia.
However, a source in the organizing committee led by President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that there would be no images of Stalin during the celebrations.
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During Stalin’s reign, millions of people across the U.S.S.R. were executed on false charges of espionage, sabotage and anti-Soviet propaganda or died of starvation, disease or exposure in labor camps.
I rarely quote this or other Russian state-owned news sources for their obvious Russo-centric bias, but this was the first news publication to break the story after receiving the news from Ukrainiana’stweet.
LVIV, Ukraine – About 10,000 protesters formed a human chain in the Ukrainian city of Lviv on Tuesday to demonstrate against a new education minister accused of being pro-Russian.
The mostly student protesters formed a human chain around four kilometres long in central Lviv, a city in western Ukraine considered a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
“Down with Tabachnik!” protesters shouted, referring to Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnik, who was appointed earlier this month by Ukraine’s new President Viktor Yanukovych.
Protesters held signs with slogans such as “We will not dance to music from Moscow” and “Tabachnik is harmful for Ukraine.”
The rally, which temporarily blocked traffic, came after a similar demonstration in Lviv last week that drew 5,000 people.
Tabachnik, a historian with a reputation as a Russophile, has angered nationalists by saying Russian should become an official state language alongside Ukrainian.
Nine million Canadians — that’s almost a third of us according to the 2006 census — came to these shores from communist-ruled countries. Many are now dead or very old. Their descendants deserve to see their sacrifices acknowledged and Canadians exposed to the full panoply of communist atrocities.
Prospects for educating Canadians about the human toll exacted by communism through their stories will brighten when a long-sought Ottawa Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism is completed, a project singled out for endorsement in the recent Throne Speech.
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The exhaustively researched Holocaust is in no danger of being forgotten. The highest term of opprobrium in Western culture, whether from leftists or rightists (rightly or wrongly) is “Nazi,” not “communist.” That’s not because Nazis and communists have been compared and Nazis found to be worse. It’s because people don’t know how bad communism was and is.
In 2006 the Swedish Ministry of Education initiated programs teaching the crimes of communism because a poll had revealed only 10% of Swedish youth could identify the Gulag. Canadian youth would not fare better. All educated Canadians associate the word “Auschwitz” with “genocide.” The equally horrific “Holodomor” is more likely to draw a blank stare.
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Why has communism escaped the moral condemnation Naziism attracts in such exuberant degree? In recent years several scholars have addressed the question and provided a litany of reasons, amongst them:
-Stalin was a war ally and therefore escaped the postwar censure he deserved;
-There was no Nuremburg, no Truth and Reconciliation moment for communism as there was for other genocidal regimes;
-Communist propaganda machines are extremely efficient at positive branding (Trudeau bought in; his fawning patronage of Fidel Castro was beyond contemptible).
But all reasons pale beside the glaring failure of left-wing intellectuals to admit — and to teach — that communism isn’t simply an unfortunate contingency of socialist passion but an ideology as immoral and implacably ruthless and dramatically consequential as Naziism.
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The word “memorial” is somewhat misleading, though, suggesting that communism is a closed historical chapter. The fall of the Berlin Wall notwithstanding, communism in one guise or another still determines the fate of millions of hapless people around the globe. Victims in communist regimes are still starved, imprisoned, tortured and denied the most basic of human rights.
