A summit designed to put in place an economic union similar to the EU failed to reach its goals yesterday (19 March), following the objection by Belarus to putting in place a community mechanism, capable of imposing its decisions to member states. The establishment of a 'Eurasian Union', largely modeled on the EU, was postponed to 2015, after the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko insisted that member countries should have the right to veto the decision of the future body. The summit was hosted in Moscow by the outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev. Putin, who won the presidential elections on 4 April amid accusations...

“I am again and repeatedly an innocent victim of the Germans ... I find it an unbearable arrogance of Germany, that Germany is misusing me to turn the attention away from the war crimes committed by Germans, to make them forgotten and against the truth to claim that the true criminals of the Nazi crimes were me, the Ukrainians and the European neighbours of Nazi Germany.” --John Demjanjuk during his trial in Munich, Germany during which he was convicted of being an accessory to the Nazi murders of 27,900 Jews while serving as a guard...

The forty-sixth Shevchenko lecture was held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton on 9 March 2012. The co-organizers of this prestigious event, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Ukrainian Professional and Business Club of Edmonton, were privileged to host a distinguished guest speaker from the United Kingdom, James Sherr, whose subject was “Ukraine and the Russian Question.” A senior fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House (London), he came to Edmonton from Ottawa, where he took part in an international conference on “Ukraine at the Crossroads” on 7–8 March. In his presentation...

Ukrainians like to blame their country’s ills on “Moscow and the Muscovites,” but the UK’s highly respected Royal Institute of International Affairs (a.k.a. Chatham House) has just provided good grounds for thinking that their paranoia may be justified. Take a look at the January 2012 briefing paper, “A Ghost in the Mirror: Russian Soft Power in Ukraine,” by two Kyiv-based analysts—Alexander Bogomolov and Oleksandr Lytvynenko. Bogomolov is president of the Association of Middle East Studies, while Lytvynenko is director of research projects at the Foreign and Security Policy Council. Neither is a “nationalist hothead.” Both are sober establishment men. Here are the...

The newspaper headline reads, “Nazi dies, avoiding jail time”. By any measure John Demjanjuk was not a Nazi. By his worst accusers he was a Prisoner of War forced to work in a Nazi concentration camp. The article concludes, “Demjanjuk was the first man in Germany to be convicted for serving as a guard at a death camp – but without evidence of being involved in any specific murders.” How consistent! Over thirty-six years – there was never any evidence. Following his German conviction and sentence, the German government placed him in a nursing home. The court lifted the warrant of arrest stating that...

The State Penitentiary Service of Ukraine has rejected a request by Canadian MP Bob Dechert for a meeting with former Ukrainian Premier Yulia Tymoshenko in the Kachanivska Penal Colony. On March 15 the service received a request from the Embassy of Canada in Ukraine for assistance in organizing a meeting of the parliamentarian with the former premier in the colony, the penitentiary service reported on Friday. "The request was considered under the national legislation, and the Embassy of Canada in Ukraine was informed with a reference to Articles 24, 110, 138 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine that there is no reason to visit the establishment [Kachanivska colony] and meet with Yulia Tymoshenko," reads the statement...

The first week of March 2012 will go down as a watershed in the annals of Ukrainian Canadian community unity and advocacy on behalf of Ukraine. From March 5 to March 10, 2012 a virtual non-stop succession of events in the nation’s capital dominated the attention of relevant Canadian government and diplomatic corps officials, policy analysts and formulators, academics and journalists, NGOs and community leaders. The week-long events began with Parliamentary Hearings on Ukraine at the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development held in the House of Commons on Monday, March 5, 2012 that were followed by a second day of hearings on Wednesday, March 7. That same day, a prestigious banquet was held at the Chateau Laurier Hotel signaling the convening of the international conference, “Ukraine at the Crossroads,” the proceedings...

John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. autoworker who was convicted of being a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp despite steadfastly maintaining over three decades of legal battles that he had been mistaken for someone else, died Saturday, his son told The Associated Press. He was 91. Demjanjuk, convicted in May of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to five years in prison, died a free man in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach. He had been released pending his appeal. John Demjanjuk Jr. said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father died of natural causes. Demjanjuk had terminal bone marrow disease...

On Monday, March 5, the TYCM Executive Committee met with the Rutgers Ukrainian Club on the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The purpose of the event was to formally introduce the Ukrainian Student Association of Mykola Mikhnovskiy to the student community of Rutgers University. Among the topics discussed included a brief history of TYCM, a summary of planned political activism and an open invitation to TYCM's upcoming strategic planning session. A lively discussion later ensued, mainly about local Ukrainian-American activism that could directly aid the community in Ukraine. After the meeting concluded...

Several dozen well-wishers and VIPs gathered in the private dining room of Kingston's River Mill Restaurant on Friday, 9 March, to honour Danylo Luciuk, presented with the " Mykola Mikhnovsky Medal of Merit " for his more than half century of service in the cause of Ukraine's independence and ongoing commitment to the good of the Ukrainian community in Canada. Born in Volosiv, western Ukraine, in 1912, Danylo Luciuk was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUNb) and a political refugee who emigrated to Canada from a Displaced Persons camp near Munich, in 1949. In Kingston...