Ukraine has stepped up efforts to dismantle the country's main opposition party after initialing a political and trade agreement with the EU. Diplomats from both sides at a ceremony in Brussels on 30 March formally sealed the content of the 1,000-page-long treaty after more than four years of negotiations. The Ukrainian foreign ministry at the time said it expects EU leaders to sign the text in six to 12 months' time. Its head of EU integration, Yevhen Perelyhin, said on national TV on Monday (9 April), Ukraine should start getting ready for the "versatile opportunities" offered by the trade part of the deal. For its part...

On June 30, 1941 as the Soviets were fleeing and the Nazis invading the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists convened an assembly at the Lviv “Prosvita” building and there proclaimed the renewal of Ukrainian statehood. The proclamation was read by the head of the temporary government Jaroslaw Stetsko. The Germans insisted that Stetsko rescind the proclamation. When he refused he was arrested, incarcerated, sent first to Berlin, then to the Saksenhausen concentration camp where he spent most of the war years like his leader and colleague, Stepan Bandera. After the war, Jaroslaw Stetsko headed the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an international structure composed of leaders of the many nations that had fallen captive to the USSR. From 1968 for almost twenty years Stetsko headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera faction). Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was that...

Go see Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, both because it’s an excellent film about the Holocaust in wartime Lviv and because it demonstrates just how deeply rooted some ethnic stereotypes can be. The story is simple: an anti-Semitic Polish sewer worker and part-time crook, Poldek Socha, finds himself in the unexpected position of hiding a group of Jews in Lviv’s sewers. At first, he does so only for money. In time, he abandons his anti-Semitism and acts with altruism. The film ends with the liberation of Lviv by the Soviets and the emergence of the surviving Jews from the sewers. “These are my Jews!” Socha beams. “These are my Jews!” In an interview, Holland emphasized what she thought was one...

Ukraine plans to sell bonds denominated in Russian rubles and doesn’t need to restart a $15.6 billion International Monetary Fund loan to make debt payments, said an adviser to President Viktor Yanukovych. The former Soviet state wants to raise 98 billion hryvnia ($12 billion) this year, two thirds of which will probably be bought domestically, Iryna Akimova, the first deputy chief of Yanukovych’s staff, said in an interview yesterday. The Finance Ministry has regularly sold bonds denominated dollars and euros in the domestic market after delaying a $1.5 billion Eurobond offering planned for March...

The scandal around the court case that involves Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill is gaining momentum. Illegal seizures used to be the preserve of businesspeople, but it turns out that the highest-ranking clergy can be also inclined to seize someone else’s property by legal action. The very nature of the lawsuit against those living next door to the apartment of Kirill (born Vladimir Gundyayev) does not arouse much interest. It is common knowledge that the Russian and Ukrainian judicial systems serve either the rich or the powers that be, both of which often being the same thing. I would like to dwell here on the moral and ethical sides of the matter, for it is a mirror image of the crisis in Russian Orthodoxy...

Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) President Eugene Czolij met in Brussels, Belgium, on March 28-29, 2012, with high-ranking European Union (EU) officials of the European Parliament. He had the opportunity to discuss continued support for Ukraine’s democratization and Euro-integration, as well as to highlight the strategic significance of Ukraine for collective European interests, including regional peace, stability and prosperity. Eugene Czolij met with former European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, European Parliament Vice-President Jacek Protasiewicz, Chair of the European Parliament Delegation to the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee Pawel Kowal, Members of the European Parliament Tunne Kelam and Jan Kozlowski, European Commission Member of Cabinet of Commissioner...

On March 29-31, 2012, Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) President Eugene Czolij travelled to Dublin, where he had an opportunity to present to Ireland’s high-ranking officials current issues of relevance to the international Ukrainian community and familiarize himself with the organizational and religious lives of local Ukrainians. His visit to Dublin included official meetings with Minister for European Affairs Lucinda Creighton and Department of Foreign Affairs Political Director David Donoghue. During the meetings, Eugene Czolij highlighted the deterioration of democracy in Ukraine and the violations of human rights, including the persecution of political opponents. With Ukraine preparing to chair the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2013, the UWC President appealed to Ireland, as the current...

Why should a 96-year-old Israeli Jewish woman from Kiryat Haim, a Holocaust survivor, want to be buried in the Christian cemetery in Haifa? She wanted to give meaning even to her death. She was born and grew up in Lviv - formerly Poland, later Ukraine. She studied music at the conservatory, and German philology at the university. He studied with her and my mother-in-law, Fania Werbin nee Taube, was her classmate in high school. Fania immigrated to Israel before the war, her girlfriend remained and was trapped. Her family was murdered and only she, Antonia Gruber, survived...

The North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is holding talks with Kiev over Ukraine’s possible participation in the alliance's planned missile defense system n Europe. According to the head of the NATO Liaison Office in Ukraine, Marchin Koziel, the deployment of the system's elements is a priority for the alliance. He says during the summit in Lisbon, NATO heads agreed on the possibility of involving non-member countries – or “third countries”- in the planned missile shield in Europe. Thanks to “its ballistics missiles, technologies, know-how, experience or simply the process of European integration,” Ukraine is such a country, he stated speaking at a round table meeting in Kiev, reports the Rosbalt news agency. The alliance and the leadership of the former Soviet republic are holding...

I recently came across the saddest commentary on Ukraine’s eastern provinces that I have ever encountered. It’s a video blog by one Stanislav Tsikalovsky from the city of Luhansk. The 34-year-old Tsikalovsky goes by the name of Proctologist. His slogan is: “Believe me, because madmen always speak the truth.” The truth that recently caught the attention of some 30,000 Ukrainians came in a video Tsikalovsky made after a trip to Lviv, in western Ukraine. Here’s what he had to say: I would like to dedicate this video blog to the city of Lviv, which I visited, and to those people who hosted us, showed us their city, and told us about its beauty and prospects for the future. I wasn’t sure what to say until I sat down in the Lviv-Luhansk train and arrived in my native Luhansk. I disembarked and understood that, besides crying in front of a camera, I wouldn’t...