The Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development agreed today to “undertake a study on the progression of rights and democracy over the past 10 years in Ukraine.” The study had been requested by Peter Goldring, Member of Parliament for Edmonton East. Mr. Goldring says it is appropriate and timely for the Committee to examine the subject given the recent apparently politically motivated and arbitrary prosecution and conviction of former Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. As well as being a member of the Foreign Affairs committee Mr. Goldring is...

In the House of Commons today, Peter Goldring, Member of Parliament for Edmonton East, vice-chair of the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Group and member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, called on parliamentarians to learn the lessons of the Holodomor, the murder by starvation of millions in Ukraine in the 1930s. “For most of 80 years past, the silence has been near complete, stifled behind a Soviet curtain of iron, ne’er to be spoken aloud,” Mr. Goldring said. “Eight million perished, murdered by forced starvation in the Holodomor, the genocide of Ukraine...

Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) has said that that the authorities have taken measures to ensure that Freedom Day celebrations are safe. "The city authorities are inviting all interested political and public organizations to submit applications for holding events in the areas where preparatory work for the New Year and Christmas holidays is not being conducted," the administration's press service said in a statement. In particular, the administration proposed that such events be held on European, Bessarabska and Kontraktova and other squares...

Alex Iwaszczenko was just a young boy in the early 1930s, so he doesn't remember much about his life back then. But he won't ever forget the constant hunger, or seeing bodies of villagers lying in the fields. Some of them were so famished, they simply dropped dead on a hunt for whatever sustenance they could find. "I look around in the field, and I see lots of people dead," Iwaszczenko recalled Sunday, following a requiem service commemorating the 78th anniversary of the Ukrainian genocide. Millions of Ukrainians died in 1932 and 1933 as a result of a policy under the Stalin regime that eliminated food in most parts of rural Ukraine under Soviet control...

Russia should pay about 2bn dollars in rent for the land and facilities used for the stationing of its Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, said Serhiy Zhurets, director of the consulting information company Defense-Express. "The Russian side is paying practically nothing at the present time," the expert said at a news conference on "The price of the Russian Black Sea Fleet's stay in Crimea" held in Kiev in Monday (21 November). According to Zhurets, the rent for the navy's stay in Crimea is being offset against Ukraine's debt to the Russian Federation...

Canadians will unite in remembrance November 21-27 during the fourth annual National Holodomor Awareness Week. Events across the country will commemorate one of the most heinous crimes in the history of mankind and honour its victims which number in the millions. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) continues its efforts to secure this genocide’s rightful place in the new publicly-funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Recognized by the Parliament of Canada as genocide of the Ukrainian people, this year's Holodomor anniversary will be...

As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence -- a testament to the spirit and determination of the people of Ukraine -- we also remember the suffering they endured seventy-eight years ago during the catastrophic famine that has come to be known as the Holodomor – the “death by hunger.” This terrible tragedy, created by the intentional seizure of crops and farms across Ukraine by Joseph Stalin, was one of communism’s greatest atrocities. Today, Americans join with the people of Ukraine and Ukrainians around the world in remembering those who suffered and died senselessly as a result of this manmade famine. In the wake of this...

Bohdan Stashynsky killed two Ukrainian émigré nationalists in Munich in the late 1950s and then, after defecting to West Berlin in 1961 and being tried in Karlsruhe in 1962, he received an eight-year prison sentence, was released after four, and then proceeded to fall off the face of the earth. Now, at 80, the ex-assassin has apparently decided to set the record straight by telling his side of the story to journalist Natalya Prykhodko. As Prykhodko tells it, she’d been contacted by a retired officer of the Ukrainian Security Service who said Stashynsky “feared dying and taking some secrets to his grave. And why you? Because...

Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), Archbishop Sviatoslav (Shevchuk) has consecrated the place in the center of Washington, D.C., where a monument to the victims of Holodomor (the man-made famine in Ukraine) will be erected. During his visit to the U.S. the head of the UGCC had several meetings with congressmen and representatives of the U.S. State Department and...

The famous diabolical sneer attributed to Hitler on the eve of the Holocaust, "Who remembers the Armenians?", uttered a scant quarter-century after the genocide in that country, could equally apply, mutatis mutandis, to Ukrainians under Stalin who, only a half-dozen years before the Final Solution, suffered through what Robert Conquest first called The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. That horrendous event has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention. Recently I noted the launch of a new scholarly work treating the Holodomor...