[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: Reuters; CT; AP; CoE

[Deychak, Orest]

(There won't be any mailings to this list for at least the next week, as
I'll be in Belarus as an OSCE observer for their September 28
parliamentary elections. OD)

Reuters

Rice gives strong backing for Ukraine NATO bid

Mon Sep 22, 2008 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday
pledged Washington's firm support for Ukraine's bid to join the NATO
military alliance despite strong Russian opposition to the move.

In a meeting with Ukraine's foreign minister on the sidelines of the
U.N. General Assembly, Rice said the United States stood by a commitment
made at a summit in Bucharest last April for Kiev to join NATO's
Membership Action Plan (MAP) -- a first step toward membership of the
military alliance.

"We, of course, are, have been and will continue to be supportive of
Ukraine's Transatlantic ambitions. And of course, the U.S. position on
MAP was very clear," said Rice, with Ukraine's Foreign Minister
Volodymyr Ohryzko at her side.

"I should just say the Bucharest declaration is also very clear," she
added.

At the April summit, NATO leaders stopped short of putting Ukraine and
Georgia immediately on the path to membership of the alliance, but
pledged the two ex-Soviet states would one day become members.

Russia strongly opposes Ukraine's proposed membership of NATO, as well
as that of Georgia.

Russia and Georgia fought a brief war last month after Tbilisi sent in
troops to try to seize back the rebel region of South Ossetia, provoking
massive retaliation by Moscow and a plummet in U.S.-Russia relations to
their lowest level since the end of the Cold War.

While the United States has strongly backed both Georgia and Ukraine's
membership bids, allies including Germany, France and smaller NATO
states have opposed it for fear of further provoking Russia.

The idea of membership has not been fully embraced in Ukraine either.
Polls show a majority of Ukrainians oppose NATO membership and the
leader of the country's biggest parliamentary party has said the issue
should be decided by the Ukrainian people.

(Reporting by Sue Pleming; editing by Todd Eastham)

Chicago Tribune

Metro

Ukrainians mark famine anniversary 

By Russell Working, TRIBUNE REPORTER 

21 September 2008

4

Behind Neonila Scherstiuk Lychyk's school in the Ukraine of her
childhood, there was a cemetery and, sometimes during recess, horse
carts arrived loaded with corpses.

At first, Lychyk said, the teacher would shoo the children indoors. In
time, she didn't bother.

The entire Ukraine was experiencing the horror anyway: the corpses in
the streets, the villages emptied of people, the little ones who
disappeared -- rumored to have been kidnapped by cannibals.

This fall, Chicago-area Ukrainians like Lychyk of River Forest are
commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, or death by hunger,
which the Ukrainian government says was a Soviet-engineered famine that
killed as many as 10 million people in 1932-33.

Anniversary events include seminars, an exhibition, memorials and
requiem masses. Organizers and survivors said their efforts to spread
the word are urgent. Like those who lived through the Holocaust,
survivors of what has been called the "genocide famine" are growing
fewer by the day.

Unlike the Holocaust, which was exposed and recorded by conquering
armies, the Holodomor was hidden for at least two generations by a
communist regime that had no qualms about using food as a weapon but
didn't want the world to know, historians said.

Historians and the Ukrainian government say the famine was engineered by
the Kremlin, which sent communist thugs door to door to steal food out
of pantries and off of tables. Meanwhile, the government exported
Ukrainian grain to the West throughout the famine.

This summer, the Ukrainian government released historical documents it
says prove the Holodomor was an intentionally manufactured genocide.
Moscow has resisted the label of "genocide," saying Russians and others
in the Soviet Union -- not just Ukrainians -- suffered under Stalin's
iron rule.

Taras Hunczak, a Ukrainian-born history professor emeritus at Rutgers
University, has studied original documents related to the famine.
Estimates of deaths have ranged widely and are difficult to prove, but
Hunczak said he believes 7 million to 10 million people probably died.

The Chicago-based Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation USA annually
memorializes the victims of the Holodomor through talks in schools and a
memorial service. But this year the foundation is making an extra push
to remind the world, foundation president Nicholas Mischenko said.

Mischenko was born in Ukraine a year after the Holodomor. He never met
two older siblings who starved to death. "They took away our farm. Took
away everything that we had: cows, horses, chickens -- everything. And
after that they took away all the foodstuffs."

During World War II, his family fled Ukraine, spending three years
traveling across central Europe before gaining refugee status in Austria
and emigrating.

Anatole Kolomayets, a Chicago artist who was born in 1927 and survived
the famine with his younger brother, George, said his family lived on a
farm in a devastated rural area. His father fled out the back door as
the police arrived to arrest him. Kolomayets' father soon found a job at
a Poltava railroad station, where he received a bread ration and the
family rejoined him.

Lychyk's family survived because her father was a state employee and
received a food ration. But every day as a 7-year-old, she saw the fate
of families who couldn't feed their children.

For years, Lychyk didn't tell her children about what she had survived.
But recently, she wrote down her memories for them.

"This is something that is very hard to discuss, because you just don't
want to take the joy of life from young generations," she said. "But I
think that's wrong. We should tell our children and grandchildren so
this doesn't happen again."

AP

EU Ukraine Politics; Uneasy coalition talks in Ukraine 

22 September 2008

IEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukrainian lawmakers held more talks Monday aimed at
replacing the current government, as a deadline loomed for early
parliamentary elections.

The pro-Western coalition of President Viktor Yushchenko and his 2004
Orange Revolution partner, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, collapsed
earlier this month. The two leaders have been feuding ahead of the 2010
presidential elections. They also have disagreed about how to react to
Russia's war with Georgia last month.

The Kremlin has bitterly opposed prospect of NATO membership for Georgia
and Ukraine, whose pro-Western leaders have sought to bring their
ex-Soviet republics into the Western alliance.

Yushchenko's party said in a statement Monday that it is ready to revive
the shattered coalition and invite a smaller party to join.

Tymoshenko also has advocated making the old alliance work, but hinted
that if that doesn't happen she may team up with the Moscow-friendly
Party of Regions.

Top officials from parliamentary factions were meeting Monday in
Parliament to discuss ways of forming the coalition. The head of
Yushchenko's party, Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, officially made the call to
revive the coalition and include the smaller party at the meeting,
according to a statement on the party's Web site.

Analysts say such an alliance may slow Ukraine's efforts to join NATO
and pave the way for stronger ties with Russia. Still, it would be
unlikely to hamper Ukraine's overall integration with the West, since
all the three major political forces are interested in closer ties with
the European Union.

Many analysts believe, however, that the rival political forces are
unlikely to come to an agreement and that a new parliamentary election
will probably be held in the winter. Lawmakers have until mid-October to
either work out a new alliance, or a new vote will be called. 

 

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Can Now Offer Russian Citizenship to Eight
Million Ukrainians

 

Paul Goble

 

            Vienna, September 23 - Under the terms of new legislation
nominally intended to promote the repatriation of "Russian compatriots"
and thus help solve Russia's demographic problems, Moscow can now offer
Russian Federation citizenship to more than eight million Ukrainians,
even though the Ukrainian constitution prohibits dual citizenship.      

             Had Moscow taken this step six months ago, Verkhovna Rada
deputy Kseniya Lyapina told Kyiv's "Delo" yesterday, "it might have been
possible to consider this as part of Russia's domestic policy." But
after Moscow's invocation of its right to protect Russian citizens in
South Ossetia, these changes look like "preparation for aggressive
actions" (delo.ua/news/87411/). 

            According to that newspaper, "those who want to receive a
Russian passport do not need to live on the territory of the [Russian]
Federation for five years, provide evidence of the source of their
incomes or demonstrate a knowledge of Russian" if they are former
citizens of the USSR and were born on the territory of Russia.

            If Ukrainians were to give up their Ukrainian citizenship in
order to take Russian citizenship and then move to the Russian
Federation, as some demographers and political analysts have suggested
is the reason behind the new rules, that would not necessarily create a
problem for Kyiv, especially since the number of those likely to do so
would not be large.

            But if because of these simplified procedures, more
Ukrainians take Russian citizenship without giving up their Ukrainian
citizenship in violation of the Ukrainian constitution and then remain
in Ukraine, Moscow would likely be able to exploit them in the same way
it used the presence of dual citizens of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to
justify military action.

            Unfortunately, the comments of Russian officials in recent
days suggest that there is little reason to put a positive
interpretation on this new act. Indeed, in an article carried in
Ukrainian papers over the weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov provides the basis for just the opposite reading
(www.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/0/5F3D95AD906E3A42C32574CA002A4FA2).

            The Russian minister sharply criticized Kyiv for its failure
to criticize Georgia and for its assumptions that what Moscow had done
there was not "a response to aggression" but rather an indication of
some kind of grand imperial design that gives Ukraine no choice but to
seek protection from the West.

            Not only is this insinuation entirely false, Lavrov said,
but it is being made by those in Kyiv who want to push Ukraine into NATO
"in spite of the opinion of the overwhelming majority of its population
and elementary democratic procedures" but one that will divide Ukraine
from its Russian neighbor. 

            And Russia has demonstrated, the minister argued, that it is
interested only in protecting people as it did in Georgia and making
sure that "Tbilisi will not use force again." Moscow has no "hidden
agenda," something he said had been proved by President Dmitry
Medvedev's agreement with French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

            But in words that many Ukrainians and others will see as an
indication that Moscow does have a broader agenda if no longer a
"hidden" one, the Russian foreign minister  said that "the entrance of
Ukraine into NATO would bring its wake a deep crisis in
Russian-Ukrainian relations" and have "the most negative" impact on
European security more generally.

             And then the minister added that Russia has some "serious
concerns" about how Ukraine is acting domestically: First of all, he
said, Moscow is very disturbed by "the discrimination and exclusion from
all spheres of life of the Russian language," which restrict "the rights
of millions of Russian-language citizens of Ukraine.

            Second, he said, "we can hardly agree with the
pseudo-historical treatment by Kyiv of the events connected with the
famine of the 1930s in the USSR  as some kind of 'genocide of the
Ukrainian people'," an approach which slanders the memories of "millions
of famine victims of other nationalities."

            And third, Lavrov concluded what many in Kyiv and elsewhere
will see as a bill of indictment of the current Ukrainian government,
the Russian government currently notes "with regret, "the growth of
Russophobic and also anti-Semitic attitudes among the nationalistically
inclined organizations of Ukraine."

 

 (Lavrov certainly doesn't let facts and truth get in the way...OD)

 

 

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