[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: State Department; AP; RFE/RL (2); EDM

[Deychak, Orest]

U.S. Department of State

Philip J. Crowley

Assistant Secretary
Daily Press Briefing

Washington, DC

August 12, 2009

Excerpt on Ukraine

[...QUESTION: Do you have anything to say about a rather scathing attack
by the Russian president in a blog yesterday about Ukraine, among other
things, saying that their efforts to get into NATO were anti-Russian and
that he basically - Medvedev said he looks forward to a new government
in Ukraine?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, first of all, on the subject of Ukraine, it is a
sovereign country. It has the right to pursue its interests in any way
that it chooses. I think Vice President Biden made that clear during his
recent visit to Ukraine.

It is important for Ukraine and Russia to have a constructive
relationship. I'm not sure that these comments are necessarily in that
vein. But going forward, Ukraine has a right to make its own choices,
and we feel that it has a right to join NATO if it chooses. And,
obviously, we support that right.]

Associated Press

Ukrainian president rejects Russian criticism 

13 August 2009

10:14

 

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has rejected
sharp criticism from his Russian counterpart, saying the Kremlin is to
blame for a downturn in bilateral ties.

Yushchenko is responding to an open letter from Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev, who has accused him of conducting a hostile policy toward
Russia.

Medvedev criticized Yushchenko's government for supplying weapons to
Georgia, striving to join NATO and endangering Russian gas supplies to
Europe, among other complaints.

Yushchenko said in a letter to Medvedev released Thursday that Ukraine's
ties with Georgia were in line with international law.

He urges the Kremlin to respect Ukraine's sovereign right to join NATO
and says he is disappointed by the message from Medvedev.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

www.rferl.org

 

August 12, 2009 

Ukraine: Russia Hostage To Its Imperial Past 

KYIV (Reuters) -- Russian leaders are stuck in their imperial past and
seem to relish bullying and threatening their neighbors, a senior
Ukrainian official has said, responding to a tirade from Moscow the
previous day.

Relations between Russian and former Soviet republic Ukraine have
deteriorated steadily since Kyiv's Orange Revolution brought pro-Western
President Viktor Yushchenko to power in 2004. Russia has twice cut off
gas supplies through Ukraine to Europe amid disputes over payments and
contracts.

Kremlin leader Dmitry Medvedev lashed out on August 11 at Yushchenko for
"anti-Russian" policies and said he wanted to see a leader in Ukraine
who was easier for Moscow to deal with. Analysts saw his comments as an
attempt to influence Ukraine's  presidential election, due next January.

Yushchenko, who is seeking but unlikely to win re-election, has yet to
comment on Medvedev's outburst but his chief of staff Vera Ulyanchenko
posted a reply on their party's website.

"The young leadership of Russia is turning into a hostage of old
imperial complexes, which constantly needs to cherish the idea of a
foreign enemy and substitute equal dialogue with all neighboring states
with a language of threats and insults," she said.

'Policy Of Provocation'

Russia's brief war last August with Georgia, which shocked the West and
drew sharp criticism, was the result of a "policy of provocation and
pressure that led to the death of many innocent people," she added.

"There is no doubt, that the policy of provocation is not in the
interest of the Russian nation, whose long and painful history should
teach new and young Russian leaders to make the right conclusions -- not
imperial, but practical," she said.

The war of words follow Kyiv's expulsion of a Russian diplomat last
month, mutual accusations over Russia's Black Sea Fleet naval base in
the Crimean peninsula, and the visit to Kyiv of U.S. Vice President Joe
Biden.

Biden lent his support to Yushchenko's bid for Ukrainian membership of
NATO, a move Russia sees as a threat to its security. Moscow is also
unhappy at Yushchenko's insistence that the Black Sea Fleet vacate its
base by 2017.

But with public support of just 4 percent, Yushchenko has little chance
of winning re-election in a vote on Jan. 17. The key contenders, Prime
Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych, are
both seen as more likely to seek better relations with the Kremlin.

Yanukovych, the Moscow-backed presidential candidate who lost out in the
Orange Revolution, now leads the opinion polls and is followed by
Tymoshenko.

Kremlin deputy chief of staff Alexei Gromov dismissed Ulyanchenko's
remarks, telling Russian news agencies that "this text...on behalf of
quite an unrepresentative [with just a 3 percent rating] party does not
need any comment."

Far from being an attack on the Ukrainian people, Medvedev's message was
a "cool and well-considered" assessment of Yushchenko's anti-Russian
policies, Gromov added, according to Interfax.

"The way our Russian president, our country are treating the Ukrainian
people, the Ukrainian state, has been exceptionally respectful, warm and
fraternal," the Kremlin official said. 

 

(Note: If Russia has been treating Ukraine with exceptional respect,
warmth and fraternity, per the Kremlin official's above quote, I'd sure
hate to see the alternative.  OD).  

 

 

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

August 07, 2009 

Soviet-Era Documents Shed Light On Suppression Of Ukrainian Catholic
Church 

by Brian Whitmore 

Patriarch Kirill's recent high-profile visit to Ukraine was interrupted
by an unwanted visitor from the past: Josef Stalin's ghost.

A five-decade-old letter from the Soviet Communist Party archives, made
available to RFE/RL's Russian Service this week as Kirill was wrapping
up his 10-day visit to Ukraine, illustrates the extent to which the
patriarch's predecessors were involved in Stalin's efforts to wipe out
the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the 1940s. 

The letter, from then-Russian Orthodox Patriarch Aleksy I to the head of
the Soviet Council on Religious Affairs, Georgy Karpov, was dated
December 7, 1945, when the Kremlin was consolidating control over
territories in heavily Catholic western Ukraine after World War II.
Karpov was a colonel in the NKVD, a predecessor to the Soviet KGB.

In the letter, Aleksy informs Karpov of an "initiative group" that was
being formed in Greek-Catholic dioceses in western Ukraine that would
pressure clergy to agree to disband their church and convert to
Orthodoxy. 

"More than 800 priests have already joined the initiative group, and it
is expected that by the New Year the entire clergy will have done so
with the exception of a small number of diehards," Aleksy wrote. 

At the time of the letter, all of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church's
bishops had been either imprisoned or exiled, making the clergy
especially vulnerable to pressure as Stalin sought to eradicate the
Vatican's influence.

"What strikes me most about that letter is that, within the context of
the particular power relationships that were in place, [Patriarch
Aleksei I] really sounds like he was trying to give a semblance of
ecclesiastical credibility to what was otherwise clearly a blatant act
of state intervention in Church affairs," says Andrii Krawchuk, the
former president of the University of Sudbury in Ontario, Canada and the
author of the book "Christian Social Ethics in Ukraine."

In another letter, published this week by the Austrian Catholic news
agency Kathpress, Nikita Khrushchev, then a member of the Soviet
Politburo and a high-ranking Ukrainian Communist Party official,
informed Stalin of "work undertaken to dismember the [Ukrainian
Greek-Catholic] church and transfer the...clergy to the Orthodox
Church." That letter was dated December 17, 1945, just 10 days after
Aleksy's correspondence.

Father Ihor Yatsyv, press secretary for the head of the Ukrainian
Greek-Catholic Church, Lubomyr Huzar, tells RFE/RL's Russian Service
that the documents shed important light on efforts by Soviet authorities
to liquidate Catholicism in western Ukraine.

"The most important thing this letter illustrates is that these
initiative groups were not established by the Greek-Catholic dioceses
themselves, as had been previously claimed, but rather that they were
inspired by the Soviet authorities," Yatsyv says.

Echoes Of The Past

Stalin allowed the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been suppressed
following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, to operate officially again
from 1943 -- albeit under tight Soviet supervision -- in an effort to
intensify patriotic support for the authorities during World War II and
after.

"In Stalin's regime the idea was to subsume everything into one
centralized aegis, namely the Russian Orthodox Church, which itself was
subject to strict controls and even repression by the state," Krawchuk
says.

The letters came to light as Patriarch Kirill was completing a visit to
Ukraine amid criticism that the Russian Orthodox leader was carrying out
the Kremlin's political agenda to bring Russia's southern neighbor back
under Moscow's control.

In controversial remarks on Ukrainian television on July 28, Kirill said
Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. He also called on
Ukrainians not to forsake their values in the pursuit of closer ties
with Europe.

Yatsyv was critical of Kirill's conduct during his visit, which took
place from July 12-August 5, which he said "was more political than
religious," and suggested that he saw echoes of Moscow's past attempts
to dominate Ukraine.

"One would expect a politician from Russia or some other country that
wants to establish a sphere of influence in Ukraine to use such a tone.
If it is a spiritual person, the head of a church, he should be
addressing spiritual and moral issues," Yatsyv says.

Yatsyv says the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church had no role in leaking
the Stalin-Khrushchev letter to Kathpress. He says, however, that after
the publication the church discovered that it had a copy of the letter,
which it has since posted on its website.

In a meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev upon returning to
Moscow, Kirill called his visit to Ukraine "one of the most striking
memories of my patriarchal service" and appealed for closer ties between
Moscow and Kyiv.

"We must do everything we can to ensure that our people always feel a
mutual closeness, while respecting the sovereignty of nations and taking
into account the reality of modern politics," Kirill said. 

"The people of Russia and Ukraine should feel comfortable in this common
spiritual space, being a part of different nations and being the
citizens of different states, but still being the sons and daughters of
the Russian Orthodox Church."

Medvedev responded that "in spite of what has happened and in spite of
our division into separate states, the special brotherly relations
between our peoples must remain, regardless of who is in power."

Underground Seminaries

The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, which was formed by the Union of
Brest in 1596, is under the authority of the Vatican but observes
Byzantine rites similar to those of the Eastern Orthodox Church . It is
considered an important component of national identity in western
Ukraine.

According to documents from Ukrainian archives, obtained by RFE/RL's
Russian Service, Stalin's security chief Lavrentiy Beria, the head of
the NKVD, approved the decision to liquidate the Ukrainian
Greek-Catholic Church in January 1941. 

Those plans, however, were delayed when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet
Union in the summer of 1941. The Soviet Union regained control over
western Ukraine in the summer of 1944.

Initially, Ukrainian Greek-Catholic bishops were asked by Soviet
authorities to endorse a union with the Russian Orthodox Church, but all
of them refused -- and were subsequently arrested and sent into internal
exile.

Under the supervision of Soviet authorities, new, more pliant, Ukrainian
Greek-Catholic bishops were ordained, but this was never recognized by
the Vatican.

In March 1946, just three months after the Aleksy-Karpov and
Khrushchev-Stalin letters, the clergy who had joined the initiative
group convened in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv to annul the Union
of Brest, dissolve the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, merge its clergy
with the Russian Orthodox Church, and turn its property over to the
Moscow Patriarchate. 

Some clergy, however, went underground to keep the faith alive,
conducting services in forests and in homes.

"The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church ceased to [officially] function in
the Soviet Union, but it continued illegally, in the catacombs as we
say," Yatsyv says. "There were new bishops and underground seminaries."

The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church remained underground until for more
than four decades until December 1989, during Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev's liberalization, when it was allowed again to function
officially.

RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service and Vladimir Tolz of RFE/RL's Russian Service
contributed to this report 

Eurasia Daily Monitor

August 12, 2009

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill Visits Ukraine

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill visited Ukraine from July 27 - August
5 in order to suppress the pro-independence mood among the local clergy
and more broadly, to assert Russian religious and cultural domination.
Kirill made it clear that he would oppose plans, backed by Ukrainian
President Viktor Yushchenko, to create a local Orthodox church fully
independent of Russia more energetically than his predecessor Alexy II.
Kirill also allowed Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych to use his
visit to benefit Yanukovych's presidential election campaign, which
indicates that Moscow will probably back his bid as it did in 2004.

During his visit Kirill ostentatiously ignored the rival Orthodox Church
of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UPTs-KP), although UPTs-KP Patriarch Filaret
wanted to meet him. Adding insult to injury, Kirill acted as if UPTs-KP
did not exist at all. Strictly speaking, this is the case from the point
of view of the Moscow church as Filaret was excommunicated after he
split from the Moscow church in 1992. UPTs-KP is still not officially
recognized by the rest of the Orthodox world.

Yushchenko supports UPTs-KP viewing it as the basis for establishing a
single Ukrainian Orthodox church independent from Moscow patriarchs and
Russian cultural influences. This would perfectly fit his idealistic
model of a monolingual and monocultural Ukraine distanced from Russia as
much as possible, which he has pursued since his election as president
in 2004. This ideal is impossible to achieve in the modern world, and
the same is probably true of Yushchenko's dream of a nationwide
independent church. Yushchenko failed to persuade Ecumenical Patriarch
Bartholomew to recognize UPTs-KP last year as this would have spoilt
relations between Bartholomew and the world's largest Orthodox church in
Russia, and Kirill flatly dismissed Yushchenko's arguments.

When Yushchenko told Kirill that it is important to establish a single
Orthodox church in Ukraine as this is also an issue of national
sovereignty, Kirill said that such a church already exists and this is
the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Moscow Patriarchate (UPTs-MP) (Ukrainska
Pravda, July 25). Kirill also said he was a patriarch for all the
eastern Orthodox Christians regardless of their nationality or party
affiliation (UNIAN, July 27). In line with Moscow's official rhetoric,
Kirill spoke a lot about the common roots of Russia and Ukraine dating
back to the medieval Kyiv Rus. One of his chief ideologists, Andrey
Kuraev, was more outspoken, threatening Ukraine with a civil war should
a single church fully independent from Moscow ever be established (Ekho
Moskvy, July 27).

In order to support the claim that he controls a single Ukrainian church
rather than the church of the eastern and southern parts of the country
where the Russian language and culture dominates, Kirill challenged
UPTs-KP in its stronghold, the nationally-minded western Ukraine,
visiting the regions of Rivne and Lutsk. Yushchenko's secretariat
reportedly warned him against the visit as UPTs-KP supporters planned
protests there. Kirill used the warning to give an impression among
believers with the help of the mass media that he was not welcome by
Ukrainian officials, although the Ukrainian police and security service
hurried to say that they did not advise Kirill against the visit
(Interfax-Ukraine, August 2-3). Once Kirill eventually arrived in
western Ukraine, the pro-Kremlin mass media in Russia and Ukraine's most
popular TV channel Inter, which also openly backs Yanukovych's election
campaign, presented this as Kirill's moral victory.

Yushchenko's dream of an independent church may be achieved only if
UPTs-KP unites with the more numerous UPTs-MP. Kirill did everything
possible during his visit to put an end to discussions about a possible
unification with Filaret's church among UPTs-MP clergy in Ukraine. He
asserted that the Russian church should remain single "here and in the
whole world." "We should be united around a common idea and the idea of
autocephaly [independence] is not a common idea," he said in Kyiv
(Interfax-Ukraine, July 29).

Kirill made it clear that he would reduce the role of UPTs-MP aging head
Metropolitan Volodymyr in order to increase his own control of the local
church. The Zerkalo Nedeli weekly said that Kirill promoted two
Ukrainian regional archbishops to metropolitans, demonstratively
breaking the tradition according to which such promotions were the
responsibility of Volodymyr (Zerkalo Nedeli, August 8). UPTs-MP
spokesman Archbishop Mitrofan said after Kirill's departure to Moscow
that discussions about the church's autocephaly were over (UNIAN, August
6).

Demonstrating that he views Ukraine as part of the Russian space, Kirill
ostentatiously refused to discuss local Ukrainian issues at the first
ever sitting of the Russian synod in Kyiv. At the same time, he reported
on a recent meeting of Russian religious leaders with President Dmitry
Medvedev (UNIAN, July 27). Immediately on returning from Kyiv, Kirill
met Medvedev to tell him that the "spiritual unity" existing between
Russia and Ukraine "for millennia" "became a basic value that is not
affected by political considerations" (Interfax-Ukraine, August 6).

Yanukovych used Kirill's visit to the fullest extent. He met Kirill in
Kyiv and accompanied him on a visit to his stronghold of Donetsk.
Yanukovych compared himself favorably to the government of Yushchenko
and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovych alleged that they,
"interfere in the affairs of the church, which is inadmissible,
politicize religious matters and try to dictate to believers in which
church to pray" (Ukrainska Pravda, August 3). Tymoshenko's adviser Oleh
Medvedev described Kirill's tour as a visit of an imperialist who
preached the neo-imperialist Russian World doctrine (Segodnya, August
6).

--Pavel Korduban

 

 

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