[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WP; KP; EDM

[Deychak, Orest]

The Washington Post

A Section

Documenting the 'Holocaust by Bullets'; For Book, French Priest
Interviewed Witnesses to Slaughter of Soviet Jews 

Maria Danilova and Randy Herschaft 

Associated Press

1 February 2009

FINAL

A10

The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the world's consciousness:
barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces. Less known is the "Holocaust
by Bullets," in which more than 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns
and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Their part in the
Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left
unidentified in unmarked mass graves.

"Shoah," a documentary by French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, stands as
the 20th century's epic visual record of the Holocaust. Now another
Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a
different part of the picture.

Desbois says he has interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and
pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the
former Soviet Union. The result is a book, "The Holocaust by Bullets,"
and an exhibition through March 15 at New York's Museum of Jewish
Heritage.

Brought to Ukraine by a twist of fate, Desbois has spent seven years
trying to document the truth, honor the dead, relieve witnesses of their
pain and guilt, and prevent future genocide.

About 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed,
starved to death or died of disease during World War II. An additional
550,000 to 650,000 Soviet Jews were killed in Belarus and up to 140,000
in Russia, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Victims were
mainly women, the young and the old.

Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter
by bullets was the opening phase of what became the Nazis' Final
Solution with its factories of death operating in Auschwitz and other
camps, all in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Desbois devotes his 233-page book, published by Palgrave Macmillan in
August, to his work in Ukraine, where he says he has uncovered more than
800 mass extermination sites, more than two-thirds of them previously
unknown.

Since the book was written, he has expanded his search for mass graves
into Belarus, and he plans to look early this year in areas of Russia
that were occupied by the Germans.

Sometimes bursting into tears, old men and women from poor Ukrainian
villages recount to Desbois how women, children and elders were marched
or carted in from neighboring towns to be shot, burned to death or
buried alive by German troops, Romanian forces, squads of local
Ukrainian collaborators and local ethnic German volunteers.

Even then, it was methodical, Desbois's research shows. First, Germans
would arrive in a town or village and gather intelligence on how best to
transport the victims to extermination sites, where to execute them and
how to dispose of their bodies.

"It was done as systematically as it was done elsewhere," said John Paul
Himka, an expert on the Holocaust and Ukraine at the University of
Alberta, who is not connected to Desbois's work. "You can read as
they're figuring out best way to do this, the best way to shoot . . .
it's absolutely systematic, no accident here."

Desbois's interviews and grave-hunting tie in to millions of pages in
Soviet archives, heightening their credibility, says Paul Shapiro of
Holocaust Memorial Museum, who wrote the foreword to Desbois's book.

Among Desbois's key findings is the widespread use of local children to
help bury the dead, wait on the German soldiers during meals, and remove
gold teeth and other valuables from the bodies. His work has also
yielded evidence that the killings were most frequently carried out in
the open, in daylight and in a variety of ways -- shooting victims,
throwing them alive into bonfires, walling up a group of Jews in a
cellar that wasn't opened until 12 years later.

Most of Desbois's witnesses are Orthodox Christian, and he comes to them
as a priest, wearing black with a clerical collar, taking in their pain
and trying to ease their suffering. Many have never before talked about
their experiences.

In the village of Ternivka, some 200 miles south of Kiev, where 2,300
Jews were killed, a frail, elderly woman, who identified herself only as
Petrivna, revealed the unbearable task the Nazis imposed on her.

The young schoolgirl saw her Jewish neighbors thrown into a large pit,
many still alive and convulsing in agony. Her task was to trample on
them barefoot to make space for more. One of those she had to tread on
was a classmate.

"You know, we were very poor, we didn't have shoes," Petrivna told
Desbois in a single breath, her body twitching in pain, Desbois writes
in his book. "You see, it is not easy to walk on bodies."

Desbois, 53, a short, soft-spoken man with dark, thinning hair, says the
stories give him nightmares. The most difficult is "to bear the horrors
that the witnesses tell me, because often the people are simple, very
kind and want to tell me everything," Desbois said in a phone interview
while on a trip to western Ukraine.

"You have to be able to listen, to accept, to bear this horror," said
Desbois. "I am not here to judge the people's guilt, we are here to know
what happened."

Desbois's small team includes a translator, a researcher, a mapping
expert, a ballistics specialist, and a video and photo crew. He often
joins his witnesses in their homes, leaving his shoes outside. He tends
to a peasant's cow while the man tells his story.

Desbois has deep personal roots in his project, dating to 2002, when he
first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was
interned as a French prisoner in World War II.

When he arrived, the locals told him of a stream of blood that had run
from the site where the Jews were executed, and of a dismembered woman
hanging from a tree after the Nazis threw a grenade in a pit full of
people. When he was offered a visit to more villages, he did not
hesitate.

"I am in a hurry to find all the bones, to establish the truth and
justice so that the world can know what happened and that the Germans
never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing
Jews there."

The Holocaust is a divisive topic here, because some Ukrainians
collaborated with the Nazis. Jewish groups are grateful for Desbois's
efforts and lament the lack of government support for his and other
Holocaust research and education programs.

"As a Ukrainian citizen and a Ukrainian historian, it pains me . . .
that there is no policy of national remembrance," said Anatoly Podolsky,
head of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies. "We are not
responsible for the past, but we are responsible for remembering."

Desbois leads a French association, Yahad In Unum (the Hebrew and Latin
words for "together"), founded by Catholics and Jews to heal the wounds
between the two faiths. He believes that as a Catholic priest talking to
Orthodox believers about the killing of their Jewish neighbors his work
advances that healing mission.

"The book is meant so that people know . . . that a genocide is simply
people killing people," Desbois said. "My book is also an act of
prevention of future acts of genocide."

http://www.washingtonpost.com <javascript:void(0)> 

Kyiv Post

Editorial <http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/editorial> 


A better option


28 January 

Investing in Ukraine's gas pipeline is the best and cheapest option for
Europe to secure Russian gas supplies

The January natural gas war between Ukraine and Russia was a badly
needed wake-up call for European Union bureaucrats who have dragged
their feet on energy diversification and who have long been wimpy with
Russia.

The cutoff of natural gas supplies revealed how deeply dependent both
Ukraine and Europe have become on a nation whose leaders are keen to use
energy as a geopolitical tool of influence and blackmail. One of
Russia's aims was to smear Ukraine, undermining its reputation in Europe
as a functioning democracy and as a reliable transit route for Russian
gas to Europe. 

The Russians also hoped to build support for costly alternative pipeline
projects bypassing Ukraine. But that's a tough sell.

Kremlin leaders are finding it hard to finance the $20 billion Nord
Stream project across the Baltic Sea, and for good reason. It's a very
expensive way to pump 30-55 billion cubic meters of gas.

Another Kremlin favorite is the $20 billion South Stream, which would go
through the Black Sea into Bulgaria, also an expensive way to move 30
billion cubic meters of gas.

A third option to bypass Ukraine, touted mainly in the West, is the $13
billion Nabucco gas pipeline. But that's a stiff price tag to move 30
billion cubic meters.

But the better and cheaper option would be to invest up to $3 billion or
so in strengthening Ukraine's pipeline system, which already pumps a
whopping 120 billion cubic meters of gas each year. The nation's network
could pump more, and do so more efficiently, with needed upgrades.

While Russian bad behavior has shown that Europe and everyone else
should explore other energy options, Europeans should also back a
consortium that would invest into Ukraine's state-owned pipeline.
Ukrainian leaders should embrace this option as well. It would bolster
the nation's free-market credentials and its economic importance.
Europeans would then be deeply involved in the gas issue all the way to
the Russian border. Ukraine's gas pipeline might also be a key to
opening the door to future membership in the European Union.

In the next five to seven years, Ukraine's vast pipelines will remain
dominant, yet vulnerable. Still, the existing network remains the best
and cheapest way to pump Russian gas to Europe. 

 

Eurasia Daily Monitor

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/

January 30, 2009

Ukrainian Chief Banker in Legal Limbo


The Ukrainian parliament has exacerbated both the political and economic
crises in Ukraine by voting to dismiss National Bank (NBU) head
Volodymyr Stelmakh. Consequently, it is not clear who is running the
central bank in a country that has been among the hardest hit by the
global financial crisis. The move was orchestrated by Prime Minister
Yulia Tymoshenko, who has been demanding Stelmakh's removal for months.
President Viktor Yushchenko, her main rival, has refused to recognize
Stelmakh's dismissal, and the law is apparently on his side.

Tymoshenko holds Stelmakh responsible for the devaluation of the
national currency, the hryvnya, by some 60 percent against the dollar
since summer 2008. She also believes that the NBU decision to issue
loans worth billions of dollars to several ailing banks from November
through January was illegal. Tymoshenko is especially unhappy about the
refinancing of Ukraine's seventh-largest bank, Nadra, which she accused
of involvement in illegal currency speculations, an allegation denied by
the bank (see EDM, December 17; UNIAN, January 24).

Yushchenko's team views Tymoshenko's motives differently. Oleksandr
Shlapak, Yushchenko's chief economic advisor, has claimed that
Tymoshenko wants to eliminate Stelmakh because he opposes her plan to
sell government bonds to the NBU in order to cover a huge budget deficit
in 2009. Shlapak warned that if the NBU started printing money in order
to eliminate the deficit, Ukraine's economy would be thrown back into
the 1990s (Kommersant Ukraine, January 27). In the 1990s Ukraine's GDP
shrank dramatically, and inflation reached five-digit figures by 1994.

Ukraine's parliament, which has been dominated by a pro-Tymoshenko
coalition since late last year, voted no-confidence in Stelmakh twice,
in December and January. That did not impress Yushchenko, who flatly
refused to dismiss Stelmakh, his ally since the 1990s when Yushchenko
himself chaired the NBU and Stelmakh was his deputy. According to the
Ukrainian constitution, it is the president who has the authority to
dismiss the NBU head, and parliament is only able to reject or approve
his decision.

Since parliament cannot directly dismiss Stelmakh, it opted for a
bizarre alternative. On January 26 a parliament majority voted to
invalidate parliament's approval of Stelmakh's appointment as NBU head
in December 2004. Tymoshenko's team tried at the same time to replace
Stelmakh with Serhy Tyhypko, who led the NBU in 2004. The Communists and
defectors from Yushchenko's camp who voted to oust Stelmakh refused,
however, to back Tymoshenko's choice for his replacement (Ekonomicheskie
Izvestia, January 27).

This probably means that the NBU will be formally steered by Stelmakh's
first deputy, Anatoly Shapovalov, as long as Stelmakh's status is
unclear; but Tymoshenko also wants Shapovalov out. Justice Minister
Mykola Onishchuk, who is loyal to Yushchenko, said that parliament's
vote on Stelmakh had no legal basis (UNIAN, January 27). Yushchenko's
legal adviser Ihor Pukshyn said that Yushchenko would appeal
parliament's decision to the Constitutional Court (Ukrainska Pravda,
January 26).

Arseny Yatsenyuk, a former deputy of Tyhypko and parliament speaker in
2007 and 2008, suggested that if one accepts parliament's logic on
Stelmakh's dismissal, one should also accept the possibility that
parliament could replace Tymoshenko with one of her predecessors in the
post of prime minister (UNIAN, January 26). In a television interview,
Tymoshenko conceded that parliament had no legal powers to dismiss
Stelmakh (ICTV, January 26).

The uncertainty about the NBU leadership may make matters worse for
Ukraine's ailing banking sector. Prominvestbank, the country's fifth
largest bank and the first to send out bad signals last fall, has
apparently been rescued as the NBU managed to find a buyer for it in
Moscow-Vnesheconombank, which is chaired by none other than Russian
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (Ekonomicheskie Izvestia, January 16).
RODOVID, another one of Ukraine's top 20 banks seriously weakened by the
financial crisis, is about to be sold to ISTIL, a company belonging to a
British national, Mohammad Zahoor (Kommersant Ukraine, January 12).
Several other large banks are on the brink of disaster.

Tycoon Dmytro Firtash has reportedly lost interest in the Nadra Bank
after RosUkrEnergo, his joint venture with Russia's Gazprom, was
eliminated from the gas trade between Ukraine and Russia under the
recent agreements between Tymoshenko and Putin. Firtash declared his
interest in Nadra last November (Segodnya, January 27). Nadra is
seriously short of cash, and the Fitch international rating agency
recently gave it the lowest rating among post-Soviet banks (Kommersant
Ukraine, January 21). Shapovalov, speaking in parliament, accused the
Tymoshenko cabinet of sinking Nadra, because at the cabinet's request a
court in Kyiv forbade the NBU to continue refinancing the bank
(Ukrainska Pravda, January 26). Tymoshenko insists that Nadra is being
refinanced illegally on Yushchenko's orders (Ukrainska Pravda, January
22).

The NBU has appointed a temporary administrator for another large
cash-strapped bank, Ukrprombank (RBK-Ukraine, January 21). Ukraine's
largest private bank, PrivatBank, denied rumors that it was going to buy
Ukrprombank (www.finblog.com.ua, January 12).

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