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[Deychak, Orest]

The Wall Street Journal

World News: World Watch 

30 June 2009

A11

UKRAINE

EU and Lenders Reject Naftogaz Bid for More Funds

The European Union and international lenders told Ukraine's state gas company they believe it needs only $2 billion -- half the $4.2 billion in financing it has demanded -- to avoid a gas-supply crisis this winter.

Russian and EU leaders have said if Ukraine can't fill its gas reserves, disruptions to Russian gas supplies to the EU, which in January left several of the bloc's nations without heat, will likely be repeated. Naftogaz officials weren't available to comment.

-- Alessandro Torello

Financial Times

Ukraine gas talks move ahead

By Joshua Chaffin and Roman Olearchyk 

Published: June 30 2009 03:00 

The European Commission reported "good progress" yesterday during talks in Brussels aimed at helping Ukraine pay for Russian gas supplies.

Participants, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, said any assistance to help a recession-battered Ukraine pay its bills would be contingent on continued reform of its gas sector.

They also reduced their estimates for the amount of support Ukraine would need to fill its own gas needs and serve European customers through the winter. One attendee put the figure as low as $2bn (€1.4bn, £1.2bn) - less than half of previous estimates.

Joshua Chaffin, Brussels, and Roman Olearchyk, Kiev

AP

Ukraine, Russia battle over shared history 

By MARIA DANILOVA 

Associated Press Writer

26 June 2009

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Russia and Ukraine have quarreled over a lot of things in recent years, from politics and energy to language and religion.

Now they are again at odds -- this time over history.

Saturday marks the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava, a victory for Czar Peter the Great that symbolized the rise of the Russian empire and crushed Ukraine's hopes for independence for most of the next three centuries.

Both Russia and Ukraine are marking the anniversary, but their views of its significance are diametrically opposed. The row threatens to escalate tensions between the two former Soviet countries, whose clash over gas prices in January left millions of Europeans without gas for heating and cooking.

The historical squabble reflects the larger cultural and political struggle by Moscow to reclaim its political and economic influence over Ukraine, as well as Kiev's attempts to break free of Russia and integrate with the West.

Ukraine wants to honor Ivan Mazepa, the powerful hetman, or leader, of the Cossack state, the precursor of modern-day Ukraine, which enjoyed limited autonomy as a Russian protectorate.

Kiev hails Mazepa as a hero for his attempt -- albeit a failed one -- to liberate his people from Russian dominance by allying himself with Sweden in the 1709 battle at Poltava, east of the present day capital of Kiev in central Ukraine.

The battle was a turning point in a prolonged war between Russia and Sweden over military and political supremacy over northern Europe, which Russia eventually won.

Russia's Foreign Ministry last month warned Ukraine against glorifying Mazepa.

"We would like to remind the Ukrainian leadership that playing games with history, especially with a nationalistic undertone, has never led to anything good," the statement said.

Russian historian Vladimir Artamonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Russian History Institute calls Mazepa a "traitor," arguing that he betrayed not only the Russian czar but his own people.

A victory for Swedish king Charles XII, Artamonov contends, would have brought Ukraine under the influence of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, then dominated by Sweden -- meaning Ukraine would simply have traded one master for another.

"Anybody who fought against Russia is treated as a hero" in Ukraine, Artamonov said.

President Viktor Yushchenko says that Ukraine has the right to name and honor its own heroes.

"They tell us that that we have a joint history (with Russia), but no, each has its own history," Yushchenko told foreign reporters earlier this month.

Russia paints Mazepa as a scheming opportunist who betrayed his overlord, Peter the Great, to fight alongside the Swedes. Ukrainian authorities plan to erect monuments to Mazepa in Poltava and Kiev and his stern face with its thick black mustache adorns the 10 hryvna bill.

Despite Mazepa's defection, Russia won the battle, one of the keys to it eclipsing Sweden as a leading European power. Moscow continued to gradually chip away at the Ukrainian Cossacks' autonomy until Empress Catherine the Great fully absorbed the region into her empire in late 18th century. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution Ukraine became a Soviet republic and gained independence amid the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Ukrainian historians and officials say Mazepa's rebellion represented Ukraine's historic yearning for independence.

Yuriy Mytsyk, a historian with the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, calls Mazepa a hero, comparing him to the first U.S. President George Washington, who fought Britain's King George III for America's independence.

Vladislav Verstyuk, deputy head of the government's Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, said that Russia's accusations of historical inaccuracy are merely an attempt to reclaim its geopolitical dominance over a former province.

"Politically speaking, it's all about whether Ukraine will remain under a tougher influence from Moscow and Russia or it will slowly but surely drift toward Europe," Verstyuk said.

The Mazepa controversy is the latest in a series of academic and political clashes over the two countries' intertwined history.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently established a history commission aimed at countering what he calls efforts by Ukraine and other foreign nations to falsify Russian history.

Russia has angrily rejected Ukraine's claims that a Soviet-era famine, which killed millions, was an act of genocide, saying others ethnic groups also suffered. Moscow also protests the honoring of Ukrainian insurgents who briefly sided with the Nazis during World War II and then fought against both Hitler's forces and the Red Army.

 

New York Review of Books 56, number 12 (July 16, 2009)

 

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

by Timothy Snyder (Yale University)

 

Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with 

death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 

1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and 

the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share… 

 

( This article is well worth reading in its entirety OD)  

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

 

 

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 

June 26, 2009 

Constitutional Instability In Ukraine Leads To 'Legal Turmoil'

by Taras Kuzio 

 

Link to article

 

http://www.rferl.org/content/Constitutional_Instability_In_Ukraine_Leads_To_Legal_Turmoil/1763341.html

 

Eurasia Daily Monitor

June 24, 2009

Crimean Tatars Divide Ukraine and Russia

Taras Kuzio

President Viktor Yushchenko has strongly condemned the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars on many occasions and ordered the Security Service (SBU) to open a special investigative unit examining crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet regime against them. Since the 1998 Ukrainian parliamentary elections, Rukh and President Yushchenko's Our Ukraine have included Tatar leaders within their party lists.

The SBU unit will investigate the 1944 deportation and the earlier persecution of the Crimean Tatar intelligentsia. The SBU has declassified 63 criminal cases against Crimean Tatar members of the Milly Firqa separatist organization that operated from 1918-1928. SBU chairman Valentyn Nalyvaychenko recently outlined how the special unit would investigate who was responsible for the deportations. Crimean Tatars seek to have all former KGB documents pertaining to them declassified and made available for public scrutiny on the internet. The SBU promised the declassified documents would be given to families who suffered during the repressions.

On the 65th anniversary of the deportation of Crimean Tatars, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko condemned it in no uncertain terms: "This terrible and severe page in our history we, as Ukrainians who ourselves went through the famine-genocide and repression, and for a long period of time defended their right to independence, feel the sufferings and consequences of each and every Crimean Tatar" (www.kmu.gov.ua May 18).

The anniversary coincided with the first World Congress of Crimean Tatars attended by 800 delegates from 11 countries. The congress, held in the famous Bakhchysaray palace, the former seat of the Tatar Khanate, was followed by a procession to the historical Zincirli Madrasah. The congress released the pent up frustrations felt by Crimean Tatars who are dissatisfied with the manner in which they have been treated by successive Ukrainian governments. Throughout much of May the Crimean Tatar protestors stood outside the cabinet of ministers' office in Kyiv demanding greater attention for their economic and social plight.

Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, a veteran Soviet dissident, complained that no legislation has ever been adopted in Ukraine to reinstate the social and legal rights of his people (Voice of America Russian service, May 18). The World Congress called upon the Ukrainian president and prime minister, "to take urgent steps to deliver on all the previously reached agreements, and your instructions and promises regarding the fair resolution of land disputes in Crimea and providing Crimean Tatars with land" (UNIAN, May 23).

All of the infrastructure of the Crimean Tatars up to their 1944 deportation - theaters, schools, mosques, and other buildings - were expropriated by the Soviet regime and have not been returned. Crimean Tatar place names were subsequently Russified. Currently 15 out of 650 Crimean schools provide instruction in Crimean Tatar, but only 13 of these do so in the first three grades.

Land is the major source of dispute, as many Tatars live illegally as squatters, pushed into rural areas by developers taking prize urban real estate. High unemployment forces many Crimean Tatars to eke out a living within the shadow economy, as shuttle-traders where they regularly face violence from organized criminal gangs who control the street markets. The issue of the plight of the Crimean Tatars is seen in diametrically opposite ways by Ukrainians and Russians. Russian nationalist and communist parties and NGO's in the Crimea hold to the Russian world view of Tatars as rabidly anti-Russian and "Nazi collaborators." They, and the Russian authorities, see Tsarina Catherine as a great builder of the Russian empire. Ukrainians and Tatars see her as a destroyer of their autonomy and independence in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Following the Russian occupation of the Crimea, between the 1780's to 1914 hundreds of thousands of Tatars emigrated to Ottoman Turkey, where in modern Turkey they remain a vocal lobby.

The charge of "Nazi collaborators" was first raised in May 1944 when the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan. Between 25 percent (Soviet government figure) and 46 percent (Crimean Tatar estimate) died in the first year in exile. Smaller numbers of Germans, Armenians and Bulgarians were also deported. The place of these four ethnic groups was largely filled by ethnic Russians. The autonomous status of the Crimea within the Russian SFSR was abolished in 1944 and only revived in 1991 in the Ukrainian SSR to which the Crimea was transferred in 1954.

The USSR unleashed ideological tirades against Ukrainian, Baltic and Crimean Tatar nationalist diasporas by equating "nazi collaborationism" with "(separatist) bourgeois nationalism." This linkage escaped the anti-communist Russian diaspora as it, like the majority of Russian dissidents, never supported the secession of the Russian SFSR from the USSR. Russian nationalists and the majority of Russian democratic dissidents either supported the transformation of the USSR into a "Russian (or eastern Slavic) state" or the USSR's democratization, not its dissolution. In 1967 the Soviet government dropped all charges of "Nazi collaboration." But, Tatars only began to return to the Crimea in the late 1980's, where they now number 300,000 (12 percent of the population). The ethnic Russian majority is in decline from 65 (1989) to 58 (2001) percent. Approximately 100,000 Crimean Tatars continue to live in Uzbekistan.

Under Vladimir Putin the positive steps taken in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras in overcoming Soviet stereotypes and false criminal charges have been reversed. President Dmitry Medvedev's creation of a "historical commission" coincides with a bill "opposing the rehabilitation of Nazism, Nazi criminals and their accomplices" in the former USSR. The "falsification of history" is better applied to Russian leaders who have ordered school textbooks to portray Stalin as an "effective manager," and his mass crimes against humanity explained away as the only manner in which to overcome the USSR's economic and security challenges. However, as the Moscow-based political analyst Yevgeny Kiselyov, recently observed: "The worst ‘falsifier' of history, of course, has been the Kremlin" (Moscow Times, June 3). Stalin came in third place in the "Name of Russia" nationwide television contest held in November 2008.

Ukraine's strategy of declassifying KGB documents pertaining to Soviet crimes against humanity began in the 1990's, and was speeded up under Yushchenko. The policy is diametrically at odds with Russia under Putin, which continues to block access to archives. Soviet documents on the 1933 Ukrainian famine and other Soviet crimes are being declassified in Ukraine, while they remain a "state secret" in Russia (Moscow Times, June 9).

Glavred

Who Will the West Support in Upcoming Elections?

June 19, 2009

Taras Kuzio

(In Ukrainian and Russian)

http://ua.glavred.info/print/articles/15136.prn

 

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