Month: July 19, 2019 6:26 am

WASHINGTON – Speakers from Washington, Kyiv and Brussels discussed Ukrainian foreign policy priorities for newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a June 20 telecast organized by the German Marshall Fund (GMF), and supported by the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation as well as the Reanimation Package of Reforms.
Opening remarks were provided by Jonathan Katz, senior fellow at the GMF, and Orest Deychakiwsky, vice-chairman of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation (USUF). Messrs. Katz and Deychakiwsky are co-chairs of USUF’s Friends of Ukraine Network Democracy and Civil Society Task Force.

Law on state language in effect

The law on Ukraine’s state language came into force on July 16, two months after former President Petro Poroshenko endorsed it days before leaving office. The Law on Securing Ukrainian Language as the State Language declares Ukrainian “the only official state language in Ukraine.” It says “attempts” to introduce other languages as the state language would be considered attempts to “forcibly change the constitutional order.” The new law defines what it calls the “public humiliation of the Ukrainian language” as a punishable offense under the country’s Criminal Code.

In mid-June, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU) ruled that the snap parliamentary elections called by newly inaugurated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be scheduled for July 21 (Pravda.com.ua, June 20; see Eurasia Daily Monitor, May 22). Recent polling conducted by the sociological firm Rating shows that 42.3 percent of Ukrainians are ready to support Mr. Zelenskyy’s freshly formed Servant of the People party, which could result – for the first time in Ukraine’s post-1991 history – in a single-party majority in the Parliament.

The wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was still smoldering in the countryside of eastern Ukraine, the remains of the 298 people aboard strewn across several kilometers of rolling fields of wheat and sunflowers, when Russian media began relaying news of a downed plane in the area.

An Italian court has sentenced Ukrainian National Guardsman Vitaliy Markiv to 24 years in prison for his role in the deaths of an Italian photojournalist and his translator during fighting near the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk in 2014.
A court in Pavia on July 12 found Mr. Markiv, a dual Ukrainian-Italian citizen, guilty of complicity in premeditated murder in the deaths of Andrea Rochelli and his Russian translator, Andrei Mironov, Ukraine’s Hromadske TV reported from the courtroom.

Ukrainians have struggled for decades to gain national understanding and international recognition of the Holodomor, the terror famine Stalin inflicted upon them in the early 1930s, Stanislav Kulchytsky says. Kazakhs can learn much from the Ukrainian struggle as they seek to recover the truth about similar horrors the Soviet system inflicted upon them.

Since independence, Ukraine has renamed 52,000 streets, dropping Soviet-imposed ones in favor of names drawn from Ukrainian history or entirely apolitical sources. But two recent cases have reversed street name changes in Kyiv and Kharkiv – an indication that toponymy is again becoming a place of political struggle.

“The UCCLA has, over the decades, been steadfast in its commitment to memorialize each and every ‘concentration camp’ created by the government of the day,” said the UCCLA’s Borys Sydoruk. “With thanks today to the Endowment Council of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund, as well as Parks Canada, the statue and plaque consecrated in the heart of this country’s national parks system in Yoho means our work in permanently memorializing every site is ongoing, but successful.”

The Ukrainian National Association began 1994 by proclaiming that the year would be dedicated to the centennial of the founding of this fraternal organization on February 22, 1894, in Shamokin, Pa. “With reverence for the past, with a vision for the future” was the adopted motto for the jubilee, which the UNA Supreme Executive Committee urged all members, branches and districts to mark with appropriate activities. The main event was a gala concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Saturday, February 19, 1994, that featured the world premiere of the specially commissioned work by Kyiv composer Ivan Karabyts titled “Jubilee Cantata.”

The Toronto-based Ukrainian World Congress has been added to Russia’s list of “undesirables.” On July 11, the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation declared the UWC an “undesirable” organization that poses “a threat to the security of the state and the constitutional framework.” Once deemed “undesirable,” an NGO’s accounts are frozen and its branches must be closed; violators of the law face fines of up to 500,000 Russian rubles ($7,930 U.S.) as well as imprisonment.

Fifty years ago, on July 24, 1969, at 12:49 p.m. EST, American astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin Jr., and Mike Collins splashed down in the Pacific Ocean following the first manned spaceflight to the surface of the moon and back.
President Richard Nixon, who was aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet that picked up the astronauts from their capsule, offered words of greeting to the astronauts and a prayer of thanksgiving was shared by everyone on the ship.

Time flies and memory fails, but I remember precisely where I was 50 years ago on July 20 at 10:56 p.m. – in the sweltering attic above the kitchen and dining hall at the “Pysany Kamin” (Painted Rock) Ukrainian Plast Scout camp sitting in front of a TV, along with more than 200 campers – all of us on edge, waiting for live images from the moon, not knowing from minute to minute, second to second, whether the landing would end in success, failure or tragedy. And then, Neil Armstrong stepped out from the Eagle to proclaim a small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind, his grainy image sent back to Earth for us at PK and for billions around the world.