Month: September 20, 2019 2:26 am

PART I: On September 7, Ukraine’s Presidential Office and the Kremlin announced a mutually agreed decision to release 35 prisoners from detention by each side. On the same day, the 35 freed citizens of Ukraine were flown from Russia to Kyiv, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed them on the airport’s tarmac (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, September 9). Meanwhile, there is no official information on the whereabouts of the 35 freed by Ukraine as a quid pro quo. The Kremlin did not stage a media event to fly any of them to Russia.
The Kremlin and the Ukrainian Presidential Office had negotiated this mutual release agreement amid due secrecy since August 7, following Mr. Zelenskyy’s urgent plea to Russian President Vladimir Putin that day (Ukrinform, TASS, August 7). Both sides are currently negotiating for further prisoner releases.

KYIV – Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister has voiced concern about the prospect of being nudged into an unfavorable agreement with Russia, telling RFE/RL that he hopes the West is pressuring Moscow as hard as it is pushing Kyiv for progress toward peace in the Donbas.
A recent flurry of diplomatic activity between Ukraine and Russia has raised fresh hope for a deal between the countries that could end the more-than-five-year war in eastern Ukraine, which has killed more than 13,000 people and fueled a bigger geopolitical fight between Moscow and the West.

In late August, the foreign affairs minister of the Russian Federation, Sergei Lavrov, said one of the preconditions to holding a high-level meeting of the Normandy Four is “the need to put down on paper the formula by the former chief of the German Foreign Affairs Ministry and current President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that the “Steinmeier formula” will be discussed by state leaders during the Normandy Four meeting.
Miroslav Lajčák, the chairperson-in-office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who is also Slovakia’s minister of foreign and European affairs, said Ukraine should use the so-called “Steinmeier plan” to have the Minsk agreements implemented.

KYIV – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with the freed Ukrainian sailors who had been detained in the Russian Federation on September 12 in an informal atmosphere in the park courtyard of the Mariyinsky Palace in Kyiv. The meeting was also attended by the relatives of the sailors. Mr. Zelenskyy congratulated the servicemen on the return to their homeland and thanked the sailor’s relatives for the support they provided. “They are the same heroes as you. They did everything to bring you back, and we helped them,” Mr. Zelenskyy said. The president stressed that the operation to return the Ukrainians from Russia had been extremely difficult; many people and authorities were involved in the process and worked in a coherent manner. “It was very difficult to keep it a secret when so many people were involved,” the president said. He presented gifts of presidential watches to the sailors.

Moscow has long argued that Russia was forced to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 because Britain and France were not willing to join an anti-Hitler coalition. Now, it is offering an additional explanation: it says the Kremlin feared that unless it made a deal with Hitler, Germany and Poland would jointly attack the USSR.
That is the substance of documents the Russian Defense Ministry has released online under the title “A Fragile Peace on the Brink of War” (pakt1939.mil.ru), a collection that also includes Soviet reports about the enthusiasm of Ukrainians and Belarusians in Poland about the chance to live in the Soviet Union.

Many people of good will around the world have been horrified by Moscow’s Stalinist defense of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its hysterical attacks on Poland for not inviting Vladimir Putin to the commemoration of the beginning of World War II, but they have often failed to recognize what Moscow’s statements mean, Grigory Amnuel says.
Mr. Amnuel, a filmmaker, producer and politician, argues that Moscow’s statements represent the final rejection by the Putin regime of the path that democratic Russia pursued after the collapse of communism and before the rise of the power vertical dictatorship and thus put Vladimir Putin’s regime beyond the pale of civilized humanity.

It’s probably by pure chance that, just as our Ukrainian American community’s activities get under way after the traditional summer hiatus, a major conference in New York City will examine the history and continuing activity of our community.
The Ukrainian Historical Encounters Series is presenting a special event dubbed “Celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the Organized Ukrainian American Community” at the prestigious Princeton Club of New York on September 21 (two days after these words are being written). Its sponsors are the Center for U.S.-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) and the Ukrainian National Association (UNA), which this year is celebrating the 125th anniversary of its establishment.

Seen in this photo are members of Ukrainian National Association Branch 204 of New York, which was founded on August 1, 1925. The branch’s founders were Mykola Vorobets, Petro Zadoretsky and Mykola Blyznak. Serving as the branch’s first officers were Mr. Vorobets, president; Mr. Blyznak, secretary; and Mykhailo Vivchar, treasurer. The Jubilee Book of the Ukrainian National Association published in commemoration of the UNA’s 40th anniversary (1936), lists Mr. Blyznak, Mr. Vorobets, Vasyl Dobrotiy, Petro Sokalchuk and Ivan Chorniy as meritorious members of the branch.

WATERVLIET, N.Y. – On September 14, on their first day in Sadochok (preschool) children learned about the Ukrainian flag from…

Five years ago, on September 24, 2014, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of Ukraine spoke at the United Nations General Assembly.…...

After Ukraine’s president rejected a law on state recognition of the Ukrainian scouting organization Plast, the Ukrainian World Congress, on September 4, and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, on September 5, issued statements in support of Plast.
Ukrainian World Congress: On September 4, 2019, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy vetoed the law of Ukraine “On state recognition and support of Plast – National Scouting Organization of Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) considers the adoption by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of the Law “On state recognition and support of Plast – National Scouting Organization of Ukraine” as extremely important and timely.

What do I mean by our other capital? Is it Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Chyhyryn (1648-1669), or Ivan Mazepa’s and Kyrylo Rozumovsky’s Baturyn (1687-1708 and 1750-1764, respectively)? Or do I refer to Kharkiv, capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1917-1934? No, what I have in mind is the capital for western Ukrainians – though not a Ukrainian capital – between 1772 and 1918, namely, Vienna.
To be sure, there was much to deplore about Habsburg rule, especially its inability to remedy endemic rural poverty and its policy of allowing favored nationalities like the Poles and Hungarians to lord it over lower-ranking ones like the Ruthenians (most of whom eventually chose to identify themselves with the resurgent Ukrainians of the Russian Empire to the east). But today, many Galicians look with nostalgia to a time when Germans, Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, as well as Greeks and Armenians, could live side by side in a city like Lemberg (today’s Lviv) without killing each other – something for which they would exhibit an alarming propensity in the decades after the Austro-Hungarian collapse in October 1918.