Month: January 17, 2020 9:23 am

Kyiv wants compensation for PS752

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine expects a full probe, a full admission of guilt and compensation from Iran after Tehran admitted, following days of denial, that it accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane, killing all 176 aboard. “We expect from Iran assurances of their readiness for a full and open investigation, bringing those responsible to justice, the return of the bodies of the dead, the payment of compensation, official apologies through diplomatic channels,” he added. Mr. Zelenskyy spoke later in the day by phone with Iranian President Hassan Rohani. Mr. Zelenskyy’s press office said Mr. Rohani admitted during the call that Iran’s military mistakenly shot down the plane, Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 (PS752). Mr. Rohani apologized for the tragedy and promised that those responsible would be held accountable, Mr. Zelens­kyy’s press service said.

The so-called E.N.O.T Corporation, a once lavishly-funded Russian “private military company” that helped Russia seize control of Crimea and fought in the Donbas, has run into trouble with Russian enforcement bodies, although not over its killings in Ukraine.
The Russian Investigative Committee claims that E.N.O.T men, under the leadership of two Russian FSB officers, took part in extortion and robbery in Russia, and many of them are now in custody over these charges. It seems likely, in fact, that this is a crackdown, not for criminal activities, but for their leaders’ conflict with their Kremlin administrators.
There are numerous illegal armed formations receiving suspicious amounts of funding, so the disappearance of E.N.O.T Corp. fighters and their “military-patriotic” camps teaching young kids how to kill may not make a significant difference. The criminal proceedings are useful, however, for the incriminating details already revealed.

KYIV – Ukraine’s only English-language television channel, UATV, has stopped broadcasting. “Ukrainian international state broadcaster UATV will cease the production of news and satellite broadcasting, starting from January 13, 2020,” UATV said in a news release.
As a result, several of the English language news presenters bid farewell to their jobs and to their viewers around the world. Its last broadcast was on January 12.
In the beginning of the year, the government in Kyiv decided to shut down international broadcasting and to close its Crimean Tatar, Arabic and English-language departments.

In his annual press conference, summing up the year just past (Kremlin.ru, December 19, 2019), Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned Ukraine’s title to the territory that Russian nationalists reference as “Novorossiya”; and he cast an irredentist glance at central Ukraine as well. Mr. Putin himself had launched a short-lived Novorossiya project in 2014, aiming at that time to create a Russian protectorate out of eight Ukrainian oblasts, six of them along the Black Sea coast.
Mr. Putin refloated that theme under a different name, “Prichernomorie” (Black Sea coastal lands) in his 2019 end-of-year press conference: “When the Soviet Union was created, ancestral Russian territories [such as] all of the Prichernomorie and Russia’s western lands, that never had anything to do with Ukraine, were turned over to Ukraine.” In Mr. Putin’s telling, this territorial arrangement was Vladimir Lenin’s idea, which Joseph Stalin initially resisted but then accepted and enforced it. “And now we have to grapple with this.”

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan U.S. Congressional watchdog, says the administration of President Donald Trump violated federal law by withholding security assistance to Ukraine.
The GAO said in a January 16 report that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) violated the law last year when it withheld the aid that had been appropriated by Congress – a key focal point of the impeachment proceedings into Trump.
The nine-page report, written by the agency’s general counsel, Thomas Armstrong, concluded that “the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.”

Ukraine says it has launched two criminal investigations into the possible illegal surveillance of former U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv Marie Yovanovitch before she was recalled from her post last year.
The Internal Affairs Ministry made the announcement on January 16, two days after investigators at the U.S. House of Representatives released documents showing Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, communicating about Ambassador Yovanovitch’s removal.

The Rev. Protodeacon Slavko (Sviatoslav) Nowytski, 85, left the world peacefully on Thanksgiving, November 28, 2019. He was a filmmaker, director, producer, historian, Ukrainian patriot and man of deep faith.
He was born in Torchyn, Ukraine, on October 19, 1934; his family fled the war via Warsaw and Paris prior to emigrating to Canada in 1950.
After earning his master’s degree in communications at Columbia University in New York, Mr. Nowytski joined CBS as an editor, working on now-historic raw footage, including the Newark riots and the Woodstock music festival.

Seen in this photo from the archives of Svoboda and The Ukrainian Weekly are organizers and participants of the fourth annual Labor Day weekend tennis tournament held at Soyuzivka, then known as the Ukrainian National Association Estate, on September 5-7, 1959. According to a news story in The Weekly, 84 players representing nine Ukrainian sports clubs from the United States and Canada participated. The host of the tournament was the Carpathian Ski Club of New York under the able direction of Bohdan Rak, who had served in that capacity since the inception of the sports event in 1956. As identified on the back of the archival photo (from left) are: Soyuzivka Manager Walter Kwas, tournament committee member Taras Hrycaj, committee chair Mr. Rak, and UNA Supreme Treasurer Roman Slobodian. Also in the photo (fifth and sixth, respectively, from right) are Svoboda editor Bohdan Krawciw and George Kupchinsky. The winner of the men’s tournament was George Korol, while the women’s winner was Irene Stecyk. There was competition also among senior men, and in juniors divisions of boys and girls.

Ukraine has been in the news for months after a whistleblower revealed that President Donald Trump had secretly blocked $400 million in military aid for the war against Russia. Careers have subsequently been derailed; others were put in jeopardy – all in the context of mind-boggling intrigue with clownish characters seeming to have come to life from a preposterous crime novel. And yet, it’s deadly serious – literally: 14,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the war in the Donbas and more are dying every week.
A century ago this January, the post-World War I Versailles Peace Conference concluded, with the map of Europe redrawn. Peoples subject to imperial rule from Berlin, Petrograd, Vienna and Istanbul (Ukrainians among them), petitioned the powers that be, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson among them, to grant their nations a sovereign state. Most succeeded, but not Ukraine.

Back in 2016 I wrote that Donald Trump was “a narcissistic, vulgar oaf, hardly a person to serve as president of the greatest country in the world.” Lesia convinced me to vote for him because he was better than the alternative. If today I still believe what I wrote then, does that make me a never-Trumper? Just asking.
What if I write today that I believe President Trump throws distinguished appointees under the bus when they disagree with him and that he betrayed the Kurds, our allies against ISIS? Would that be enough to kick me off the Trump train? Just asking.
Like many Americans I am a fan of Fox News. I believe the commentators are informed and trustworthy. Recently, I’ve changed my mind about one of them. Tucker Carlson has lost my trust.

For Ukraine, 2019 was a year of elections – first the presidential election on March 31 and then the parliamentary elections less than four months later, on July 21. The presidential election brought a political neophyte to power in a landslide victory, while the Rada elections redrew Ukraine’s political map as newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s political party, Servant of the People, won 254 seats out of the 424 being contested.
At the beginning of the year, analysts said that the presidential race was wide open and unpredictable. National Deputy and two-time Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was the front runner, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and Mr. Zelenskyy, a showman and perhaps the country’s most popular comedian. None of the three approached the popularity among voters needed to win a simple majority. This, coupled with the fact that one-fifth of voters were still undecided made it difficult to foresee who the two final candidates would be for the likely runoff vote in April.

The top story for Ukraine’s Churches during 2019 was the granting of official independence to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine with the presentation of a Tomos of Autocephaly by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on January 6 (Christmas Eve according to the Julian calendar and Theophany Eve according to the Gregorian calendar) at St. George Cathedral at the Phanar in Istanbul. Metropolitan Epifaniy, the newly elected head of the newly created Orthodox Church of Ukraine (following the decisions of the Unification Council), received the Tomos after concelebrating divine liturgy with Patriarch Bartholomew. The document was written at Xenophontos Monastery on Mount Athos, Greece, by Hieromonk Luke, a skilled calligrapher and hagiographer.
“Today, a new page opens in the history of Ukraine,” Patriarch Bartholomew said on January 5 after signing the scroll. “We entreat and exhort you to strive for unity and peace… also with those brother hierarchs who still remain under the omophorion of… our brother Patriarch of Moscow, in order that, through your inspired presence and prudent administrative service, you may help them understand that Ukraine deserves a unity Church body.”