Month: August 21, 2020 3:03 am

The two-page advertisement by Ukrainian Americans for Joe Biden is a first. I have been reading The Ukrainian Weekly since 1946 and, if memory serves, this is the first time an ad for an American presidential candidate has appeared three months prior to the election. Hardly the norm, as I recall.

Also impressive are the number of Ukrainian Americans listed on the two-page ad. I know many of them. I respect their willingness to take a stand. Getting that many Ukrainians to commit is not easy; sometimes it’s like herding cats.

CHICAGO – Any normal summer, young bandura students in the United States and Canada would be attending bandura camps, where they could perfect their playing, learn new songs and enjoy time with friends in the great outdoors. This year, the Covid-19 pandemic put a stop to dreams of bandura camp.

The North American Bandura Camps Committee works to create cohesion and foster a collaborative spirit among the camps for the betterment of their programs and participants’ experiences. Committee members represent the four camps: Bandura@Bobriwka (Colebrook, Conn.), ODUM Bandura Camp (London, Ontario, in the past, but this year’s venue was to be Brighton, Mich.), Kobzarska Sich (Emlenton, Pa.) and Litnia Zustrich (Hawke­stone, Ontario). Their aim is to be a hub of bandura education, especially camp-based instruction.

PITTSBURGH – On July 27, the Scholar­ship Committee of the Ukrainian Techno­logical Society (UTS) of Pittsburgh announced the scholarship recipients for the 48th year of its Scholarship Program. Twenty-seven awards were made totaling $11,000.

Including this year, the UTS has presented 512 awards totaling $243,200  to 312 different students – all college/university students residing in the Pittsburgh-tristate region. The COVID-19 pandemic prevented the usual Scholarship Awards Social, and the students were notified of their scholarships by mail.

TENNIS

Svitolina wins first-leg match in Berlin

The non-WTA exhibition match on July 17 was forced to a temporary hard court at Berlin’s Tempelhof Hangar after rain washed out the scheduled final on grass courts. Elina Svitolina took advantage of this surface change, rallying from a set down for the victory over two-time Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic 3-6, 6-1, 10-5, ending the opening leg of the exhibition tournament as the first champion. Svitolina defeated Anastasija Sevatova of Latvia in the semifinal, 7-6 (7-2), 6-3. In an immediate rematch, the top-seeded Svitolina was next bested by Sevatova, 6-1, 6-1, in the second part of the exhibition. This was the second time in four days the two played against each other.

MONTREAL – The French-language educational version of the documentary film “Le Génocide d’une nation,” produced and directed by Yurij Luhovy, has been made and released on DVD. Narrated by international acclaimed actress Geneviève Bujold, the 26-minute school version will be an important addition to French-language resource material for educators in the teaching of the Holodomor worldwide.

The DVD’s June release marked the 10th anniversary of the Province of Quebec recognizing the Holodomor as genocide. On June 3, 2010, the Quebec National Assembly, in a third and final reading, unanimously passed Bill 390, “An Act to proclaim Ukrainian Famine as Genocide (Holodomor) Memorial Day.” Attending this historic event in Quebec City was Ukraine’s former Ambassador to Canada Ihor Ostash, with members of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) Montreal Branch and Montreal’s Ukrainian community.

KYIV – Belarus is in revolt and a new Belarusian political nation has been born before our very eyes. The implications are far-reaching. Not only for the Belarusians themselves, but their diverse neighbors, Europe generally and even beyond.

So, what does this mean, at least for now, for Ukraine, Belarus’s southern neighbor? What was the state of bilateral relations before and after the critical presidential election of August 9, which tens of thousands of Belarusians throughout their country believe were rigged and deprived them of peaceful democratic change?

KYIV – Ukraine is calling on the Republic of Belarus to be as tolerant as possible, hold open dialogue and reject violence, because this is the approach that will ensure a way out of the difficult crisis situation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on August 10.

“We call on our neighbors to be as tolerant as possible and reject street violence. We call for the most open, albeit complex, dialogue, because only a broad dialogue will allow the citizens of the Republic of Belarus to find a way out of the difficult crisis situation and honestly discuss further steps and formats of public interaction. Only mutual understanding between all parties can preserve the country’s independence and ensure its further movement towards freedom and democracy,” Mr. Zelenskyy said.

CHICAGO – The long arm of the U.S. justice system once again has fixated on the upper echelons of Ukraine’s oligarchic class. Two moguls last week were accused of stealing billions of dollars from a Ukrainian bank they previously owned and laundering some of the proceeds by amassing assets in six states.

The U.S. Department of Justice, in a complaint filed on August 6, alleged that longtime Ukrainian business partners Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholiubov had concealed at least $70 million of misappropriated funds in the United States by purchasing “5 million square feet of commercial real estate in Ohio, steel plants in Kentucky, West Virginia and Michigan, and cell-phone manufacturing plant in Illinois” as well as commercial real estate in Texas, “among others,” a news release stated.

KYIV – As of August 12, there were 84,548 officially confirmed COVID-19 cases in Ukraine. Last week, the number of those infected set records four days in a row. Officially, the adaptive quarantine in Ukraine has been extended until August 31, however, the government does not plan to lift restrictions anytime soon.

 The Cabinet of Ministers has developed a new system that classifies the country’s regions by zones – green, yellow, orange and red – based on the level of risk for coronavirus spread. Going from green to red, each zone has progressively higher quarantine restrictions.

WASHINGTON – For nearly fifteen years, the U.S. Committee for Ukrainian Holodomor-Genocide Awareness (U.S. Holodomor Committee) has worked diligently to raise the awareness of the American public about one of the least known tragedies in the world – the 1932-1933 Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, or Holodomor. The quintessential accomplishment was the dedication of the Holodomor Memorial in Washington on November 7, 2015, attended by Ukraine’s First Lady Maryna Poroshenko, hierarchs of the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches, members of Congress, and thousands of community activists from throughout the country.

The ministers of foreign affairs of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine held a trilateral meeting in the southeastern Polish city of Lublin on July 28 to discuss regional cooperation (Gov.pl, July 28). To pursue such future development, the officials notably established the Lublin Triangle, a new political platform invoking the integrationist heritage of the 1569 Union of Lublin.

The recently established format is nothing unusual for Central/Eastern Europe; many similar multilateral platforms involving regional states already exist, including the Visegrad Four (V4), Bucharest Nine, Three Seas Initiative (3SI), Nordic-Baltic Eight and the Weimar Triangle. However, since these groupings are rarely institutionalized, their establishment and intensity of meetings telegraph the changing political priorities of the included countries and the general condition of their relations.

WASHINGTON – U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, in a statement released on August 10, said the United States “is deeply concerned by the recent draft decree published by Russian authorities targeting U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM)-funded entities in Russia.”

He noted:

“For more than 70 years, Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) have been vital sources of independent news and information for the people of Russia. This decree will impose new burdensome requirements that will further inhibit RFE/RL’s and VOA’s ability to operate within Russia, compounding the significant and undue restrictions these outlets already face.