Month: February 18, 2021 10:53 pm

Twenty-five years ago, the United Kingdom handed over its Antarctic research station to Ukraine. On February 6, 1996, the Union Jack was replaced by the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag and the British Faraday station became the Aca­demician Volodymyr Vernadsky Station, named after the renown Ukrainian geochemist, mineralogist and crystallographer.

Part 2

Kyiv is pinning its hopes on the new administration of United States President Joseph Biden to help rebalance and restart both the Normandy forum and the Minsk Contact Group (see Part One in EDM, February 4). The Minsk Contact Group operates at a level roughly equivalent to the ambassadorial, below the head of state/head of government or ministerial levels of the Normandy format.

It’s still a very cold winter in Ukraine, but the political temperature continues to rise. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pressed from all sides, has continued to stand his ground, stepping up his attack against those viewed as Russia’s fifth columnists and managing to hold his own in the opinion polls. Meanwhile, the rating of his own party, Servant of the People, and its parliamentary faction is failing to recover from its freefall during recent months.

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested six Ukrainian Muslims, five of them Crimean Tatars, after armed searches of seven homes in the early morning of February 17. The FSB and heavily armed Rosgvardia officers were clearly interested only in books, and in at least one case, claimed to find the so-called prohibited literature which they pulled from their own bag. Russia has again targeted civic activists, some of whom have already faced administrative prosecution for peaceful pickets in solidarity with Russia’s ever-mounting number of Crimean Tatar and other Ukrainian political prisoners.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government are preparing to host a summit of heads of state and government, aiming to mobilize a more effective international response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. The summit is planned to inaugurate the “Crimea Platform,” a multi-level framework for devising actions that would raise the costs of Russia’s occupation and contradict Moscow’s thesis about the irreversibility of its hold on the peninsula. The summit event is set for August 23, back-to-back with (but distinct from) the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s national independence on August 24, in Kyiv, in the presence of world leaders.

On February 17, the Ukrainian parliament passed a resolution calling the pro-democracy Euro-Maidan protests of 2013-2014 – known as the Revolution of Dignity – a significant nation-building moment in the country’s history.

Twenty-five years ago, on February 23, 1996, a rift between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople came to a head with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s recognition of the Orthodox Church of Estonia as independent of Moscow, under the direct jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The battle for recognition for the Orthodox Church of Estonia came to a close after almost four years of unsuccessful negotiations with Moscow.

Great Lent Pastoral of the Ukrainian Catholic Hierarchy of the U.S.A. to the clergy, hieromonks and brothers, religious sisters, seminarians, and beloved faithful.
Glory to Jesus Christ!

Dear Editor:

In its January 30 statement, printed by The Weekly (February 12), the Chancery Office of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia announced that The Way will suspend publication as an online biweekly newspaper, in part because “surveys [conducted as part of the Chancery Office’s reevaluation of all existing communications operations] have indicated that a vast majority of Ukrainian Catholics within the Archeparchy do not access or utilize The Way in its present format and dissemination approach.”

Dear Editor:

It is one thing to state a fact, such as that former President Barack Obama agreed to provide Ukraine with non-lethal military aid but not lethal aid, or to state an opinion, such as that this decision about lethal aid was a mistake, a criticism I share. It is quite another to spout nonsense about why Ukraine didn’t respond militarily upon Russia’s occupation of Crimea, as Messrs. Mirchuk and Martyniuk have done in The Weekly.

I remember like yesterday being in Kyiv on the evening of November 21, 2013, for the Holodomor Commemoration. It was around 10 p.m. and I was walking with the Australian delegation through Maidan.

On this cold night, Kyiv officials arrived on the Maidan to erect the public Christmas tree, which eventually became known as the Yolka. The tree was decorated with the flags of the world to symbolize that all parts of Ukraine and the international community would not allow former President Viktor Yanukovych to abuse the nation any further.

There is no doubt that Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in November’s presidential election was welcomed by the vast majority of Canadians. After all, in a poll held during the last month of the campaign in which Canadians were hypothetically asked how they would vote, 84 percent of decided respondents picked Mr. Biden. But two executive orders Mr. Biden signed right after his inauguration have caused considerable concern.
One of these is the “Buy American” policy setting up rules for U.S. government spending, which added a caveat that exceptions to those rules will be allowed only under “very limited circumstances.