Author: Staff

Lawmakers decline Zelensky’s proposals Ukraine’s Parliament has defied new President Volodymyr Zelensky a day after he issued a decree to disband it and hold snap elections in July, declining to discuss his proposed changes in electoral legislation. At an emergency session on May 22, lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada voted against debating two amendments proposed...

This week, we’d like to focus on a bread-and-butter issue for any newspaper: readers and subscribers. It’s quite simple: without these no newspaper can exist, much less a community newspaper like The Ukrainian Weekly that has a niche market. That’s why it’s crucial for us that our readers renew their subscriptions in a timely fashion. (It’s also crucial that readers who may peruse our pages from time to time, whether in print or online, become paid subscribers instead of, say, reading their neighbor’s or uncle’s copy of the paper.)

Last year, on May 24, 2018, the Dutch-led Joint Investigative Team (JIT) concluded, as part of its international probe, that the anti-aircraft missile system that was used to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, came from Russia. 

U.N. court hears detained sailors’ caseUkraine has called upon the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to order the immediate release of 24 Ukrainian sailors and three naval ships that were seized by Russia near the Kerch Strait off the coast of Russia-occupied Crimea in November 2018.

On April 25, the Verkhovna Rada passed a new law on languages whose primary aim is to protect the primacy of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine. The vote tally was 278 for, 38 against, seven abstaining and 25 not voting; it came after a review of over 2,000 amendments in a painstaking process begun back in June 2017. The law recognizes that language is a primary component of national identity and, as our correspondent reported from Kyiv, it “elevates the status of the Ukrainian in nearly every facet of life.”

Twenty years ago, on May 17-18, 1999, nearly 35,000 Crimean Tatars gathered in the Crimean capital city of Symferopol to mark the 55th anniversary of their forced relocation to Central Asia by the order of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1944. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the forced deportation.

Zelensky: Relations far from ‘brotherly’ Ukrainian President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky has said that current ties between Kyiv and Moscow cannot be called “brotherly,” and the two countries now have little in common outside a shared border. In a Facebook post on May 2, Mr. Zelensky reacted to recent comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said that Russians and Ukrainians had “lots in common.” Mr. Zelensky wrote: “The reality is that today, after [Russia’s] annexation of Crimea and [its] aggression in [Ukraine’s eastern region of] Donbas, the ‘common’ thing that is left is the state border: 2,295 kilometers and 400 meters.

It’s official: Zelensky declared winnerUkraine’s Central Election Commission has formally declared Volodymyr Zelensky the winner of the country’s presidential election, releasing final results from the April 21 runoff vote. Commission Chairwoman Tetyana Slipachuk announced on April 30 that Mr. Zelensky received 13,541,528 votes, more than 73 percent, while incumbent President Petro Poroshenko received 4,522,450, less than 25 percent. The numbers were in line with the unofficial figures released shortly after the runoff between Mr. Zelensky, a 41-year-old comedian with no political experience, and Mr. Poroshenko, 53, who is close to the end of a five-year term. The turnout was 61.37 percent, Ms. Slipachuk said, adding that the commission had not received any major complaints that could put the results of the election in doubt. The official results of the runoff were based on the protocol signed by 15 members of the commission – one member was absent at the session – and official representatives of the contenders. Mr. Zelensky is expected to be inaugurated in early June. (RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, with reporting by UNIAN and Gordon)

It’s pretty incredible all right: a fictional teacher-turned-accidental president in a TV comedy becomes the president in real life. And with over 73 percent voter support. That, in a nutshell, is what happened in Ukraine on election day, April 21.

Forty years ago, on April 30, 1979, Soviet political prisoner Valentyn Moroz spoke at a press conference at the Ukrainian National Association in Jersey City, N.J. He was one of five prisoners – Alexander Ginzburg, Georgi Vins (a Baptist Ukrainian minister) and two Jewish dissidents (Eduard Kuzentsov and Mark Dymshits) who had sought refuge in Israel – who were exchanged with the West for two Soviet employees (Valadik A. Enger and Rudolf Chernyayev) who were found guilty of espionage in the U.S. Moroz arrived in the U.S. on Friday, April 27.

Thousands come to thank PoroshenkoIn an unprecedented event, several thousand people came to Bankova Street, the location of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, on April 22 to see President Petro Poroshenko, whose presidential term is about to end, in order to express gratitude for everything he did for Ukraine. Mr. Poroshenko thanked those in the crowd for their support and reminded them that he would stay in politics. He emphasized that his goals were to win the parliamentary elections and “return to Bankova” after the next presidential election. (Serhii Nuznenko/RFE/RL)

If that headline doesn’t catch your attention, well, then you must not know who Joseph Stalin is. The leader of the USSR from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953 was responsible for killing more than 20 million people. His rule was marked by repressions, purges, show trials, the Great Terror, labor camps, the Gulag, man-made famines, genocides. Stalin was the mastermind behind the Holodomor, during which millions in Ukraine were subjected to death by forced starvation and through which he sought to destroy the Ukrainian nation. Stalin was responsible also for the 1944 genocidal deportation of another nation, the Crimean Tatars, from their homeland.