Diaspora

BCU Financial Group - Buduchnist CU is honoured to be a major sponsor of the Holodomor Memorial in Toronto. BCU CEO, Oksana Prociuk, the Board of Directors, and BCU staff proudly participated in the official unveiling of the Holodomor Memorial Parkette which took place on Sunday, October 21st on the grounds of Exhibition Place. In a moving speech, 91-year-old Holodomor survivor, Mykola Latyshko, shared his recollection of the extreme hunger he experienced as a seven-year-old boy during the man-made Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. Toronto Mayor, John Tory, and Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, spoke during the ceremony. First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, Stepan Kubiv, delivered a personal greeting from Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko...

On Thursday, September 20, 2018 at 4:00pm, the Ukrainian Institute of America (UIA) and the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation unveiled a multilingual – English, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Yiddish – plaque at the UIA honoring Dr. Raphael Lemkin, the “father of the U.N. Genocide Convention”, specifically in reference to the speech he gave in New York City (September 20, 1953) describing the Famine of 1932-1933 on Ukrainian lands as a Soviet genocide. Professor Lemkin, of Polish Jewish descent, was born in what is now Belarus. His early life was marked by tragedy as his family was forced off their land during World War I, but this perhaps sparked his lifelong interest in what he termed “crime against international law”. Professor Lemkin is credited with coining the term “genocide” in his studies of “Crimes of Barbarity”. Ultimately, this led to his presentation in 1948 at the United Nations General Assembly that called for the adoption of a resolution and the establishment of a “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide”...

The Ukrainian diaspora is praying for the repose of Vasyl Stus, a martyr for Ukraine who was tortured to death in Lukyaninska prison in 1985. Our prayer services are taking place on September 2, 2018 on the eve of the anniversary of his death, September 4. Vasyl Stus is remembered with veneration as a fearless Ukrainian freedom fighter who gave his life in the struggle to secure universal values of humanity - of individual liberty and national freedom - for his countrymen and women. He was an intellectual, writer and poet, and exponent of nonviolence. For his writings alone he paid the ultimate price. Subjected to sadistic physical and psychological torture he died in prison rather than renounce his struggle for freedom and justice for his nation...

Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian martyr who was tortured to death by the Soviets in 1985, is remembered with veneration as a fearless Ukrainian freedom fighter who gave his life in the struggle to secure universal values of humanity - individual liberty and national freedom - for his countrymen and women. He was an intellectual, writer and poet, and exponent of non-violence. For his writings alone he paid the ultimate price. Subjected to sadistic physical and psychological torture he died in prison rather than renounce his struggle for freedom and justice for his nation...

The Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) welcomes the decision by the OSCE Permanent Council of 22 March 2018 to extend the mandate of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine until 31 March 2019. With this decision, OSCE participating States have once again demonstrated unwavering commitment to supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity and its efforts to counter Russian aggression in the eastern part of the country...

A large and enthusiastic crowd gathered on the evening of Wednesday 14 March at St. John’s Cultural Centre, Edmonton, to hear Jars Balan give the 2018 Bohdan Bociurkiw Memorial Lecture on the topic “An Unorthodox History of the 1918 Founding of the Ukrainian (Greek) Orthodox Church in Canada.” Jars Balan is the Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, and the Administrative Coordinator of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre at CIUS. He has written extensively on the history of Ukrainians in Canada, and has a special interest in Ukrainian Canadian literature, theatre, and church history. In his lively presentation, Jars drew on a wide range of sources, gathered over several decades of work on the social history of Ukrainians in Canada, to present an account of the founding of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada “from the bottom up.”...

The tragedy of the Ukrainian people, who even today suffer from Russian aggression, was planned first in 1492, when Moscow devised a concept of building up its principality as an empire envisioning itself as the Third Rome. These intentions become germane vis a vis Ukrainian territory, especially after the Pereyaslav Council of 1654. The Ukrainian Cossacks found themselves in an extremely difficult situation after a long struggle with Poland. Their hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky concluded an alliance with Moscow for armed support, believing in the assurances of a consensual Orthodox alliance...

Dear Member of Parliament, Re: Canada’s G7 Presidency and international support for Ukraine I am writing to you on behalf of the League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) to express my support for Canada taking a leadership role in the international community’s response to Russia’s ongoing hybrid war against the West, and Ukraine in particular. Our organization fully supports the call to action initiated by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) and UCC’s briefing note to Members of Parliament in early February 2018...

On 28 January 2018 in Rome, Italy, Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) President Eugene Czolij extended greetings on behalf of the UWC and the 20-million strong Ukrainian diaspora to His Holiness Pope Francis during the latter’s visit to St. Sofia Ukrainian Greek Catholic Sobor. In his address to the local Ukrainian community and thousands of faithful the Holy Father empathized with their anguish for their homeland that is suffering from war, prayed for an end to the war in Ukraine and called on them to not lose faith...

On a Sunday afternoon in the hall of Holy Spirit Church in Hamilton, a film premiered about Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj. U Spravakh Ryfy (“The Ryf Cases”) was presented by Ihor Yatsiv, the press secretary of Patriarch Sviatoslav. This documentary film was produced in Ukraine but uses archival material and interviews from Ukraine, Rome, Italy and the United States. The film’s title is a reference to all of the criminal investigations and operations attempting to liquidate the Church in western Ukraine during the post-war Soviet period. All of these operations were put into one KGB folder codenamed “Ryf.” It features the first years of Metropolitan Slipyj’s life until 1963, when he was finally released from the GULAG in the Soviet Union and returned to Rome...