Commentary

DECEMBER 11, 2013-Ottawa, Canada- Yesterday the House of Commons concluded at 10:15 p.m. a rare four hour emergency debate on the situation in Ukraine where all political parties unanimously condemned the use of force by authorities attempting to dismantle the Euromaidan in Kyiv'sIndependence Square...

The Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre (UCRDC) invites application for a research scholarship in memory of Prof. Wasyl Janischewskyj, a founding member of the UCRDC and its long-time chair. The award is intended to support the publication of a major scholarly article or monograph in either Ukrainian or English on a topic related to Ukrainian studies. Priority will be given to projects dealing with Transcarpathia (particularly the establishment of the Carpatho-Ukrainian state) or the Ukrainian community and institutions in interwarPrague. The scholarship is valued at $8,000 CDN...

In the middle of the night, from 10 to 11 December 2013, the troops of the Ukrainian special forces started another brutal attack on the peaceful demonstrators in Kyiv. Aside from the regular police, militia men were also widely involved, having been brought from the depressed cities of easternUkraine. Some of them were deployed to cause provocations, as it had been done during the scripted assault on the interior troops at the building of President’s Administration on December 1...

Very often we attend an interesting presentation, then leave and no one mentions the value and the importance of the information. I attended this presentation about Holodomor inBrooklyn,N.Y. Some of the high points of the presentation in my opinion were explaining the cause of death of the people that had starved during “Holodomor”. One would assume hunger. But Mr. Ivanushchenko showed that small children after an autopsy were diagnosed with “ death due to old age”. At first this seemed to be made up but it turned out to be true. Because of malnutrition, their bodies had aged at an extraordinary rate and this happens when there is hunger. The bodies are smaller than normal, there is protein deficiency and all these conditions were recorded. There were no births recorded only deaths at the time...

Honorable Members of the Legislative Assembly, Dear Guests and Participants of this Gathering! In the mid-19th Century Ukrainian wheat accidentally found its way toCanada. Ukrainian settlers made their way here even sooner. In both cases,Canadabenefitted greatly: Ukrainian wheat yielded generous harvests, while Ukrainians helped buildCanada– especially the prairies ofAlberta,SaskatchewanandManitoba. This particular sort of wheat took on the name “Red Fife,” and in time would turnCanadainto a world exporter of grain. For their part, Ukrainians, who came to be called pioneers, turned the wild prairies into the richest provinces of Canada...

On Thursday, November 21, 2013, with only one week before the scheduled signing of the Association Agreement betweenUkraineand the European Union, the former's head of its Cabinet of Ministers announced that there would be no signing, at least not within a week at the upcomingVilniussummit. What ensued was a spontaneous people's protest throughoutUkrainethat evolved into a well organized national revolution that ultimately concentrated inUkraine's capital, Kyiv...

It’s bland--like calamari, but without the garlic. However, boiling the human trachea, if you chance upon any fuel, helps soften the gristle. And then of course there are the other body parts, the shriveled organs, and the even more desiccated muscle. Not much of that on the bones of walking cadavers, though. But that is what a mother, driven insane by starvation, was reduced to eating; often, one of her own children. At times a child who already starved to death, at other times a child who, while barely still breathing, she would kill in its sleep to try to save the siblings. Kidnapping became a food source. But it never helped. Nor did corpse eating. It just postponed the inevitable. And it was the inevitability of it all, the absolute, categorical hopelessness of it all, that was the psychological side of a genocide that was so massive and degenerate, that the word shrinks to impotence. The horror was committed in the...

In 1932-33 there was a famine in the USSR. Twenty years later Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-American-Jewish lawyer, one of the draftsman of the United Nations' Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, offered the following remarks in a paper which he entitled “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine”: “What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide… the destruction of the Ukrainian nation... the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible of all – starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death…” In order to better understand the...

“If you had money, preferably reichsmarks or tsarist gold rubles, during the German rule, you could buy, as you can now, anything — from gold to weapons — and buy yourself out of anything,” says Yurii Vozniuk, who lived in the village of Ivankiv, Zhytomyr oblast, in the years of occupation. Lviv University Professor Zaretsky, who stayed in Lviv during the occupation, said about that-day life: “In general, you could do everything for money: all you had to do was grease a German palm. In brief, what was happening at the time was theft and bribery. Nobody had ever seen a system like this.” At first glance, the recollections of people who went through the Second World War may seem a bit exaggerated, for Germans have always been distinguished for their discipline, while what we see here is an outright accusation of corruption. But archival documents confirm that in those times “barter trade and profiteering wa...

More than 90 years have passed since Ukrainian exiles from the Ukrainian National Republic intent on establishing an institution of higher education free of hostile influence and constraints, formed the Ukrainian Free University, first in Vienna, then relocated to Prague and finally to Munich. The history of the Ukrainian Free University was written with great foresight and in difficult circumstances by several generations that established it and then secured its financial foundation. Today's generation which grew up in the diaspora, thus far has done little of substance to assist this institution, but has at least benefited in part. However, no generation, excepting perhaps that of its founders, could have envisioned its far reaching significance in the 21st century as an invaluable treasure of our nation. The UFU today embodies the essence of a metaphorical educational bridge between the diaspora and independent Ukraine separated for so long by a literal iron curtain which kept apart not only people but ideas, thoughts and cultures. Today, the...