Commentary

The only Ukrainian-language bookstore in Bakhmut – Eney – is about to close its doors unless a good soul comes to the rescue. The owner, Volodymyr Deryvedmid announced that all the books will be put on sale. There is a great variety of books, and all of them are in Ukrainian. The Eney bookstore appeared in Bakhmut about six years ago. It was opened by a former soldier, a volunteer soldier serving in the Donbas Battalion – Volodymyr Deryvedmid. He named the bookstore in honour of his fallen comrade-in-arms, Anton Tsedik. “This was my front line. When I arrived in Bakhmut, I had great ambitions. I wanted Ukrainian-language books to be available to the people here, novels, poetry and books about Ukraine, including today’s history. I decided that I’d sell the books at a minimal price, just slightly more than the retail price.” says Volodymyr. Volodymyr says that for many visitors, Eney has become more than a bookstore. It serves as a gathering place for Ukrainians, a cultural venue where visitors can exchange ideas and news, recite Ukrainian poems, and read novels, magazines and booklets...

In the winter of 1932, Mendel Osherowitch went on assignment to the USSR for Forverts, a New York City-based Yiddish newspaper boasting a daily circulation of 275,000. Osherowitch had been born in Trostianets, in Ukraine, before the Great War, and spoke Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian like the native he was. Over several months, he astutely recorded life under Communist rule and found it markedly dysfunctional – sometimes criminal. Hordes of peasants could be seen clambering onto trains, escaping into the cities in an anguished search for bread. Stories circulated about rural uprisings, brutally suppressed. Parents were haunted by worries that their children would betray them to the GPU, the dreaded secret police. Tensions were growing between the beneficiaries of Bolshevik rule and those for whom it was an enervating nightmare. Meanwhile, Western journalists, self-sequestered in Moscow, weren’t reporting on any of it...

Seven years ago, the Euromaidan revolution started in Kyiv. Initially springing up against then-President Yanukovych’s foreign policy U-turn in the refusal to sign the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, it grew into a protest against police violence and the corrupt regime itself. Since then, Ukraine has been on a rollercoaster of dreams and crushed hopes. What did Euromaidan achieve? Did it change Ukraine? We asked activists and public intellectuals, and here is what they answered. What was the place of Euromaidan in Ukrainian history? What has it achieved, and what was not reached?..

A Kyiv court ruled in favor of pro-Russian politician and lawmaker Viktor Medvedchuk in his lawsuit to halt the further sales of a book on Soviet dissident Vasyl Stus, a Vinnytsia Oblast native who grew up in Donetsk, without his permission. Judge Maryna Zastavenko of the Darnytsky District Court on Oct. 19 presided over the libel case in which the author, Vakhtang Kipiani, publisher Vivat, and printing house Unisoft were the defendants. During the court hearing, about 20 citizens gathered near the court building to protest with posters with portraits of Medvedchuk and Stus, who died at age 47 on Sept. 4, 1985, in a Soviet labor camp in Perm, Russia, after 13 years of imprisonment. The ruling stated that Kipiani, a history journalist, must pay Hr 768 ($27) in court fees and that certain passages must be removed from the book. “My lawyer and I are not satisfied with the court’s decision. This trial should not take place because historical issues cannot be the subject of civil proceedings. Medvedchuk is not forbidden to write his own book and state everything he thinks about Stus and this court himself,” Kipiani told the Kyiv Post...

President Zelensky has repeatedly reiterated his electoral promise to end the war. The president is, of course, talking about “the war in Donbas.” In contrast, his predecessor stressed that Ukraine was exposed to a Russian Hybrid War, often warning about the risk of a full-scale Russian invasion and underlining that Russia would remain a threat to Ukraine for decades. His threat assessment at the time was in line with the National Security Strategy and Military Doctrine of Ukraine, developed with inputs from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Foreign Intelligence Services, Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine, Law Enforcement structure, and international partners. The term “Hybrid War,” “invasion,” or “threat” (to Ukraine) is hardly used by President Zelensky. Ironically, one of the few times the President used the term “Hybrid War” was when he introduced the new Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (FIS), Valeriy Kondratiuk. The head of FIS, however, embraces the term...

On August 28 this year, the Omsk Regional Court satisfied the administrative claim of the regional department of the Ministry of Justice of Russia and decided to liquidate the Omsk regional public organization "Siberian Center of Ukrainian Culture" Gray Wedge ". This is another link in the "cleansing" of Ukrainians in the Russian Federation, which has been purposefully carried out for the past 10 years. Thus, in 2010 the Federal National Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians in Russia was liquidated in court, and in 2012 another all-Russian organization, the Association of Ukrainians in Russia, was liquidated. The Ukrainian authorities should react to such things. After all, they were a warning. After all, the Russian leadership launched an attack on Ukrainians. However, an adequate reaction from the then Ukrainian authorities, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, could not be expected. After all, this government, at the suggestion of Russian curators, was actually engaged in the destruction of the Ukrainian in Ukraine and the planting of the "Russian world" here...

Peace plans reloaded? As Neta Crawford – Professor of Political Science at Boston University – has carefully noticed “a full accounting of any war’s burdens cannot be put on columns of a ledger”. Yet it does not mean that the attempts to do so are useless. Even if one might never calculate a proper compensation for a human loss, one can still figure out how much should be done to improve well-being of the living people: be it an elderly in the waiting queue to cross the line of contact or a schoolgirl hiding inside of a bomb shelter in the middle of a lesson. The landslide victory by Volodymyr Zelensky in the last elections turned a new page in the government attempts to end the war in Donbas. Nonetheless, the factual basis for the reintegration plans remains vague. Lack of credible information on the economies of the occupied region creates uncertainty with respect to the magnitude of the reintegration costs. Although wiiw study is not unique in estimating the costs of war (see here and there), it stands out in three respects. First, the...

“This Spring, facing a global pandemic in response to which we have had to isolate ourselves, many turned to literature for encouragement and direction. Boccaccio, Defoe, and Camus may teach us a great deal about life in the shadow of plagues, but few authors provide a better example of surviving and finding meaning in isolation than Vasyl Stus (1938–1985), one of Ukraine’s most sophisticated 20th-century poets... For his uncompromising moral stance and defiant behavior, prison administrators repeatedly placed him in solitary confinement. In 1983, after his diary had been smuggled out of the camp and published outside the USSR, he spent an entire year alone in a cell. Two years later, he was dead...” Vasyl Stus was a Ukrainian poet, human rights' activist, dissident and hero who died in a Soviet prison camp on the night from September 3-4, 1985. This year marks the thirty fifth anniversary of his tragic death. At the time of his demise he was only 47 but his health was significantly undermined so that the specific cause of death was undetermined. Even so at the time he insisted on a hunger strike to protest Russian Soviet oppression...

In July, the construction site of the Tribute to Liberty monument, standing in the Park of the Provinces, kitty-corner to the Canadian War Museum and the National Holocaust Monument, was spray-painted with hammers-and-sickles and the words: “Communism will win.” Many Canadians know that communism has been the political ideology of some of the bloodiest and most heinous regimes. In the last 100 years and more of its Russia-led Communist existence, it has killed more than 120 million in Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Korea, East and Central Europe, the Caribbean and more while the death toll mounts in the war in Ukraine, carnage in Syria and chaos in Venezuela...

We always suspected it. We tried to tell reporters, politicians, RCMP investigators, even a few of those ranged against us in the public arena, about what we were certain was true – but they wouldn’t believe us. I can’t blame them. There was no hard proof, not in the 1980s, to confirm Soviet agents of influence had initiated “active measures” to undermine the anti-Communist Ukrainian community in the West...