Commentary

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...

The first President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk took over the leadership of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group on the Peaceful Settlement of the Situation in Donbas (TCG). The corresponding decree was signed by President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy on July 30, 2020. As a former President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk has the experience necessary to participate in the negotiation process of this level...

Ukrainian soldiers did not return fire. "Last night, no enemy shelling was recorded in the areas of responsibility of the vast majority of units except for 15 violations of the ceasefire in Krymske, Prychepylivka, Popasna, Troitske, Novozvanivka, Novo-Oleksandrivka, Orikhove, Avdiyivka, Nevelske, Lebedynske, Opytne, and Vodiane," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation (JFO) said...

Ukrainian soldiers will be able to use the right to self-defense, as guaranteed by Article 51 of the UN Charter. Ukrainian who have participated in UN peacekeeping missions are arriving in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, to monitor the implementation of a recently agreed ceasefire. "Ukrainian servicemen most of whom have considerable combat experience and were directly involved in peacekeeping missions under the auspices of the UN have been sent on a special mission and have started to arrive at the first line of our defense in Donetsk and Luhansk regions," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation (JFO) said on Facebook on July 26...

The summer doldrums are notorious for inciting violence. This past week on the entrenched battlefields of eastern Ukraine was no exception. Combined Russian-separatist forces — operating under Moscow’s command — have continued their daily drumbeat of shelling Ukrainian troops and towns in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Ukraine and Russia have been fighting a low-intensity land war since the spring of 2014. There’s been a steady trickle of combat deaths in the Donbas for more than six years. And Europe’s only ongoing war often falls from the headlines. But the killing of a Ukrainian medic on Monday spurred notably incensed reactions from both Kyiv and Washington...