Commentary

Daniel Bilak is on a mission. The former Torontonian, who now calls Kyiv home, wants to rebrand Ukraine. “What we really want to do is to get the message across that there is new Ukraine,” Bilak says, taking a short break from his regimen of shaking hands and making introductions at a busy conference room at the Ukraine Reform Conference hosted at the Royal York Fairmount Hotel in downtown Toronto. “We want to break down stereotypes, we want to break down people’s views of Ukraine as this sort of basket case, failed state nation that the Russians and many Western media promote”...

Every year, Russian president Vladimir Putin holds a huge, end-of-the-year press conference for Russian and international press. Ukraine is traditionally an important topic. This year, Putin held his 15th year-end press conference on December 19. What Putin said about Ukrainian President Volo­dymyr Zelenskyy, Kremlin influence over the leaders of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics,” Ukrainian land reform, and who, by his words, “grabbed me by the throat” in Minsk, when will the eastern Ukrainian border be closed, payments by Gazprom to Ukraine’s Naftogaz, and what he thinks about presidential term limits in Russia – in our piece. About...

When I spoke with the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan this past summer, at a café in the ninth district of Vienna, I found him much gentler than I had imagined him to be. As a public persona, Zhadan is sexy and tough and the lead singer of a ska band called Sobaky v Kosmosi, or Dogs in Outer Space. His music is post-proletarian punk, his poetry is lyrical, and his novels recall William Burroughs and the Beats, with the occasional intrusion of Latin American-style magical realism. Yet in person Zhadan was a self-reflective conversation partner and a careful listener. He is conscious of his role as the unofficial bard of eastern Ukraine—and still more conscious of the moral responsibility he bears for his words. There are not many people from his part of the world whose words reach beyond its borders. Zhadan is among a handful of Ukrainian authors whose work has been widely translated. His most recent novel, “Voroshilovgrad,” won the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Switzerland; he has drawn enthusiastic audiences in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Russia...

The self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ [‘DPR’] announced on 29 November that is has adopted a ‘law’ defining what it claims to be its ‘state territory’. Unlike the actual area under ‘DPR’ control, the document asserts that the borders encompass the entire Donetsk oblast. Since this so-called ‘republic’ has only been ‘recognized’ by one equally illegitimate Russian-controlled territory (South Ossetia), the move is formally meaningless. Politically, it is not, as it comes just 10 days before a scheduled ‘Normandy summit’ between the Presidents of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany and flies in the face of the Minsk Accords...

The collapse of Kyiv’s position at home and abroad over the last six months reflects the fact that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s three closest advisors are working for the Kremlin and have given Vladimir Putin a victory he very much needed but doesn’t deserve, Andrey Piontkovsky says. During his presidential campaign at the urging of people like oligarchs Viktor Medvedchuk and Ihor Kolomoisky and his close friend Andrey Yermak, the Russian analyst says, Zelensky offered himself as the candidate of “the peace party” which Ukrainians had to support against “the war party” of his predecessor “This Goebbels-style Kremlin lie,” Piontkovsky adds, “continues to be injected into Ukrainian consciousness by...

Ukraine has taken seriously one of the most complex and long-lasting reforms - land reform. The government's proposed model of the land market reform is flawed and is not supported by the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian society, causing criticism and protests. Land Reform History In the 1990s, land belonging to collective and state farms was dissolved in Ukraine. The shares were transferred to the property of farm workers and pensioners who had previously worked on these collectives. In 2001, a moratorium on the sale of agricultural land was established providing government the time to prepare a legislative framework for regulating land circulation. All successive Ukrainian presidents tried to end the moratorium but were not successful. The current...

Through three rounds of elections in Ukraine last spring and summer, the people of Ukraine used the power of the ballot box to overwhelmingly support the candidacy of Volodymyr Zelensky, a TV personality who coincidentally rose to fame playing the role of a fictional president. What was clear from the results in what was generally a fair election is that a broad cross-section of Ukrainians were hoping that Mr. Zelensky would begin reform of an oligarchic, corrupt system of governance and end Russia’s occupation of the Crimea and Donbas region...

By October 2019, it has, however, become apparent that these worries are unjustified. If one believes recent public announcements by Ukraine’s new president, government and dominant parliamentary faction, the local governance reform started in 2014 will continue with adequate speed and depth. At the same time, the currently escalating conflict around the future modus of local self-government in Kyiv raises concerns. Conflicts such as these gain additional importance in view of the nation-wide regional and local elections that are due in October 2020...

HREC Education, of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC), a project of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, is pleased to announce that its national panel of three education adjudicators has selected the 2019 winner of the HREC Educator Prize for Holodomor Lesson Plan Development. This year, the judges have awarded one prize of $1,000 CAD to Dr. Thomas R. Mueller of the California University of Pennsylvania in California, PA. Dr. Tom Mueller has been a geography professor at California University of Pennsylvania since 1999. He is also an educational associate for Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute’s MAPA (Digital Atlas of Ukraine) program...

When President Trump froze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to Ukraine in July of 2019, Oleksandr Markiv was in a trench defending his country’s eastern front line against Russia-backed separatist militias. Two months later, Markiv, 38, was dead, killed by shrapnel during a mortar attack on his battalion’s position in a notoriously dangerous defense point known as the Svitlodarsk Bulge. Markiv was one of 25 Ukrainian fatalities on the front line since July 18, the day Trump quietly put on hold a $391-million military aid package appropriated by Congress for Ukraine last year. Democrats accuse Trump of holding Ukraine’s allotted military aid hostage in exchange for promises from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the dealings of Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden...