Commentary

Imagine the British Prime Minister saying today that the US is an artificial state because its war for independence was arranged and sponsored by France and that, in reality, the US was always part of the UK and should remain so. And all who disagree are Nazis and should be “denazified.” This is precisely the logic Putin uses regarding the history of Ukraine to justify his current war to eradicate Ukraine’s independence and everything Ukrainian. Only the role of France in his propagandist narrative is assumed by Poland. At the same time, Ukraine is constantly described as “part of Russia,” subversively used as a weapon against the “Motherland” by Poles, later by Austria, and now by the USA. For contemporary Europeans and Americans, such reasoning could seem funny or insane. For Ukrainians, it is, too, but its...

Joining communities around the globe, Edmonton’s Ukrainian community marked the tragic second anniversary of russia’s full scale invasion of peaceful Ukraine on February 24, 2024. Approximately 2000 people, gathered at the Alberta Legislature grounds to commemorate the genocide being perpetrated against the Ukrainian Nation. This important event was organized by the Edmonton Branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) in cooperation with the Ukrainian National Federation, Edmonton Branch and the Alberta Provincial Council of the UCC. Edmonton UCC President Yaroslav Broda thanked everyone for standing with Ukraine, including various elected officials. The Nove Zhyttia Choir under the direction of Oleksandra Hryniuk who performed the Canadian and Ukrainian National Anthems opened the program. A moving prayer for Ukraine was delivered by Archpriest Cornell Zubritskу, Dean of St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Edmonton. In further remarks, Broda said “ Russia has...

On the night of November 30, 2023, Ukrainian saboteurs detonated an explosion in a key strategic tunnel located on the Baikal Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad in eastern Siberia. The attack on the Severomuysky tunnel is notable not only for the impact it had on Russian rail traffic in the Russian Far East but also because the Ukrainian security services organized and conducted a clandestine strike deep inside Russia at a distance of nearly 4,000 miles from the territory of Ukraine. Attributed to the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU, the attack is to date one of Kyiv’s boldest infrastructure strikes in the past year marked by repeated raids on Russian bases, factories, and railroads. These attacks include cross-border assaults into Russian territory adjoining Ukraine, such as Belgorod province, and also include aerial attacks on Russian strategic air bases by Ukrainian drones – such as the Tula air-based attack (home to the TU-95 nuclear bombers); and ...

Tucker Carlson is far from being the first Western journalist to have aligned himself with the enemy. There’s a long tradition of the likes of Hitler and Stalin finding pliable Brits and Americans to do their propaganda for them. Russian President Vladimir Putin can be confident he won’t be facing any zingers in his interview with Carlson, due to be broadcast on Thursday night in the U.S. It will probably be more an exercise in sycophancy akin to the softball encounter between Carlson and Donald Trump last August. Indeed, it could be an attempt to map out the contours of another Trump-Putin love-in. After all, Carlson nailed his colors to Putin’s mast long ago. He’s argued ...

When a rink in northern Virginia planned an ice show featuring Russian ice dancers last summer, it skated into a formidable opponent: Oksana Baiul. The 1994 Olympic champion found out that the show’s billed main attraction were Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin—she the daughter of the notorious Russian skating coach Eteri Tutberidze—and thought their appearance would undermine the ban on Russians competing imposed after the invasion of Ukraine. So she leapt into action, texting an official at U.S. Figure Skating and asking pointed questions. The incident was a sign of the lengths to which Ukrainian athletes have been willing to go to enforce sports sanctions against Russia and its ally Belarus—one ice show and coaching clinic at a time—and how Ukraine’s current and former competitors have embodied the mentality of a country fighting for...

Does the U.S. have an obligation to aid Ukraine? The short answer to this question, one that many have been evading, is yes. The reasons have to do with America’s choices, policies and actions during the early 1990s. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, the H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations had a kind of bromance with Russian leaders, namely with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. There were numerous meetings and telephone calls both on the presidential level and on various ministerial levels. People were on a first-name basis and many American leaders tended to see the world the way Moscow’s leaders did. When the USSR finally collapsed in December 1991, Soviet nuclear assets were found in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Ukraine at that time had the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth, after the U.S. and Russia. As Eugene Fishel describes at length in his ...

The liberation of Kherson in early November of last year sparked a wave of euphoria as Ukrainians celebrated a landmark victory over Vladimir Putin’s invading army. Weeks later, this celebratory mood had given way to all-too-familiar feelings of grief and fury as the Ukrainian authorities uncovered evidence of war crimes committed during the city’s eight-month Russian occupation. This grim process has already been repeated in hundreds of liberated villages, towns, and cities throughout northern and eastern Ukraine. On each occasion, retreating Russian troops have left behind a vast crime scene of mass graves, torture chambers, sexual violence, and deeply traumatized communities. Specific accounts of civilian suffering are strikingly similar from region to region, indicating that these crimes are the result of deliberate Kremlin policy rather than the rogue actions of individual Russian army units. Wherever Russia establishes control, anyone regarded as posing a potential threat to ...

As the year draws to a close, there is a growing sense of Ukraine fatigue in Western capitals amid pessimistic forecasts, talk of a battlefield stalemate, and recriminations over the perceived failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. This grim mood is raising serious questions about the future of military aid to Ukraine and the prospects for continued Western support into 2024 and beyond. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is looking more confident than ever. This week, he was in particularly messianic mood as he addressed the World Russian People’s Council. Ukrainians and Belarusians are not independent but are in fact part of the “great Russian nation,” he declared. According to Putin, these two nations have been artificially divided from Russia by the “separatist illusions” of the 1991 Soviet collapse. Putin’s casual denial of Ukraine’s right to exist is a timely...

With regard to “formal security guarantees,” Baker replied, “We did not think it appropriate to provide” them. For his part, then-Senator Joe Biden chimed in to suggest that Kyiv accept legal obligations to disarm or “be faced with a three-to-one superiority of nuclear weapons from Russia.” In one breath, he contemplated Ukraine becoming an independent nuclear power left beholden to Russia due to its nuclear dominance. A coercive double bind became a feature, not a glitch of disarmament. Despite these inklings, Baker hectored Ukraine to confirm its renunciation of nuclear weapons by fully accepting various treaty obligations, including START. The full-court press to remove nuclear weapons from Ukrainian soil would soon transform from a key objective under the Bush Administration into an...

The 90th anniversary this month of the Holodomor - the horrendous crime against the Ukrainian people committed by Stalin and his servile entourage in Moscow in 1932-33, is upon us. Millions perished as a result of it, while the Russian-dominated Soviet state got away with mass murder because of Western naivety and myopia. Dispatches at that time from a few courageous eyewitness Western correspondents who reported that a deliberate, punitive and in fact genocidal starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviet regime was taking place, were ignored. The outside world did not want to believe that such a massive atrocity was being carrried out. The purveyors of fake news whitewashing the Soviet killers – such as the American Pulitzer Prize Winner Walter Duranty, George Bernard Shaw and...