Commentary

China (Republic of China) was charter member of the United Nations from 1945. It was not the People's Republic of China which currently holds a permanent seat in the Security Council of the United Nations. In fact the Korean war of the early 1950's pitted a coalition of the United Nations against Communist North Korea, Communist China and the USSR.. In the struggle between Communist and Nationalist China, the Communists ultimately prevailed in the 1950's, but its was not until much later that the Peoples Republic of China became a UN member and succeeded to China's permanent seat at the UN Security council This required a formal application by the Peoples Republic pursuant to the UN Charter and a two thirds vote of the UN General Assembly. This happened in 1971 largely as result of President Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's efforts, two very dubious historical figures in terms of integrity. Many opposed argued that this was a bizarre reward for Chinese communist bad behavior...

Denys Shmygal expressed the gratitude for Canada's leadership in supporting Ukraine, supplying weapons and training the Ukrainian military. He stressed on that such support was a significant contribution to our victory. The parties also discussed sanctions against russian energy resources and establishment of a tribunal to hold the russian leadership accountable for all crimes committed in Ukraine. The aggressor must pay for his war at the the court, but also to compensate for all the destruction...

Much has been written about the atrocities at Irpin and Bucha, two cities in the Kyiv region of Ukraine, and what was discovered there after the Russian defeat and withdrawal in March of this year. Photos from Bucha corpses of civilians shot execution style with their hands and feet bound appeared on global networks and screens. Back in March, Ukraine and more than forty other states appealed to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate these events as war crimes. The ICC continues to conduct its investigation. Obviously, the human remains have been interred, but very telling real evidence remain in the ruins. The cities have returned to some degree of normalcy, but with much less vibrancy, and lasting very vivid signs of war crimes remain. There are far fewer residents in Irpin, a city of over sixty thousand prior to the war. People are slowly rebuilding their places of residence, often places where they had been born...

On Thursday, July 14, “The New York Times” (NYT) carried a relatively even story about the recall of Ukraine's Ambassador in Berlin, Andrij Melnyk for comments he had made concerning German lack of support for the Ukrainian war effort. The NYT went a little further, expounding on the current Ukrainian German political conundrum, lack of tangible support and German obsession about Nord Stream 2. Within the discourse predicated on German guilt for World War 2, was the Ambassador's presentation of history on German television, particularly Ukrainian activity during World War 2. Called upon, he specifically addressed Ukrainian nationalists, the Ukrainian partisan effort, the Poles, their partisans and the “Holocaust”. Ambassador Melnyk had laid flowers at the grave of Stepan Bandera. A German “journalist” noted that Bandera held antisemitic, fascist views. The NYT article then gratuitously included customary anti-Ukrainian nationalist calumny, uncorroborated by legitimate historians except the likes of the vitriolic anti-Ukrainian pseudo- expert of Polish ethnicity Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe...

During the early hours of the Russo-Ukrainian War, when it became clear that Vladimir Putin was mounting a full scale invasion, rather than just a much anticipated minor incursion, most, though not all, of the leading players in Euro-Atlantic political, military, academic and media circles took to the airwaves to make some rather dire forecasts and to dispense equally dire advice to the Ukrainians. It was predicted that border cities in the north and east, as well as coastal cities in the south, might fall within a day or two and that the capital Kyiv would be forced to surrender within a week. President Zelensky was advised to move the seat of government to Ukraine’s westernmost large city, Lviv, or, better yet, to set up shop in exile. The Ukrainian armed forces, in turn, were told to head for the Carpathian Mountains and convert to insurgency-style warfare...

I wish to begin my remarks by emphasizing that I am not a scholar or an academic and have not prepared dissertations or conducted formal presentations on this evening’s topic before. I am, however, a student of politics and have been involved in both Canadian and Ukrainian political life most of my adult life. This, in turn, has formulated my political thought and has led me to certain points of view, which you may or may not share. In any case, because we are focusing today on Yevhen Konovalets, a prominent figure in the Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 1920’s and 30’s, I thought it logical to start my presentation with my observations on the terms nationalism and patriotism, fundamental in my mind to this discussion. There is no one agreed upon meaning of nationalism. The term nationalism often has a negative connotation and has often been associated with dangerous and right-wing movements in history like fascism, violent separatist movements like the Kurds or the Basques, or racist movements such as white nationalism...

One of the streets in Hoholiv—a town just east of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv—bears the name of Mikhail Lermontov, a 19th-century Russian poet. Lermontov never visited Ukraine, and only a few of his poems touch on Ukrainian topics. But streets all over Ukraine are still named for him and other Russian cultural figures, a heritage of its Soviet imperial past. Hoholiv, which saw heavy fighting in March, similarly honors Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Aleksandr Pushkin. Naming streets in every city, town, and village is just one instrument for an empire to designate and control its colonial space. Every prominent Russian name was a way to exclude a Ukrainian one. Street names were a tool to erase local memory. Russia’s literary greats, however, didn’t just lend their names to their country’s imperial project. Much more than is commonly recognized, their writings also helped shape, transport, and ingrain Russia’s imperial ideology and nationalist worldview...

Ukrainians have changed more since Putin launched his full-scale aggression against Ukraine in February than they had in the previous 30 years, a development that has transformed their society but is one that Russians as yet have failed to recognize, according to Yevhen Golovakha, the director of the Institute of Sociology at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv. In his words, “what Ukraine was not able to do in the course of the 30 years of its independent existence, the war has done.” It has changed the attitude of Ukrainians to their state, their society and their future. Golovakha draws his conclusions by...

The first episode would involve those descendants of Kyiv's survivors who found shelter in Zaporizhia and whom the contemporary Ukrainian farmer deemed worth mentioning as his spiritual mentors the Kozaks ('Kozaky'). The Zaporizhian 'Host', as the Kozaks came to be known collectively, developed, in the 15th and 16th century, into a free-wheeling, land owning elite military caste on the frontier of Europe that eventually helped create the second iteration of the Ukrainian state (the Kyiv principality being the first) known as the Hetmanate (1647) and then withdrew back to their home region to let the Hetmanate find its own firm ground without their interference. Lo and behold, in 1683, the Ottoman Empire decided to make a major move on Europe - conquer its very heartland - and arrived at the gates of Vienna, seat of ...

A bloodied shirt, tattered pants, leather shoes sliced open and flesh shaved off by razor-wire are what I endured while getting a closer look at South Ossetia, a Russian-occupied region of Georgia. This rendering took place under the gaze of a nearby Russian watchtower, whose inhabitants thankfully chose not to sally forth. Meanwhile their Georgian counterparts, deployed further back from this sleepy borderline, patrolling a once-important regional highway now little more a weed-covered strip of broken asphalt, were only slightly more curious. Yet, like every Georgian I met, they expressed great sympathy for Ukraine on learning that I was a visiting Canadian professor of Ukrainian heritage. Having suffered a Russian invasion in August 2008, and the subsequent amputation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, their country stands with Ukraine, especially as Ukrainians confront the genocidal agenda of Vladimir Putin, the KGB man in the...