Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Ukraine's record for tolerance and the protection of minority rights deserves praise.

ueries of the Communist era. It’s made a lot of progress.

And in no area more than in its treatment of minorities. Ukraine, of all the historically wounded places on the planet, has become in this respect a progressive, tolerant modern state, the equal – and probably the superior – of any of the European Union countries whose representatives lecture Kyiv about its ethical transgressions. We’re reminded of this happy fact by the recent pilgrimage, to Uman, in Cherkasy oblast, of 10,000 Jewish visitors on the occasion of Rosh Hashanah. Uman is the burial place of Rabbi Nachman, the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, Hassidism’s founder. That such an event is a part of Ukraine’s calendar is a grand achievement, given not only Ukraine’s historical implication in the European psychosis of anti-semitism, but also global attitudes toward Jews these days, when a hostility towards them seems recrudescent. Ukraine’s ethical exemplars in Brussels might ask themselves whether, at a moment when French synagogues are again burning, 10,000 Hassidim would be welcomed en masse in Paris, Berlin, or any other capital in the enlightened EU.

Some ethnic problems do exist, of course. But they’re being handled in a way that suggests that wounds left over from the Soviet era – when whole “traitor populations” were uprooted and moved thousands of miles from their ancestral homes – will be salved. In Crimea, for example, large numbers of Tatars have returned, and are regaining pieces of their ancestral land. Ethnic Germans, many of whom were deported to Kazakhstan and elsewhere during World War II, have returned to almost every major Ukrainian city. And then there are the Russians, whose language is largely accepted side-by-side with Ukrainian in a country that’s effectively, and happily enough, bilingual.

We express our admiration to our adopted country for its catholicity, and predict that this spirit of tolerance will define the course as Ukraine, still a mere 12 years old, grows and matures.