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Nation must break vicious cycle
Jan. 16, 2011, 5:23 p.m. | Op-ed — by Taras Kuzio
Taras Kuzio.
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Taras Kuzio writes: Ukraine repeatdely swings between Russophile, nationalistic re-birth polices in last century.
Ukrainians were deluded into thinking that the cycle had run its course in 1991 when the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) was banned as the party had by then shrunk to a small coterie of “imperial communists” who supported the August 1991 putsch in Moscow.
But they were sadly mistaken.
Although only 5 percent of its Soviet era 3.5 million members re-joined the re-legalised KPU after 1993, a more serious threat emerged eight years later in the form of the Party of Regions. The KPU and Party of Regions have both inherited the Russophile, conservative ‘imperial communist’ ideological wing of the Soviet KPU.
As we approach the anniversary of two decades of Ukrainian independence, it is the Party of Regions that is Ukraine’s most disciplined, best financed and most organized political force in Ukraine.
While national democrats are fracturing into ever more political parties and unable to unite, the Party of Regions has successfully merged with four former pro-Leonid Kuchma parties and attracted, through various means, many defectors from the senior ranks of the opposition, including some who voluntarily defected such as Taras Chornovil and Serhiy Holovatiy.
People search for any leftovers following a harvest in Kharkiv in 1933, during the Josef Stalin-ordered famine known as the Holodomor, which claimed several million lives – mostly of Ukrainians. (Courtesy photo)
Is it Ukraine’s fate therefore to experience repeated cycles of national rebirth-democratization followed by conservative, Russophile counter-revolution? Let us hope not.
From the 1920s until the early 1930s, Ukraine experienced indigenization and Ukrainianisation that facilitated a national revival in culture, the arts and drama. Ukrainian peasants moving to the growing towns were becoming the new Ukrainian-speaking working class. National communists defended Ukraine’s Ukrainianisation program and sovereignty. Ukrainianisation was accompanied by political and economic liberalization.
If permitted to continue eastern Ukraine’s urban centers would have become Ukrainian speaking and the last two decades would have seen a different political class emerge in independent Ukraine. In 2004 all of Ukraine would have supported the Orange Revolution – not just Western and Central Ukraine.
The tragedy is that Ukraine’s Russian speakers and Russian minority have voted for counter-revolutionary political forces, whether the KPU in the 1990s or Yanukovych and the Party of Regions since 2004. In Eastern Europe, national minorities have supported democratic revolutions against autocrats and strongly backed their country’s integration into Europe; in Ukraine they have done the opposite.
From the early 1930s until the mid 1950s, the height of Stalinism was accompanied by a massive counter-revolution against everything Ukrainian, with the teaching of history returning to the glorification of Imperial Russia. The Stalinist counter-revolution began with the Holodomor (murder famine) that led to the deaths of between 3.5-4 million Ukrainians in 1933.
Tim Snyder’s excellent new book “Bloodlands” calculates that 5.5 million people died from famine in the USSR, of whom 3.5 were Ukrainian and 1 million were Kazakhs; Russians were in a decided minority. In addition, Snyder points out that Ukrainians and Poles living in Ukraine represented the majority of the victims in the Great Terror.
In the mid-1950s, Ukraine experienced its second cycle following the death of Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech revealing the horrors of Stalins crimes leading de-Stalinisation accompanied by political and economic liberalization. Ukrainian cultural, and to some extent political, elites support the de-Stalinisation campaign and push powerful demands for a change to the manner in which history is written, the rehabilitation of countless murdered Ukrainian cultural figures and greater republican sovereignty.
(Photo: Petro Shelest)
Petro Shelest, who headed the republics KPU from 1963 until 1972, gave tacit encouragement to the de-Stalinisation process and moderate program of Ukrainianisation, advising Ukrainian writers that they should defend the Ukrainian language.
Shelest, who came from Kharkiv – the center of Ukrainian national communism in the 1920s, encouraged and distributed to local party branches the hugely influential Internationalism or Russification text written by Ivan Dziuba (today he is a fierce critic of Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk).
The forces of Russophile counter-revolution were not asleep and operated through the KGB and two large regional branches of the Communist Party that were the bastions of conservatism – Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk.
In the mid 1960s and early 1970s, Ukraine was engulfed by large scale arrests of Ukrainian dissidents and cultural figures; the 1972 arrests were the largest to take place in the USSR since the Stalin era and were described by the samvydav (self-published) journal UkrainskiVisnyk (Ukrainian Herald) as the "Ukrainian Pogrom.”
Most importantly, Ukraine’s ruling elites under three presidents (Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Yanukovych) began their careers during the Shcherbytsky and Leonid Brezhnev “era of stagnation.”
As the person in charge of ideological control, Kravchuk must have worked alongside the KGB and Moscow in repressing Ukrainian dissent and stagnating Ukrainian culture. Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, born far later, emerged as economic personalities and politicians only in the late 1980s and 1990s.
By the late 1970s, the human rights organization Amnesty International calculated that the Soviet Union had 10,000 political prisoners. Of these political prisoners, 40 percent were Ukrainians, representing a far higher proportion than their numbers in the Soviet population. Russians accounted for far fewer political prisoners than their share of the population.
The highest sentences handed down to dissidents in the Soviet Union were in Ukraine and Ukrainian political prisoners continued to die in the Gulag right through to the mid 1980s.
OUN-UPA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army) nationalists convicted in the late 1940s and early 1950s for armed resistance to Soviet rule were sentenced to 25 years, released (if they survived) and then often either executed or re-sentenced for another term. Soviet executions of Ukrainian nationalists continued until 1987.
In 1972, a Russophile counter-revolution removed Shelest and replaced him with Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who ruled Ukraine for the next 17 years. The Shcherbytsky era Russified Ukraine to a greater extent than the Stalin era, led to cultural stagnation and massive political repression with further arrests of opposition leaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1972, a Russophile counter-revolution removed Shelest and replaced him with Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who ruled Ukraine for the next 17 years. The Shcherbytsky era Russified Ukraine to a greater extent than the Stalin era, led to cultural stagnation and massive political repression with further arrests of opposition leaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Nevertheless, Ukrainians remained stoic. With 40 members, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group became the largest of the Helsinki Groups established in Soviet republics, double in size to the Moscow Helsinki Group. In western Ukraine, the underground Uniate Catholic Church was the largest catacomb church in the world.
(Photo: Volodymyr Shcherbytsky)
The third cycle emerged in the late 1980s, during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost. In 1989, Shcherbytsky was replaced by another KPU conservative, but the tide was already turning and the KPU was beginning to split between “imperial communists,” on the one hand, and “sovereign (i.e. national) communists” and the KPU’s democratic platform (mainly within the Komsomol Communist youth league) on the other.
In addition, in the same year, Rukh held its inaugural congress and as the Democratic Bloc went on to win a quarter of seats in the March 1990 elections.
During the next two decades, independent Ukraine experienced the flowering of Ukrainian national identity, the pursuit of a Ukrainophile educational policy and national identity and moderate state support for the Ukrainian language which grew in the educational system.
The two exceptions where education did not experience Ukrainianisation were Donetsk and the Crimea – the two regional strongholds of the Party of Regions.Throughout the majority of these two decades, Ukraine experienced democratization and a liberal political and media environment.
The exception to this liberalization was during Kuchma’s second term in office, where Ukraine experienced the emergence of authoritarian tendencies. The major difference between Kuchma and Yanukovych is that the former could only possibly build a semi-authoritarian regime in Ukraine (for example, he never fully controlled parliament).
He even failed in building semi-authoritarianism as seen in the sweeping victory of the opposition and the 2004 Orange Revolution, which overturned an election rigged for Yanukovych, in his last year in office.
The third cycle’s Russophile counter revolution took place after the election of Yanukovych in 2010 as he, and the neo-Soviet political culture of Donetsk and Crimea are far more likely to build a full Eurasian authoritarian regime. In 2011, only a year after Yanukovych was elected president, Ukraine was downgraded by Freedom House to the Kuchma era designation of “partly free.”
If this took place only one year into Yanukovych’s five-year presidency, it is obvious that by 2013, following inevitable election fraud in Ukraine’s parliamentary elections, or 2015, following fraudulent presidential elections, that Freedom House will reduce Ukraine’s position even further to “not free.”
A category of “not free” would be the first time Ukraine has been defined as such and reflect the fact that the Yanukovych regime is far more of a threat to democracy than Kuchma ever was. Over the last weekend of November 2004, it was Prime Minister Yanukovych who allegedly instructed Interior Ministry special forces to advance on Kyiv to violently crush the Orange Revolution;
Kuchma refused to issue the order.
This commentary is not meant to be an indictment of eastern Ukrainians, but of the deep-seated, inherited Soviet and Eurasian political culture found in that region of Ukraine. Indeed, eastern Ukrainians suffered the most from Russophile counter-revolution during the Stalin era.
Threats to Ukrainian national identity, language and culture and the crushing of Ukraine’s hopes for democracy have always come from the east during the 1930s-1950os, 1970s-1980s and again today.
It is time to seek to break out of this vicious historic cycle. Ukrainians, east and west, deserve far better.
Taras Kuzio is an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation visiting fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington. He is writing a Contemporary Hiostory of Ukraine.
Is it Ukraine’s fate therefore to experience repeated cycles of national rebirth-democratization followed by conservative, Russophile counter-revolution? Let us hope not.In the last 100 years, Ukraine has experienced three cycles of national re-birth and democratization followed on each occasion by conservative Russophile counter revolution.
Ukrainians were deluded into thinking that the cycle had run its course in 1991 when the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) was banned as the party had by then shrunk to a small coterie of “imperial communists” who supported the August 1991 putsch in Moscow.
But they were sadly mistaken.
Although only 5 percent of its Soviet era 3.5 million members re-joined the re-legalised KPU after 1993, a more serious threat emerged eight years later in the form of the Party of Regions. The KPU and Party of Regions have both inherited the Russophile, conservative ‘imperial communist’ ideological wing of the Soviet KPU.
As we approach the anniversary of two decades of Ukrainian independence, it is the Party of Regions that is Ukraine’s most disciplined, best financed and most organized political force in Ukraine.
While national democrats are fracturing into ever more political parties and unable to unite, the Party of Regions has successfully merged with four former pro-Leonid Kuchma parties and attracted, through various means, many defectors from the senior ranks of the opposition, including some who voluntarily defected such as Taras Chornovil and Serhiy Holovatiy.
People search for any leftovers following a harvest in Kharkiv in 1933, during the Josef Stalin-ordered famine known as the Holodomor, which claimed several million lives – mostly of Ukrainians. (Courtesy photo)
Is it Ukraine’s fate therefore to experience repeated cycles of national rebirth-democratization followed by conservative, Russophile counter-revolution? Let us hope not.
From the 1920s until the early 1930s, Ukraine experienced indigenization and Ukrainianisation that facilitated a national revival in culture, the arts and drama. Ukrainian peasants moving to the growing towns were becoming the new Ukrainian-speaking working class. National communists defended Ukraine’s Ukrainianisation program and sovereignty. Ukrainianisation was accompanied by political and economic liberalization.
If permitted to continue eastern Ukraine’s urban centers would have become Ukrainian speaking and the last two decades would have seen a different political class emerge in independent Ukraine. In 2004 all of Ukraine would have supported the Orange Revolution – not just Western and Central Ukraine.
The tragedy is that Ukraine’s Russian speakers and Russian minority have voted for counter-revolutionary political forces, whether the KPU in the 1990s or Yanukovych and the Party of Regions since 2004. In Eastern Europe, national minorities have supported democratic revolutions against autocrats and strongly backed their country’s integration into Europe; in Ukraine they have done the opposite.
From the early 1930s until the mid 1950s, the height of Stalinism was accompanied by a massive counter-revolution against everything Ukrainian, with the teaching of history returning to the glorification of Imperial Russia. The Stalinist counter-revolution began with the Holodomor (murder famine) that led to the deaths of between 3.5-4 million Ukrainians in 1933.
Tim Snyder’s excellent new book “Bloodlands” calculates that 5.5 million people died from famine in the USSR, of whom 3.5 were Ukrainian and 1 million were Kazakhs; Russians were in a decided minority. In addition, Snyder points out that Ukrainians and Poles living in Ukraine represented the majority of the victims in the Great Terror.
In the mid-1950s, Ukraine experienced its second cycle following the death of Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech revealing the horrors of Stalins crimes leading de-Stalinisation accompanied by political and economic liberalization. Ukrainian cultural, and to some extent political, elites support the de-Stalinisation campaign and push powerful demands for a change to the manner in which history is written, the rehabilitation of countless murdered Ukrainian cultural figures and greater republican sovereignty.
(Photo: Petro Shelest)
Shelest, who came from Kharkiv – the center of Ukrainian national communism in the 1920s, encouraged and distributed to local party branches the hugely influential Internationalism or Russification text written by Ivan Dziuba (today he is a fierce critic of Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk).
The forces of Russophile counter-revolution were not asleep and operated through the KGB and two large regional branches of the Communist Party that were the bastions of conservatism – Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk.
In the mid 1960s and early 1970s, Ukraine was engulfed by large scale arrests of Ukrainian dissidents and cultural figures; the 1972 arrests were the largest to take place in the USSR since the Stalin era and were described by the samvydav (self-published) journal UkrainskiVisnyk (Ukrainian Herald) as the "Ukrainian Pogrom.”
Most importantly, Ukraine’s ruling elites under three presidents (Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Yanukovych) began their careers during the Shcherbytsky and Leonid Brezhnev “era of stagnation.”
As the person in charge of ideological control, Kravchuk must have worked alongside the KGB and Moscow in repressing Ukrainian dissent and stagnating Ukrainian culture. Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, born far later, emerged as economic personalities and politicians only in the late 1980s and 1990s.
By the late 1970s, the human rights organization Amnesty International calculated that the Soviet Union had 10,000 political prisoners. Of these political prisoners, 40 percent were Ukrainians, representing a far higher proportion than their numbers in the Soviet population. Russians accounted for far fewer political prisoners than their share of the population.
The highest sentences handed down to dissidents in the Soviet Union were in Ukraine and Ukrainian political prisoners continued to die in the Gulag right through to the mid 1980s.
OUN-UPA (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army) nationalists convicted in the late 1940s and early 1950s for armed resistance to Soviet rule were sentenced to 25 years, released (if they survived) and then often either executed or re-sentenced for another term. Soviet executions of Ukrainian nationalists continued until 1987.
In 1972, a Russophile counter-revolution removed Shelest and replaced him with Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who ruled Ukraine for the next 17 years. The Shcherbytsky era Russified Ukraine to a greater extent than the Stalin era, led to cultural stagnation and massive political repression with further arrests of opposition leaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1972, a Russophile counter-revolution removed Shelest and replaced him with Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who ruled Ukraine for the next 17 years. The Shcherbytsky era Russified Ukraine to a greater extent than the Stalin era, led to cultural stagnation and massive political repression with further arrests of opposition leaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Nevertheless, Ukrainians remained stoic. With 40 members, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group became the largest of the Helsinki Groups established in Soviet republics, double in size to the Moscow Helsinki Group. In western Ukraine, the underground Uniate Catholic Church was the largest catacomb church in the world.
(Photo: Volodymyr Shcherbytsky)
In addition, in the same year, Rukh held its inaugural congress and as the Democratic Bloc went on to win a quarter of seats in the March 1990 elections.
During the next two decades, independent Ukraine experienced the flowering of Ukrainian national identity, the pursuit of a Ukrainophile educational policy and national identity and moderate state support for the Ukrainian language which grew in the educational system.
The two exceptions where education did not experience Ukrainianisation were Donetsk and the Crimea – the two regional strongholds of the Party of Regions.Throughout the majority of these two decades, Ukraine experienced democratization and a liberal political and media environment.
The exception to this liberalization was during Kuchma’s second term in office, where Ukraine experienced the emergence of authoritarian tendencies. The major difference between Kuchma and Yanukovych is that the former could only possibly build a semi-authoritarian regime in Ukraine (for example, he never fully controlled parliament).
He even failed in building semi-authoritarianism as seen in the sweeping victory of the opposition and the 2004 Orange Revolution, which overturned an election rigged for Yanukovych, in his last year in office.
The third cycle’s Russophile counter revolution took place after the election of Yanukovych in 2010 as he, and the neo-Soviet political culture of Donetsk and Crimea are far more likely to build a full Eurasian authoritarian regime. In 2011, only a year after Yanukovych was elected president, Ukraine was downgraded by Freedom House to the Kuchma era designation of “partly free.”
If this took place only one year into Yanukovych’s five-year presidency, it is obvious that by 2013, following inevitable election fraud in Ukraine’s parliamentary elections, or 2015, following fraudulent presidential elections, that Freedom House will reduce Ukraine’s position even further to “not free.”
A category of “not free” would be the first time Ukraine has been defined as such and reflect the fact that the Yanukovych regime is far more of a threat to democracy than Kuchma ever was. Over the last weekend of November 2004, it was Prime Minister Yanukovych who allegedly instructed Interior Ministry special forces to advance on Kyiv to violently crush the Orange Revolution;
Kuchma refused to issue the order.
It is time to seek to break out of this vicious historic cycle. Ukrainians, east and west, deserve far better.Yanukovych and the Party of Regions represent the biggest threat to Ukrainian democratic and national rights since the Shcherbytsky-Brezhnev era. This is again not surprising as they are the inheritors of the conservative-russophile wing of the Soviet Communist Party in Ukraine.
This commentary is not meant to be an indictment of eastern Ukrainians, but of the deep-seated, inherited Soviet and Eurasian political culture found in that region of Ukraine. Indeed, eastern Ukrainians suffered the most from Russophile counter-revolution during the Stalin era.
Threats to Ukrainian national identity, language and culture and the crushing of Ukraine’s hopes for democracy have always come from the east during the 1930s-1950os, 1970s-1980s and again today.
It is time to seek to break out of this vicious historic cycle. Ukrainians, east and west, deserve far better.
Taras Kuzio is an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation visiting fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington. He is writing a Contemporary Hiostory of Ukraine.
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Firt, the Ukrinian Communist Party should never have been allowed to become a legitimate party. Second, the real history of
WW2 is that it was ukrainian generals who spearheaded our victory, NOT Joseph Sta;om wjp semt KGB into the front lines behind the advancing Soviets to shoot anyone who retreated for any reason. Third, the present government, if you can even call it that, was made possible by the treachery of Yuschenko and the stupidity of those who still listen to him. Fourth, Oleksandre Danyluk's mission to organize and educate Ukrainian Civil Society is long overdue. On him, and others like him, rests Ukraine's hope for getting rid of the garbage which is the Yanukovich government and the traitors who were bribed to join him
Ukrainians! Look at what Tunisian have done! You can do the same with yanukovotch, Akhmatov and other Pinchuk who have sucked your blood for a so long time and ruined Ukraine!
Yanu wasn't ever elected, it was rigged, as usual and just like any Russian election
Divide and conquer is not the solution.
The idea that Ukraine in its current borders is a unified nation is a fantasy of the horilka-swilling drunken Lviv Polark diaspora who go to Cossack reenactment camps and havent been to Ukraine in 65 years. Dividing the country would make everyone a lot happier.
You realize that by dividing, it means cutting off Donetsk, not cutting off Galicia, right?
We (Ukrainians) keep Kyiv
!!
Lenin deliberately gave a huge swathe of Russian territory to Soviet Ukraine, in order to better Russify the Ukrainian heartland. This extra territory made Ukraine a bigger country geographically but overall has been a curse to the nation rather than a blessing.
It is time for Ukraine to cut loose the Donbass and Crimea. Once this happens, the Party of Regions will never win another election, and use of the Russian language in Ukraine will quickly fade.
interesting idea but is it worth it to cut this territory loose?
do we remove the tumor or do we hope chemotherapy will cure us? the latter option being an open and cleansing revolution
with an overhauled, democratic, and nationally oriented government and reforms I think there is hope to one day have crimea and donetsk get their act together and stop speaking foreign languages
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
When the tourist crowed find out about the Crimea neither Ukrainian nor Russian will be the language of choice. Cash will.
To paraphrase Patrick Henry:
If the idiots in the so-called Ukrainian opposition don't hang together (that is, stick together in a united fashion against Yanustalin and his well-organized mafia), then they will hang separately.
Yanustalin and his gangster sovok relic mafia will hang them one by one - complete with sovok-style propaganda.
And if the PEOPLE don't finally realize that you can't have a country where there is only a gangster sovok "government" and corruption (the sovok union fell apart because of it), then the answer is simple - Ukraine will not last.
Putler is right - currently, Ukraine is not a country.
It is a mafioso sewer, where only a few people benefit from severely abusing government - and the people.
Good comment, I agree! We must stop Doneck MAFIA!
It is true that orange mafia pillaged Ukraine under yushchenko. He betrayed the great trust that was placed in him.
Yanukovych and his blue machine are keeping up the orange tradition of robbing Ukraine blind and russifying the country.
It is time for a 'clean house' strategy. This time there has to be a REAL revolution...clean all the vermin out. Expel them from the country, take away their assets, replace every one of them.
If they complain....shoot them.
If Donbass or Crimea give trouble....give them to Russia. The rest of the country will be just fine.
Any questions? heh,heh,heh :D
What a brainless orange xoxol. E Ukraine gone, the retarded rustic W xoxolia will look like a worthless vilage full of zombies. NATzO will lose any interest in the orange morons because the real strategical value for NATzO is Crimea.
Now look who wants to destroy Ukraine - the brainless nazi xoxol diaspora, who got a boot in their behinds by theUkraine people in 1950 and in 2010, heh, heh, heh :D
You heard nothing of the kind...ever! Or you don't understand Russian....which is about the only language spoken there. Or you're a 5th columnist! There is nothing remotely Ukrainian there. Period!
You're correct. People there are so brainwashed into accepting everything Russian. They have an inferiority complex about all things Ukrainian.
Get rid of the Donbass and Crimea....this is a Russian cesspool
of anti-Ukrainian intrigues. The population there is too far russified to give Ukraine any benefit. They simply feel more like Russians and do not want to be a part of Ukraine. That is FACT! Simply ask them.
The rest of the country will be fine. Ukraine will be well on the road to genuine nationhood.
The Russsians are terrified about getting the Crimea and Donbass. They would then not be able to control Ukraine. Ukraine would really be Ukraine....not this hybrid confused country.
Thus Ukraine solves most of its problems! heh,heh,heh:D
Try the library.
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
Get rid of Ukraine's Rivera and assembly line to Russia!
Who needs Little Rusians with Ukrainians like you?
Besides while visiting Donets'k I heard more Ukrainian nationalism
spoken in Russian than in Ukrainian while in Lviv.
What a load of crap!
I confess I'm a moron! don't take me seriously,heh,heh,heh:D
Only an idiot Russia would call the orange politicians a "mafia"
trying to deflect the crimes of your own people?
Tell that tou your US masters, illiterate xoxol. Orange mafia godfatger scarface Yushchnko exposed, case closed, heh, heh, heh :D
Taylor: Firtash touts Yushchenko as ‘close friend and confidante’
Dec 3 at 01:26 | Yuriy Onyshkiv Secret U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks say the controversial co-owner of gas intermediary RosUksEnergo is closely acquainted with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
Dmytro Firtash, the controversial co-owner of gas intermediary RosUkrEnergo, said he is closely acquainted with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and was his adviser during gas crises with Russia, according to a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv published on the WikiLeaks website on Dec.1.
In a two-and-a-half-hour meeting with the ambassador, the Ukrainian oligarch acknowledged his connection with Yushchenko, describing himself as a “close friend and confidante” of the former Ukrainian president, who served one five-year term before being soundly defeated in his re-election bid in January. Firtash claimed to have “loyally served” as an unofficial adviser to Yushchenko during tense gas negotiations with Russia and political crises dating to the 2004 Orange Revolution
I confess I'm a moron! don't take me seriously,heh,heh,heh:D
No...yushchenko was very bad. He betrayed the trust of the people. That's why the people got duped into voting for the scumbag russophile yanukovych.
Both these swine should be hanging from a lamp-post!
Why did not they got duped to vote for the orange mafia mamasita Tymoshenko, brainles xoxol? LOL :D
What a sour oange loser, heh, heh, heh :D
Thanks Mandsiak from Toronto!
I confess I'm a moron! don't take me seriously,heh,heh,heh:D
This too shall pass... like the mongols, like the czars, like the commissars etc... The kremlin has been trying to extinguish Ukraine for centuries, and as always, fails in the end.
Fuck him.. I'm PROUD to be a XOXOL... beats being a katsap ANY DAY!
I guess you're too stupid to even listen to your own katsap sultan Pfutin, or any other miltary analyst. Russia paid a kings ransom for a miltarily useless base, for its even more useless fleet... You sheep will never learn.... baa, baa, baa!
Yshchenko and his CIA operative wife supported by the nazi xoxol diaspora holed in US and canukistan were the US filth column in Ukraine and turned the US-paid putsch known as "orange revolution" into complete fiasco for the civilzed humanity to laugh outlaud, heh, heh, heh :D
The so called DERMOcrapy by US recipe in Ukraine was as successful as the US- made DERMOcrapy in Russia during the times of drunkard Yeltsin - complete failure because the greedy yankz do not practice or promote democracy, but banana republics for their own interests.
US itself is not a democracy but a plutocracy which practices communism for the higher level of the US financial mafia as the bank bailouts in the US demonstrates, while the US is the country with largest prizon population in the World, no public health care and inferior public education which keep 40% of the population functionaly illiterate.
So if anyone believes that the US are going to "bring democracy" using the orange uma bongo, he should rather check himself in the nearest house for mentally challenged, HA HA HA, gasp, HO HO HO :D
Yawn again :-O
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
D
Where is there wrongdoing in any of that personal history? The fact she was brought up to love Ukraine and keep the commandments of God instead of being Soviet raised is how a negative? Or do you just hate sucessful women?
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
D
There is not ONE incident that Cathy did not portray her role as Ukraine's First Lady without grace and dignity and certainly never as a front for an unsavory agenda. Your comment is so hurtfully embarrassing.
Dear Katerina is typical CIA operative, by all the indications responsible for the "poisoning" of her loser orange dumbo considering the fact that SHE did everything possible to stall the investigation of her husband poisoning with "agent orange". LOL :D
Kateryna Mykhaylivna Yushchenko (Ukrainian: Катерина Михайлівна Ющенко; Russian Екатерина Михайловна Ющенко ) (born Catherine Claire Chumachenko on September 1, 1961 in Chicago, Illinois) is the current and second wife of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
She is a Ukrainian-American born in Chicago to the Ukrainian immigrants from the Eastern Ukraine.
Kateryna Yushchenko is a former official with the U.S. State Department.
Katerina Yushenko was the one and only Ukrainian first lady who was educated,intelligent and held her position with grace!She made all proud Ukrainians proud! And your lies won't change a thing.
And by the way, where is your Mrs Yanukonvict!Have you seen her doing her job as first lady? No? Well, that's because she's the wife of a mafia boss and her place is in the kitchen!Besides,she's not capable of putting two words together just like her ignorant, brainless, husband!
Great... maybe we can be room mates!
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
Is Mr. Kuzio available for Ukraine's education minister? Taking 100 years and putting it into 1000 words is quite a fete.
Especially honorable is betraying your pro Ukrainian sensitivity when you con easily assume a fashionable Little Rusan masque. I would sincerely love to experience some of his feelings in an invited epilogue here at the Kyiv Post.
When we are granted access to his upcoming book I am sure it will recognize the historic realities of the Greco Catholic Church. I likewise trust the innocent assumption that the term "Uniate" is not a derogatory usage will be addressed. Gogol maybe a great storyteller and khokhly is great story telling of a different kind. Although I commended breviary I must admit a veneer built of thin layers will outlast a singular solid and has the ability to produce a marquetry that is stunning. I do trust his contemporary history of Ukraine he will not miss the mention of the nationalist diaspora cleansing in Akcja Wisla which allows the separatist Carpatho Rusians to fly around like nats especially in the century of Ukrainian Americas experiences.
Thank you.
Mr. Kuzio is a butt of any joke. Even his US masters keep him on a six feet distance, because he is cold war era nuts and embarrasses his masters just by his presence, heh, heh, heh :D
I confess I'm a moron! don't take me seriously,heh,heh,heh:D
Dr. Kuzio writes:
"This commentary is not meant to be an indictment of eastern Ukrainians, but of the deep-seated, inherited Soviet and Eurasian political culture found in that region of Ukraine. Indeed, eastern Ukrainians suffered the most from Russophile counter-revolution during the Stalin era."
I wonder if he has obfuscated cause and effect. The Eurasian political culture became deep seated, and imbedded (but not inherited) after the Holodomor and the continued Genocidal ethnic cleansing of eastern Ukraine of Ukrainians, along with the importation of Russians.
That also explains why -
"Threats to Ukrainian national identity, language and culture and the crushing of Ukraine’s hopes for democracy have always come from the east during the 1930s-1950os, 1970s-1980s and again today." - while Ukrainian nationalism ie Mikhnovsky, Petliura, Dontsov and others came from this self-same East during the first three decades of the century. To paraphrase the Italian diplomat - the ethnic material had been changed. Stalin, of course was more to the point - no person, no problem; as he solved the Empire's problem of Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine.
I confess I'm a moron! don't take me seriously,heh,heh,heh:D
only person suffering a grand delusion is mr kazio-turn-me-nap...
what is he on about?
delusions, he says?
is he not delusional?
does he not live the life of a provacatuer?
is he not deluding himself?
ukraine he is referring is well.... i do not know
he says he knows what ukraine is, needs and ought to be...
the only hitch, and the hitch is
HE DOES NOT SPELL IT OUT...
sure he pedals all waif's tales...
but
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO REVERE THIS casio-kuzio-nap-me-mum into UKRANIAN
better stick to knitting
ask mama what happened nine-months before he was delivered
POR the poor boy is
hallucinating
MASSIVE DELUSIONS ARE HERE ON SHOW
so please spare him
please save him
for christ's sake stop him
POR the poor kuzio orphan
LABOURS UNDER FALSE ILLUSION
that he is somehow the beacon of light, the defender, the saviour
of our nation....
ohhh good, be merciful and tell him
UKRAINE HAS MOVED ON....
and in the spirit of love and reconcilliation
the person of DUBIOUS pedegree
may be let enjoy the ukranian hospitality and right to residency
otherwise
shoot the flower into the orbit
and let him wither slowly but surely
that they eyes of the ukraine
do not have this japanese elf passing himself as ukranian...
sure he has that right
but come on,
he is programmed somewhere in the bowls of the PENTAGON
and now living off his dirty work somewhere in STRAUSS WALTZ walts...
leave, desist, join the human race
and leave the UKRAINE to UKRANIANS,
mr kazio, kuzio, casio, computer-brutal-game software peddler of
ukrainian conscience.
cheers,
rat-zinger esq
aka
bene-dic[t]
A great piece of art.
Thank you.
Another demented rambling soul.
Incoherent rambling is indicative of a demented mind.
Demented soul! How many times have you posted garbage on just this one article. You are a raving mad idiot! with a twisted mind!and in desparate need of psychiatric help!Could someone direct this mental patient to the nearest nuthouse?
her is delusional and demented.
Publishing abusive comments attacking one contributor and another does not help father the debate or support your cause. In reading these comments there appear to be some editing and removal of comments that are not abusive. If you are going to censor comments then remove the abusive vilification not constructive comments.