Commentary

I would like to share with you the TRUE story behind this Skoryk earworm. It is a piece of music that TRUE Ukrainians should anathematize. Let me explain. In 1982 a Soviet film, Vysoky Pereval, was released for which the music score was written by Myroslav Skoryk. You can watch it here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=n1Mnimpj6BE The director claims that the movie is about heroic events in a Carpathian village during and after WWII. Yes, heroic, but he doesn't say which side is heroic – the Soviet or the Ukrainian side. The story is about a Ukrainian woman (Slavka Petryn), separated from her family during WWII, rescued by the Soviets, indoctrinated with Communism and sent back to her village together with other Soviet agents to create a Stalinist paradise there. She is shocked to discover that her family is with the Ukrainian partisans fighting the Communists. The typical backwater violence ensues as the two sides struggle for supremacy. In the end she is killed, but her orphaned son reaches out to a Russian orphan in a gesture of "eternal brotherhood" as a cloud in the form of a dove floats above them and the Melodiya screams its last phrases...

The Ukrainian media Espreso TV is saying it is being pressured after the Ukrainian state media regulator scheduled an unplanned inspection of the channel. The reason for the inspection is eerily reminiscent of Soviet times: broadcasting programs of the Ukrainian desks of the BBC and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which Ukraine’s National Council on TV and Radio Broadcasting said was a violation. The regulator accused Espreso TV of breaching its license agreement, according to which national audio and visual products should comprise 100% of its broadcast time. According to the regulator, Espreso has allegedly violated the agreement by broadcasting 1 hours and 11 minutes of BBC and RFE/RL programs a day (some 5% of its total broadcast time)...

The Crimean Peninsula has long suffered from water shortages, but these are now often exacerbated by the ever-more frequent winters with little-to-no rain or snow. In the last several months, under Russian occupation, those difficulties have become critical: according to Russian officials, the region has seen its reserves of potable water decline by 60 percent and will entirely run out of supplies of this critical natural resource sometime in July or August (Gazeta.ua, May 21). The situation is creating a serious public health crisis in Crimea and could prompt Moscow, which has few other options, to engage in a new military action against Ukraine to gain access to water supplies, especially as Ukrainian officials and commentators have made clear that Kyiv is not prepared to sell water to the occupation authorities...

Kyiv’s press pack braved a light spring drizzle on May 20 to gather in the gardens of the Ukrainian president’s official residence for a long-awaited event: a press conference with President Zelensky himself. The three-hour Q&A event at Mariyinskiy Palace was held to mark the first anniversary of the Zelensky presidency. Notably, it was only Zelensky’s second formal press conference in the twelve months since his inauguration in May 2019. The occasion itself yielded few major surprises. At one point, Zelensky appeared to backtrack on his campaign commitment to serve just one term as president and suggested he would be willing to seek re-election in 2024. He also offered dark hints of coming legal troubles for his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. However, the real story of the press conference was that it was taking place at all...

A commemorative stained-glass window is planned for St. James's church, in Sussex Gardens, London to honour Ukrainian Canadians who fought in the Second World War. Supplied / Postmedia...

Making sense of the national elections in Ukraine that occurred nearly a year ago is of great importance for Ukrainians and for those involved in understanding the Ukrainian polity. Initially, many pundits concluded that Ukrainians sought and got a new, young face unblemished by politics. Becoming belatedly apparent is the fact that the new political leadership lacks a basic understanding of running a country, much less reforming it. The new government has not broken with its populist messaging during the campaign and refuses to speak squarely with the citizenry...

Marika Panchuk has spent much of her life listening to wartime stories about her father, Bohdan Panchuk, and meeting people across Canada who owe their lives to him. “Through the years people have certainly come up to me and said, ‘I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for your father,’ ” Ms. Panchuk, 69, recalled from her home in Winnipeg. “There certainly was a bond between everyone who was there. But there wasn’t a lot of talk about details.” Indeed, the story of Mr. Panchuk and the Ukrainian Canadian Servicemen’s Association – the group he co-founded during the Second World War – has been largely forgotten. And yet the former schoolteacher from Saskatchewan, who enlisted with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1939 and landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, became a key figure in helping more than 30,000 Ukrainian refugees come to Canada after the war. The exploits of Mr. Panchuk and the UCSA were set to be recognized on Friday as part of Britain’s 75th-anniversary celebration of the victory in Europe, or VE Day. A service was planned at St. James’s Church in London to unveil a stained glass window in honour of the association, which operated out of the church’s vicarage...

A year ago, a beaming Volodymyr Zelensky strolled into his campaign headquarters to the theme song of the popular TV sitcom in which he played an accidental president. Confetti showered from the rafters and a crowd of supporters erupted in applause. He had just won Ukraine's presidential runoff election with 73 percent of the vote, the largest tally in the country's history. The moment is captured in a slickly produced 50-minute video released by his office on April 21, the anniversary of the election. More of a public-relations puff piece than a documentary film, it sometimes resembles the sitcom and shines an uncritical light on Zelensky's first year in office...

International attention is now fully focused on the fight against COVID-19. The topic of Russian aggression against Ukraine has rarely hit the front pages of global mass media even before that. At the same time, Russia has stepped up its efforts to take advantage of the coronavirus momentum, either through the PR support of its not always helpful assistance to Western countries, or through calls to lift sanctions. What should Ukraine prepare for? What to expect from Russia? How will the EU and the US behave? The New Europe Center addressed the experts with the question “How does the pandemic affect the negotiations on Donbas?”...

As war-torn and pandemic-hit Ukraine entered April 2020, the last thing the country needed was more drama. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. For much of the month, the coronavirus crisis and the ongoing conflict with Russia were both temporarily overshadowed by a spate of forest fires in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone that generated lurid international headlines and plunged Kyiv into apocalyptic gloom. These blazes exposed Ukraine’s unpreparedness for such emergencies and served as a grim warning of what may lie ahead during the long summer months in a country parched by an abnormally warm winter season that saw record high temperatures and virtually no snow. When news of forest fires in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone first started to emerge in the days following April 4, it soon became a hot topic on Ukrainian social media (no pun intended)...