Commentary

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...

Inasmuch as the Russians could not eradicate the national characteristics of the non-Russian nations in the USSR, they had to grant some concessions and to show to the world at the same time that they were “liberal” and not “imperialist.” Thus, Moscow allowed the establishment of the “Union Republics,” which, however, were independent in name only and which were controlled and run by Russian puppets. Meanwhile the Russians pursued the policy of Russification of the non-Russian cultures, and exploited their economies. The USSR was depicted as a “natural political complex,” a sort of Hitlerian Grosswirtschaftraum (Great Economic Complex). The Russian propaganda directed to the free world depicted the “Union Republics” as “free and independent nations,” ridiculing any suggestion that these nations were captive. At the U.N., Russian diplomats fiercely fought off any inquiries or attacks on the...

Liberal democracies need to understand this broadening conflict and respond by sanctioning, isolating and prosecuting those responsible. In 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, leaving Afghanistan occupied and oppressed. In 2022, fascist Russia invaded Ukraine and tried to seize power in Kyiv. And earlier this month, Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,400 Israelis and have taken around 200 hostages. With Moscow so eager to find a distraction, it should come as no surprise that there is growing evidence Russia had a hand in Hamas’s massacre. According to Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Hamas’s drone tactics seemed similar to Russia’s - a fake video, amplified by...

We all need to be reminded of how the Soviet KGB orchestrated "Operation Payback" to provoke tensions between the Ukrainian and Jewish diasporas, a covert operation regurgitated by the operatives of the Russian Federation and their fellow travellers in the West. Here is the actual document*) and an English translation: “Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine To Comrade V. V. Shcherbytsky MEMORANDUM about active measures against OUN centres abroad The republican Committee of State Security carried out a set of measures to counteract the attempts of reactionary political circles and security services in the West to use the ringleaders of OUN centers abroad in subversive actions against the...

After the recent visit to Canada of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, interested parties renewed worn out claims about the presence of “Ukrainian Nazis” in Canada. The media joined the sensationalist chorus, while national leaders of all political stripes issued a flurry of apologies with promises “to access the issue”. Now, back down the memory lane to 9 February 1985 when, in response to loud charges that Canada was harboring “thousands of Nazi War criminals”, the Canadian government established the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada headed by Justice Jules Deschênes. The Ukrainian Canadian diaspora was especially singled out by the accusers. However, Justice Deschênes’s public report on the findings of his Commission, released on 12 March 1987, censured in no uncertain terms those...