Commentary

Four years ago, in October 2010, Canada’s Prime Minister was the first Western leader to visit Ukraine after the election of President Victor Yanukovych. On March 22, 2014, Stephen Harper again was the first head of state to be in Kyiv, this time, to meet with the leaders of a new government appointed by the Ukrainian parliament after Yanukovych suddenly fled the country and left a trail of violence against peaceful protestors. During his first visit, Harper focused attention on the growing authoritarianism by the Yanukovych regime and the need for the world to support human rights and democracy in Ukraine. At the time, Europe and the US were...

Situated in the heart of New York City between the island of Manhattan and Long Island and with the United Nations in its peripheral view, Roosevelt Island stands as a monument to the 32nd President of the United States of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At its edge is a memorial to FDR with a bust of the former president and a park appropriately named “Four Freedoms Park.” On Saturday, March 15, 2014 U.S. Congresswomen Carolyn Maloney held a press conference at this site on the subject of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, a vote was taking place a mile away at the prominently visible UN among the members of its Security Council. The press conference sent a strong message of support to the people of Ukraine with...

A Ukrainian Jewish leader opposed to the Russian takeover of Crimea failed to drum up support this week from Israel, which is sitting out the crisis pitting its U.S. ally against Moscow. Edward Dolinsky, head of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, made a lobbying trip to Jerusalem with influential Ukrainian Jewish lawmaker Alexander Feldman. They were not received by officials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. Speaking to Reuters on Wednesday, Dolinsky said he and Feldman had sought to win Israeli support for "Ukraine and the aspirations of the Ukrainian people". He voiced dismay at the Netanyahu government's failure to oppose Russia's Crimea move. Such censure, while not...

The Russian Orthodox Church Department of External Affairs had announced back in July that the cross of St. Andrew fromPatras,Greecewill travel toRussia,Ukraine, andBelarusthis summer on the occasion of the 1025th anniversary of the “Baptism of Russia.” So, the X-shaped cross did go toRussia(St. Petersburg,Moscow, and theMoscowregion) for two weeks. It was inMinsk,Belarusfor four days. In Kyiv, the cradle of Rus’ Christianity, remained for only three. From the perspective of the Moscow Patriarchate, these proportions evidently reflect a certain hierarchy of importance...

Go see Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, both because it’s an excellent film about the Holocaust in wartime Lviv and because it demonstrates just how deeply rooted some ethnic stereotypes can be. The story is simple: an anti-Semitic Polish sewer worker and part-time crook, Poldek Socha, finds himself in the unexpected position of hiding a group of Jews in Lviv’s sewers. At first, he does so only for money. In time, he abandons his anti-Semitism and acts with altruism. The film ends with the liberation of Lviv by the Soviets and the emergence of the surviving Jews from the sewers. “These are my Jews!” Socha beams. “These are my Jews!” In an interview, Holland emphasized what she thought was one of the film’s strong points: its avoidance of one-dimensional characterizations. Here’s what she says about Socha: First of all, the main character, this Polish guy, was ambiguous, both hero and not hero, and a very simple, ordinary man, not very good. What wa...

As dictatorships collapsed toward the end of the last century and into this one, many people assumed that history moves in only one direction. The tide of freedom had lifted East Asia and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Indonesia. In an era of global trade and communications, the rest of the world surely would follow. Academics and think tanks studied democratization, often presuming that it could be observed and predicted like any other natural process — that the democratic West didn’t have to do much but watch and wait. Anne Applebaum, a historian and...

On the last weekend of November Kyiv Mohyla Academy hosted a conference “Model of Ukraine” titled “Different Roads to the Rule of Law.” One of the initiators and organizers of this conference, which was held for the fourth time, is the director of the Canadian-Ukrainian Parliamentary Program Ihor Bardyn – Canadian citizen of Ukrainian origin. He was born in Poland: his parents escaped there from Galicia after the World War II. And in 1950 his parents moved to Canada, where Bardyn received a law degree. First two years he worked in the law firm and then he opened his own firm, which employs 14 lawyers (half of whom are Ukrainians) and 25 people working as an assistant staff. This is the average for Canadian standards firm which is, at the same time, the largest Ukrainian law firm by the number of Ukrainians working for it. In his interview for The Day Mr. Bardyn told what prompted him to initiate the establishment of a parliamentary program and how he sees the...

What does the ultranationalist “Svoboda” Freedom Party’s 10.5 percent share of the party-list vote in Ukraine’s October 28th parliamentary elections mean? Is it the end of the world? Have Ukrainians embraced fascism and anti-Semitism? Or might there be somewhat less alarmist explanations for Svoboda’s showing? There are three good explanations—and one shockingly bad one—for Svoboda’s rise from a minor regional party to a very minor national force. After all, let’s not forget that Svoboda received the fewest votes of the five parties that made it into the Parliament. First, most Ukrainians certainly didn’t vote for Svoboda because they read its program...

It's a very old tale about the boy who cried wolf. After a while his credibility was shot and, when it mattered, no one listened. Such is the tale of many contemporary Western journalists, commentators and statesmen. The subject in this instance is Ukraine's recent flawed, but relatively democratic parliamentary elections. Hyperbolic or inflammatory assessments and assertions bordering on distortion have marred any potentially intelligent and objective analysis. Here are a few examples from relatively respected Western publications and spoke persons: “Ukraine's streak of four relatively democratic national elections, from...