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Action Ukraine Report

ACTION UKRAINE REPORT - AUR
An International Newsletter, The Latest, Up-To-Date
In-Depth Ukrainian News, Analysis and Commentary

Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion, Economics,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World

ACTION UKRAINE REPORT (AUR), Number 934
Mr. Morgan Williams, Publisher and Editor, SigmaBleyzer Emerging
Markets Private Equity Investment Group, www.SigmaBleyzer.com
WASHINGTON, D.C., SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2009

INDEX OF ARTICLES ------
Clicking on the title of any article takes you directly to the article.
Return to Index by clicking on Return to Index at the end of each article

1. EUROPE BETRAYS ITS MISSION AT PRAGUE SUMMIT
EU's eastern partnership plan is just seven pages of ramble
Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan Betrayed
Analysis & Commentary: by Borut Grgic
The Wall Street Journal Europe, Europe, Monday, May 11, 2009

2. UKRAINE SAYS IMF FUNDS NOT ENOUGH, HITS AT EU
Deputy Prime Minister Hryhory Nemyria speaks out at EBRD meeting, criticizes EU
By Natsuko Waki, Reuters, London, Friday May 15 2009

3. UKRAINE NEEDS EXTERNAL FUNDS ON TOP OF THE IMF $16.4 BILLION
Dow Jones Newswires, London, UK, Saturday, May 16, 2009

4. IMF PREPARED TO EASE CONDITIONS ON EAST EU BORROWERS
Ukraine could possibly be given additional funds on top of its current $16.4 billion
Michael Winfrey, Reuters, London, UK, May 16, 2009

5. EBRD CHIEF UPBEAT ON EASTERN EUROPE
By Stefan Wagstyl, Financial Times, London, UK, Friday, May 15 2009

6. PRISON, REVOLUTION, AND RECONCILIATION
Ukraine's PM, Yulia Tymoshenko, how friends have become foes - and vice versa
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, London, UK, Saturday 16 May 2009

7. POLITICS TAKES A FRONT SEAT AT EUROVISION SONG CONTEST
By Charles Clover, Financial Times, London, UK, Fri, May 15 2009

8. UKRAINE'S METINVEST ACQUIRES UNITED COAL COMPANY IN USA
SteelGuru website, India, Friday, 01 May 2009

9. DRS TECHNOLOGIES, INC.JOINS U.S.-UKRAINE BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC)
Leading supplier of integrated products, services, & support to
military forces, prime contractors, intelligence agencies
U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), Wash, D.C., Mon, Mar 2,2009

10. UKRAINE'S PROTECTION OF MINORITY SHAREHOLDERS' RIGHTS
FALLS WELL SHORT OF STANDARDS ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE
Research Center Publishes Study on Minority Shareholders' Rights
Corporate Relations Research Center, Kiev, Ukraine
PRNewswire, Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, May 14, 2009

11. WORLD VIEW: HOW THE WEST TURNED FROM KIEV
Last thing Ukraine needs is for Paris and Berlin and Washington to
create a new kind of axis of complacency.
Op-Ed by Denis MacShane, British Labour M.P. & Britain's former minister for Europe.
NEWSWEEK, New York, NY, Sat, Mar 21, 2009, Magazine issue dated Mar 30, 2009

12. COMMONWEALTH ENERGY PARTNERS LLC (CEP) JOINS
THE U.S.-UKRAINE BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC)
Develops and finances "clean'' energyprojects in emerging markets
U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), Washington, D.C., Tue, Mar 3, 2009

13. UKRAINE IDENTIFIES THOUSANDS OF STALIN VICTIMS BURIED NEAR KYIV
A memorial to victims of Stalin's regime stands in the Bykivnya forest near Kyiv
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Kyiv, Ukraine Friday, May 15, 2009

14. UKRAINE: OPENING OF SECRET ARCHIVES SHINES LIGHT ON FAMINE, REPRESSION
President Yushchenko says his country must confront its past. But critics say deeper
examination of authoritarianism and the starvation that killed millions could be dangerous.
By James Marson, Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, MA, Tuesday, May 5, 2009

15. ANNE APPLEBAUM, NOTED AUTHOR, COLUMNIST, HISTORIAN,
TO RESEARCH AND WRITE A NEW BOOK ON HOLODOMOR
New book commissioned by Harvard University Research Institute (HURI)
by Peter T. Woloschuk, The Ukrainian Weekly, No. 13
Ukrainian National Association, Parsippany, NJ, Sunday, March 29, 2009

16. LEMKIN ON THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE
'Soviet Genocide in Ukraine'
Journal of International Criminal Justice, Oxford Journals
Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, Vol. 7 (No. 1), 2009; pg. 123-130

17. HOLODOMOR STUDIES - NEW JOURNAL DEVOTED TO THE
ANALYSIS OF THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE
Charles Schlacks, Publisher, Idyllwild, CA, USA
Professor Roman Serbyn, Editor, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Action Ukraine Report (AUR), Wash, D.C., Sat, Apr 18, 2009

18. DEADLY ORPHANAGE
The building where over 700 children starved to death in 1932–33 is still there
By Olha Bohlevska, Zaporizhia, The Day Weekly Digest
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 3, 2009

19. “VERY UGLY SILENCE" BROKEN AS ONTARIO (CANADA)
MPPs COME TOGETHER TO RECOGNIZE UKRAINE GENOCIDE
By Alina POPKOVA, The Day Weekly Digest in English #12
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, 14 April 2009
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1
. EUROPE BETRAYS ITS MISSION AT PRAGUE SUMMIT
EU's eastern partnership plan is just seven pages of ramble
Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan Betrayed

Analysis & Commentary: by Borut Grgic
The Wall Street Journal Europe, Europe, Monday, May 11, 2009

The much-anticipated Prague Summit between the European Union and our eastern partners was a flop. The eastern partnership declaration published last Thursday is not worth the paper it was printed on.

The EU has once again taken a bold proposal -- initially designed by Sweden and Poland -- and turned it into seven pages of ramble. It was a sad day for all.
EU IS WITHOUT GOOD IDEAS OR BOLD LEADERSHIP
The EU is clearly without good ideas and without the bold leadership necessary to do what is needed in the east. The countries invited to the summit -- Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan -- are all European. Yes, they are also Caucasian, Caspian, and Black Sea nations, but Europeans nonetheless. So why was a membership concept for these countries missing from the document?

Strategic thinking was never a European forte. American think-tankers poke fun at their European counterparts for superbly managing day-to-day affairs but never quite getting the big picture. In Prague we definitely missed the big picture.

The EU is a project in the making, which is why we have an enlargement policy, which has been the single best tool for reuniting the Continent. It has turned Europe into the biggest market in the world, and it has injected dynamism into the European economy. Now, it seems, someone wants to reverse this progress and halt enlargement.

The story of Europe, the dreams of Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman, later embraced and championed by Helmut Kohl, was a united, free and prosperous Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell, tyranny cracked. Millions of oppressed were free to speak, to act and to create. The splash of creativity that was reborn in the East is still surging and radiating energy across all of Europe.

THE EUROPEAN DREAM IS ALL ABOUT - HOPE
This is what the European dream is all about -- hope. Enlargement is the policy that gives our European brothers and sisters stuck on the margins of Europe the hope to be brave, to continue with reforms and political transformation despite the risks.

Enlargement is not about the political elites, but about the European citizens. It was always about improving the lives of the citizens across Europe. It is easy to dismiss our eastern neighbors on account of their leaders.

Eurocrats with big egos dismiss the prospect that Ukraine, Georgia or Azerbaijan may one day become full members of our EU family. They criticize their leaders and their systems: there's too much corruption, too little political pluralism, and they are too slow at embracing economic change.

ENLARGEMENT IS ABOUT TOMORROW
This all may be true today, but enlargement is about tomorrow. Having a strategy is having a vision, and the EU has no strategy for the East, which suggests there is no vision of what Europe ought to look like in 2030.

In the powerful film, "The Lives of Others," one is wrenched watching the destruction of the human soul by the Stasi regime in East Germany. Tyranny preys on hope. When hope was gone from the lives of individuals, the state won. The iron fist of the murderous regime became a haven for empty souls.

Europe owes a new draft document to its eastern partners spelling out an integrated approach aimed at creating the Europe of the 21st century: whole, united and free.

We began this project in the 1940s, shortly after the end of World War II. A major breakthrough was achieved in the 1990s with the fall of the Iron Curtain, which then led to the big bang enlargement -- the first of its kind -- in 2003, when 10 central and east European states joined the EU.

Our next job is to finish this story, which means welcoming into Europe Turkey and the Balkan and eastern countries.

NOTE: Mr. Grgic is an independent investor in the Balkans and the Caucasus, and the founder of the Institute for Strategic Studies.

LINK: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124198687030304449.html
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2. UKRAINE SAYS IMF FUNDS NOT ENOUGH, HITS AT EU
Deputy Prime Minister Hryhory Nemyria speaks out at EBRD meeting, criticizes EU

By Natsuko Waki, Reuters, London, Friday May 15 2009

LONDON - Ukraine needs European funds besides a $16.4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to help fight the economic crisis, a deputy prime minister said on Friday, slashing the country's growth forecast.

Hryhory Nemyria, deputy prime minister in charge with external relations, also criticised the European Union for helping out some non-EU eastern neighbours such as Serbia and not Ukraine, calling it a major contradiction.

Ukraine, one of the Eastern European countries hardest hit by the crisis, agreed on the International Monetary Fund loan programme last November. At the time the amount was far larger than most expected.

But rapidly falling demand for commodities, especially steel, has plunged the country deep into recession while a sinking currency, an over-dollarised economy and the credit crunch has destabilised the banking sector.

"We have the IMF, we have EBRD and World Bank but the EU is not on the horizon. That's a major contradiction and we are seeking answers for that," Nemyria told Reuters television on the sidelines of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's annual conference.

"There's no question Ukraine is a European country... Why is the EU so reluctant to use instruments that are available now for Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, for Ukraine? ... The IMF funds are not enough."

He said the EU could provide access to emergency funds which Hungary and Latvia used or European countries could provide bilateral funds. Nemyria said the EU was being self-centred in ignoring Ukraine's pleas for help.

"It's not so much in terms of desperation, it's the logic of the naked self-interest from the European Union," Nemyria said. He noted that banks from France, Italy, Sweden and Austria hold half of the Ukrainian banking sector. "There's an inclination to think about helping Ukraine just because Ukraine needs this. But the EU needs this as well."

He also said he expected gross domestic product to fall by between 4 percent and 6 percent, against an official government forecast of +0.4 percent. The growth forecast had been criticised by analysts as unrealistic and has skewed the 2009 budget plan.

"As crisis management teaches us, we have to plan for the worst case scenario in order to be prepared for the worse," Nemyria said. "We are not sticking to the 0.4 (percent forecast)... The situation is very fluid. It's going to be around minus four to six percent." (Editing by Stephen Nisbet)
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3. UKRAINE NEEDS EXTERNAL FUNDS ON TOP OF THE IMF $16.4 BILLION

Dow Jones Newswires, London, UK, Saturday, May 16, 2009

LONDON - Ukraine still needs external funds on top of the $16.4 billion loan it obtained from the International Monetary Fund last year, the country's vice prime minister Hryhoriy Nemyria told Dow Jones Newswires Saturday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's annual meeting, Nemyria said that the sum needed is "below $5 billion" and that talks are under way with a number of possible lenders.

Crisis-stricken Ukraine has been in talks with Russia to borrow $5 billion to finance its budget deficit. Ukraine has also approached other countries for help. "We are ready to talk with any lenders, as long as there is no political angle in it, as long as there is no political quid pro quo", Nemyria said.

He declined to say at which stage the talks are, or which country or institution is eager to provide funds, but reiterated that Ukraine sees financial help from the European Union, or individual European countries as a possibility. An increase in the IMF loan is also possible, he said.

The IMF May 8 gave Ukraine access to $2.8 billion, the second tranche of the loan. The next IMF review will focus on making progress on bank restructuring in Ukraine. However, that may prove to be difficult, as Ukraine's government wants the owners of the country's troubled banks to restructure their debt with foreign lenders prior to ceding control to the state.

"If it's not done, the country would face extra debt of between $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion to the banks' lenders," Ukraine's acting finance minister Ihor Umansky said.

By Alexander Kolyandr, Dow Jones Newswires; +44 20 7842 9410; alexander.kolyandr@dowjones.com.

LINK: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090516-701529.html
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4. IMF PREPARED TO EASE CONDITIONS ON EAST EU BORROWERS
Ukraine could possibly be given additional funds on top of its current $16.4 billion

Michael Winfrey, Reuters, London, UK, May 16, 2009

LONDON - The International Monetary Fund is prepared to ease the fiscal conditions attached to its programmes with European Union members Latvia, Hungary and Romania due to worsening economic downturns, a senior Fund official said on Saturday.

Anne-Marie Gulde-Wolf, senior advisor in the IMF's European Department, told Reuters in an interview it was possible that non-EU member Ukraine could be given additional funds on top of its current $16.4 billion loan after an official said Kiev may seek funds.

She also said media reports that, in the IMF's review of Hungary's $25.1 billion programme, the Fund would let Budapest raise its fiscal gap target to 3.9 percent of GDP were "in the ballpark", and that there would be no change to Latvia's policy of keeping its lat currency pegged to the euro.

First quarter growth figures this week showed the economic crisis that has battered the EU's eastern members threatens to drive their contractions in national output well past levels forecast by the IMF.

The IMF sees Latvia's economy contracting 12 percent this year but first quarter data showed a contraction of 18 percent. Riga has asked for the ability to push its fiscal deficit to 7 percent of gross domestic product, rather than the 5 percent agreed to in the framework it agreed with the Fund and Gulde-Wolf said there would be an adjustment.

"There is a much steeper decline than has been in the programme. The fiscal deficit is much larger, so we are looking at a revision to the programme," Gulde-Wolf, the fund's most senior representative at an annual meeting of the region's development bank EBRD, said.

The Fund is also due to finish a review mission to Hungary next week. Hungarian media have reported Budapest has asked to be allowed to raise its fiscal deficit target 3.9 percent of GDP, from 2.9 percent agreed with the Fund.

Gulde-Wolf said that looked realistic, although the negotiations had not yet been finalised. "I don't want to comment on the exact number, but the ballpark figure is right," she said.

"The same story as in Latvia, we are looking at a weaker economic outlook and are adjusting the macroeconomic framework to that outlook, so some adjustment in the fiscal is warranted."

On Romania, which saw its economy drop by a much worse than expected 6.4 percent from January to March, she said the process of review was the same: "If the global environment changed rather than policy changed, then we really need to look at reassigning the programmes."

UKRAINE NEEDS
On Friday, Ukrainian deputy Prime Minister Hryhory Nemyria said Kiev needed more funds on top of its existing $16.4 billion IMF-led loan, the first time one of the government's leaders has said the country would have to ask for more cash.

"It is, in general, possible," Gulde-Wolf said, adding that there were limits to how much Ukraine could borrow. "It's difficult to assess without having those discussions with the authorities ... I cannot say anything specific."

She said the IMF did not see a change in the strategy agreed with Latvia letting it keep its currency fixed to the euro, an approach some economists have said has crippled the country's competitiveness but has prevented the risk of mass default on loans in foreign currencies.

She also said the IMF was keeping a close eye on the region and was ready to help any other country with financing needs. "We are well aware of what's going on," she said. "But at this stage, we do not have specific requests from any countries."

LINK: http://in.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idINIndia-39668620090516?sp=true
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Promoting U.S.-Ukraine business relations & investment since 1995.
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5. EBRD CHIEF UPBEAT ON EASTERN EUROPE

By Stefan Wagstyl, Financial Times, London, UK, Friday, May 14 2009

Central and eastern Europe can look forward to a “possible beginning of the end of the crisis”, Thomas Mirow, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said on Thursday in an unexpectedly upbeat review of the region’s economic outlook.

Echoing positive comments this week from Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, and other central bankers, Mr Mirow said: “As we meet, there is growing talk about the possible beginning of the end of the crisis. Banks are reporting better results than expected and confidence indicators are starting to point upwards again.”

Speaking at a conference on the eve of the EBRD’s annual meeting in London, Mr Mirow added: “As you know, EBRD economists are predicting a ‘bottoming out’ of the crisis in our region in 2009 and the beginning of a slow recovery in 2010 – but still under big caveats.”

He acknowledged the outlook remained difficult. The EBRD last week downgraded its forecast for central and eastern Europe, predicting a drop in regional gross domestic product of 5.2 per cent, compared with growth of 0.1 per cent forecast in January. But the bank foresaw a mild recovery next year with growth of 1.4 per cent.

Mr Mirow warned that recovery would be slower than in previous crises because finance would be scarce, global rules covering financial flows would be tighter and states would play a bigger economic role which would later have to be funded through higher taxes.

Officials from the EBRD’s 60-odd shareholder governments are expected at the meeting to discuss possible increases in the multilateral bank’s capital in response to the global crisis.

Any such moves would not take effect before the bank’s capital review in 2012, but supportive comments from key member governments, headed by the US and leading European Union states, would help reassure markets that the EBRD intended to play a big role in the region for the foreseeable future.

Policymakers are particularly concerned the large west European banks, which control most of the region’s banks outside Russia, should remain committed. Mr Mirow offered some reassurance, saying: “A measure of the progress achieved so far is the fact that the danger of large-scale retrenchment or withdrawal of western parent banks from eastern Europe has been averted and seems more unlikely now than only a few months ago.”

Some other conference speakers called for the early extension of the eurozone into eastern Europe, as advocated earlier this year by the IMF. There were also demands for radical regulatory reviews to create what one east European central banker called “a regulatory Europe”.

But there was no detailed discussion of the IMF’s proposal this week for Europe-wide bank stress tests.

LINK: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e2977792-40ab-11de-8f18-00144feabdc0.html
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6. PRISON, REVOLUTION, AND RECONCILIATION
Ukraine's PM, Yulia Tymoshenko, on how friends have become foes - and vice versa

Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, London, UK, Saturday 16 May 2009

It was one of those ghastly days – collapsing into bed at 4am after an official trip, up again too soon for a cabinet meeting on the economic crisis, and then an interview with the Guardian.

When she arrives for our meeting, Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine's prime minister and Europe's second most powerful woman, has not even had time to produce the trademark peasant-style plait that normally hovers on her head like a halo: her hair is combed into a loose bun.

Her officials struggle to remember when they had last seen her in this condition, and pictures taken that morning of her minus plait are already shooting round Kiev's mobile phones.

Tymoshenko first came to international attention during Ukraine's so-called orange revolution in 2004. She and the pro-western presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, stood on the barricades for 13 days with tens of thousands of supporters demanding a re-run of elections. The supreme court decided there had been fraud and after a new election he became president and she prime minister.

THE TWO SOON FELL OUT
But the two soon fell out, and Yushchenko sacked Tymoshenko in August 2005. Since then their long-running feud has been a major disappointment for the young people who put them in power, and the despair of foreign governments, EU officials, and investors.

Appointed prime minister again after winning parliamentary elections in 2007, Tymoshenko now misses no opportunity to criticise her former ally for "purposely impeding the government's work". She is looking forward to the elections, due in January: "We will definitely run for president and we are bound to win," she says.

She is ahead in the polls, but Ukraine's economic woes have dented her ratings. The recession has hit eastern Europe very hard, and Ukraine and Latvia have suffered most of all. Sales of Ukraine's main export, steel, are down by 40%. Real wages started to slip in December and by February were down by 13% from the year before. Unemployment is forecast to reach 10% – and this is probably an underestimate.

It has all come as a shock, especially to the country's new middle class. The economy has been booming for five years and hundreds of thousands of them took loans to buy cars and flats in dollars. But Ukraine's currency, has now lost 40% of its value, and families will struggle to repay their inflated debts.
On top of that looms the constant crisis over gas. Ukraine hit the world headlines this January when Russia cut supplies owing to unpaid Ukrainian bills.

Ukraine then cut supplies to much of the rest of Europe. Tymoshenko has made three trips to Moscow to resolve the crisis, the most recent one last week.

Now she claims there is no chance of another cut-off "because we achieved a true breakthrough by concluding a contract with Russia for 10 years. We have completely removed any political implications from the gas price and gas transit calculation formulas. Ukraine has become dramatically more independent, both economically and politically."

ONCE REGARDED IN MOSCOW AS AN ENEMY
The woman once regarded in Moscow as an enemy (in Vladimir Putin's early years in power there was an arrest warrant against her) is now seen as the Kremlin favourite. They like her role in balancing Ukrainians' pro-EU aspirations with a keen sense of Russia's interests and the need for co-operation, unlike Yushchenko "who never misses a chance to poke Moscow in the eye", in the words of a European diplomat.

Even if the gas crisis is history, the wider economic crisis is ever present. Deadlock in the Ukrainian parliament meant that Tymoshenko had to use governmental decrees to pass various measures, including steeper taxes on tobacco and alcohol, to curb the ballooning budget deficit.

Thanks to her tough approach, the IMF has agreed to release £1.8bn in a loan aimed at stabilising the economy and restoring confidence. Foreign banks, which own a large share of Ukraine's financial system, agreed to recapitalise. Its government did the same with two big state banks. Analysts now see little risk of a total collapse of the economy, but recovery will be slow.

Was there a chance of street protests, I ask, an economic orange revolution? "In this newly democratic society if people are unhappy with something they have the right to take to the street – we respect this," she says. "We have people protesting in front of government buildings and the government listens. But I would like the government and the people to stand tall. By taking to the streets we cannot eliminate the global economic crisis. We have to work hard."

SOMETIMES DUBBED THE "GAS PRINCESS"
Sometimes dubbed the "gas princess", Tymoshenko was typical of the first wave of capitalists in the dying months of the Soviet Union. A leader of the young communist league, the Komsomol, she took the route of many other colleagues in starting small businesses by privatising Komsomol assets, in her case in her native Dnipropetrovsk, a steel town in eastern Ukraine. She and her husband (she married at 18) also copied videos in their living room and rented them out or sold them.

Thanks to her new capital plus good contacts, she became managing director of the grandly named Ukrainian Petrol Corporation in 1991, and four years later the president of United Energy Systems (UES), a company which imported Russian gas and sold Ukrainian products in Russia. She became a multimillionaire.

In 1996, she became an MP for the party led by Pavlo Lazarenko whose government had awarded UES its main import licence. He later left Ukraine to escape money-laundering charges, only to be convicted in California. In 1999 she founded her own party and emerged as a battler against corruption.

Her zeal was rewarded with arrest in 2001 by the authoritarian regime of Leonid Kuchma for alleged fraud. She spent six weeks in jail, not knowing if it could be six or 16 years, until a judge ordered her release.

"Prison was a transformational experience. She came out a radical," says Taras Kuzio, the editor of Ukraine Analyst. Now she portrays herself as the first person to fight corruption. "Ukrainians cannot help noticing that our 17 years of independence have not been a period of sustained reform. They are really only beginning now: profound reforms with respect to investment climate, pensions, and energy efficiency as well as efforts to improve the environment," she says.

The constant battles between Yushchenko and the various prime ministers which followed the orange revolution have heightened calls for constitutional reform. The main opposition party led by Viktor Yanukovych, wants to move to a parliamentary system with a largely ceremonial president. Tymoshenko's party is talking to them about the changes.

This itself is a huge shift from 2004 when she and Yanukovych were on opposite sides of the barricades. Ukraine's media is full of speculation that the constitution may be changed so that she remains as prime minister with Yanukovich as a weak president.

One element in a deal with Yanukovych, who is firmly against Nato membership, could be a shift in Tymoshenko's support for joining the alliance. The Kremlin would be delighted. Ukrainian analysts suggest they could agree on a constitutional change saying Ukraine will keep its present "non-bloc status" rather than seeking to enter Nato. Diplomats say she has back-pedalled since demanding a "membership action plan" from Nato last year.

Ukraine can not live "in a security vacuum", Tymoshenko tells me. But she highlights the obstacles to Nato membership – barely 20% support among the Ukrainian public, and division between Europe's Nato members over the wisdom of getting Ukraine in. In the meantime Tymoshenko and her team are focusing on improving ties with the EU.

She admires Margaret Thatcher, as well as Germany's Angela Merkel, the only other women to reach the top in major European countries. But Tymoshenko has appointed few women to her cabinet, and rebukes quotas for women MPs. She is proud of getting into power by her own efforts. "Whenever you see a successful woman, look out for three men who are going out of their way to try to block her," she says. "I'm really proud of our women. They are not only strong. They are also beautiful."

So, why no plait? "I got home at 4am and didn't have time to produce it. I think women have to change their hairstyle from time to time." Interviewers sometimes ask if its artificial or genuine. What's the answer? "It is real." Giggling, she fiddles at the back of her head, bringing down a Rapunzel-style cascade of blonde hair.

I make my excuses and leave.

LINK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/16/yulia-tymoshenko-ukrainian-prime-minister-interview
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7. POLITICS TAKES A FRONT SEAT AT EUROVISION SONG CONTEST

By Charles Clover, Financial Times, London, UK, Fri, May 15 2009

Launched in 1956, the Eurovision Song contest was intended to be a celebration of diversity and the triumph of art over politics. But the nations of the former Soviet Union this year have not demonstrated the good-natured historical myopia that moved Bosnians, Slovenians, and Croatians to put aside emnity over the collapse of Yugoslavia to vote en masse for the winning Serbian entry at the contest in 2007.

This year’s celebration of multi-cultural, defiantly kitchy pop music held in Moscow has excited passions of nationalists in Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia, fanned by the recent Russia Georgia war last August and the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine in January.

UKRAINIAN CITIZEN REPRESENTS RUSSIA
The choice of Ukrainian citizen Anastasia Prikhodko to represent Russia with a Ukrainian language song has raised tempers amongst chauvinists such as parliamentarian Igor Lebedev, who accuses her of having “Ukrainian nationalist views” and has demanded she be withdrawn from the contest.

Others see a different political subtext in her being chosen to represent Russia: if a Ukrainian citizen and Ukrainian song can represent Russia, what sort of precedent does that set? Today we take Ms Prikhodko – tomorrow, Crimea?

“Russians have perceived the Ukrainian motif as a return to ‘The Great Soviet Past’” wrote the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda this month.
Dressed more like a nun than the “Poyushchiye Trusy” (Singing Panties) who have represented Russia in the past, Ms Prikhodko is an unlikely magnet for scandal – her song “Mamo” is apolitical: “All the listeners will understand the word ‘mama’, whatever their language,” Ms Prikhodko said.

Her selection as Russia’s entrant earlier this year sharply divided Russia’s pop elite into three camps: those who believe she can sing; those who believe the choice of a Ukrainian citizen to represent Russia was a political step, egged on by neo-imperial Kremlin designs on Russia’s neighbours; and those who think it has more to do with her reported relationship with the son of the head of Channel One, Russia’s main state television station – something the son, Igor Sinelshikov, denies.

Whatever the truth, the importance of pop music to the nations of the former Soviet Union cannot be denied. Together, they cast one quarter of the votes in the 2008 contest, and are often accused of “bloc voting” on political basis which purists charge is a manipulation of the rules.

Pop music and politics have also had a complicated relationship in the region. For instance, in 1985, the Soviet Rock group Kino’s “Change” became an anthem for a generation of liberal revolutionaries. Nowadays, countries use Eurovision entries to settle old scores.

Saturday’s finale will not include a Georgian entry, which, keeps reappearing and stealing headlines from the Moscow-based contest despite being banned for satirising Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, “We don’t wanna put in / Cuz negative move / It’s killin’ the groove” runs the lyrics of the song, which the lead singer of the Georgian band says it is “a harmless joke” though most assume it is the pop-music equivalent of payback for the doomed war which Georgia fought against Russia last August, which cost the country one fifth of its territory.

And the gauntlet Russia has thrown down to Ukraine by Moscow’s choice of Ms Prikhodko was ably picked up by Kiev, fielding the pop star Svetlana Loboda, who shimmied and jiggled into the final on Thursday night with “Be My Valentine” in a show that featured prominent Ukrainian flags, beefy gladiators, and a song with a faintly military subtext: “Gonna make me crazy boom / We’re gonna do the boom boom / Ain’t that amazing boom”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bb878ae8-4178-11de-bdb7-00144feabdc0.html
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8. UKRAINE'S METINVEST ACQUIRES UNITED COAL COMPANY IN USA

SteelGuru website, India, Friday, 01 May 2009

Metinvest announces that it has acquired United Coal Company, LLC an American producer of metallurgical and steam coal headquartered in Teays Valley, West Virginia. The acquisition has received all necessary approvals in the United States and Europe.

The released said the key rationale for the acquisition of UCC was its significant reserves of high quality metallurgical coal, which will help Metinvest’s coke and chemical facilities produce a better quality feedstock. As a consequence, the Group’s steel works will be provided with a higher quality coke, reducing iron production costs and improving quality characteristics. The Group will thereafter be more competitive in current and prospective sales markets.

Mr Igor Syry CEO of Metinvest Holding LLC said “We are extremely pleased with the agreement reached to acquire United Coal Company, and that we will be able to partner with the management team they have assembled. Metinvest is constantly looking for opportunities to improve our effectiveness and enhance the quality of our products. A higher quality of coke is especially critical in today’s environment, when Metinvest is reducing consumption of natural gas as a result of the increase in gas prices.

"Furthermore, we intend to maintain the existing business model of UCC, working closely with its excellent management team and employees. One of the things that attracted us to UCC was that they had managed to grow production quickly since 2005, and that they had several opportunities for additional expansion in the near term that matched our needs. Metinvest will continue to invest in the company in order to increase production.”

Mr Syry said “We are trying to apply a consistent approach to our strategy, to form an efficient and balanced metallurgical company, which will be a major player in the European and world markets. Having assets in the United States, the world’s most stable supplier, and having access to the world class mining methods employed by UCC with its tremendous record of and dedication to safety is a transformational step for Metinvest. This transaction positions us well for the rebound of world markets.”

Mr Michael Zervos CEO & President of UCC said “We at United Coal Company are very excited about the transaction. That Metinvest trusts our management team to continue to run the Company in the manner we have built it means everything to us. We have dedicated ourselves to building a world class producer of metallurgical coal, while keeping an unwavering focus on our core principles of employee safety and respect for the environment.

"That foundation of our Company will not change. As we built the Company, however, we saw that in order to maximize our growth opportunities, we would have to partner with an integrated steel producer so that our coals would have a sales outlet even in challenging market conditions. We believe that this transaction is a great outcome for all stakeholders in UCC, and we look forward to helping Metinvest achieve its goal of becoming the most efficient global steel producer.”

As both parties are privately held, further details concerning the transaction are unavailable.

The companies of Metinvest Group have capacity to produce 10.8 million tonnes per year of crude steel, more than 11 million tonnes per year of rolled stock and semi finished steel, over 5 million tonnes per year of metallurgical coke and over 40 million tonnes per year of iron ore enough to meet the Group’s internal demand in steelmaking raw materials and to be a key supplier to major steelmaking companies in Europe.

The Group comprises 23 industrial companies in mining and steel, many of which are located in Metinvest home country of Ukraine. In Western Europe Metinvest has recently acquired Ferriera Valsider and Trametal Italian re-rolling companies and British carbon steel plate producer Spartan UK.

LINK: http://steelguru.com/news/index/2009/05/01/OTI2NzA%3D/Metinvest_acquires_United_Coal_Company.html
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9. DRS TECHNOLOGIES, INC.JOINS U.S.-UKRAINE BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC)
Leading supplier of integrated products, services, & support to military forces, prime contractors, intelligence agencies

U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), Wash, D.C., Mon, Mar 2,2009

WASHINGTON, D.C.- DRS Technologies, Inc., a Finmeccanica Company, has been approved as a member of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), the USUBC Executive Committee announced today, on behalf of the entire USUBC membership of over 100 companies and organizations.

DRS Technologies, headquartered in Parsippany, NJ, is a leading supplier of integrated products, services and support to military forces, intelligence agencies and prime contractors worldwide. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Finmeccanica S.p.A. which employs more than 73,000 people worldwide.

JOEL LEVANSON, LEW EVANS, JIM HINSON
Joel Levanson, Col. (Retired) U.S. Army, is Vice President of International Programs, DRS Technical Services , Inc., in Herndon, VA. Joel previously represented ESSI , a company who was a member of USUBC and USUBC is pleased to be working with Joel once again.

Joel and his colleagues Lew Evans and Jim Hinson, attended several USUBC meetings last fall and DRS Technologies joined the USUBC Aerospace and Defense Working Group. Joel and Lew attended the USUBC sponsored Presidential Inaugural Reception held recently in Washington at the Embassy of Ukraine to the U.S.

“We look forward to working again with the USUBCleadership and other member companies to develop and promote stronger business ties with the growing Ukraine market” said Joel Levanson, Vice President of International Programs, DRS Technical Services.

DRS'S BROAD RANGE OF MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS AND SOLUTIONS
DRS’s broad range of mission critical systems and sustainment solutions uniquely position the company to support the ongoing superiority of the military’s Current Force, as well as the modernization and emerging transformation initiatives of the Future Force.

DRS responds to the needs of U.S. and allied military forces, as they engage in day-to-day expeditionary activities, by providing high-tech products and systems that improve the capabilities of many key platforms. The company also provides a range of military support systems and services. DRS’s products are deployed on a wide range of high-profile military platforms and on several platforms for non-military applications.

DRS sustainment products, such as environmental control systems, power generators, water and fuel distribution systems, chemical/biological decontamination systems and heavy equipment transport systems, are used to support military forces, humanitarian efforts and peacekeeping.

SECURITY AND ASSET PROTECTION SYSTEMS
DRS also provides security and asset protection systems and services, telecommunication and information technology services, training and logistics support services for all branches of the U.S. armed forces and certain international militaries, homeland security forces, and select government and intelligence agencies.

DRS strives to provide quality products and services and stand behind them, to invest in research and development and new market opportunities, and to leverage existing core defense programs and business areas. For more information about DRS, please visit the company’s website at www.drs.com.


PLEASED TO HAVE DRS TECHNOLOGIES AS A NEW MEMBER
"USUBC is very pleased to have DRS Technologies, Inc. as a new member" said Morgan Williams, Director, Government Affairs, Washington Office, SigmaBleyzer Emerging Markets Private Equity Investment Group, www.SigmaBleyzer.com, who serves as President/CEO of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC).

"USUBC has increased its membership four times over the past 27 months and now has a membership base of over 100 companies and organizations which allows USUBC to provide its members such as DRS Technologies, Inc. with a full-time operation and a significantly expanded program of work," according to USUBC membership director Iryna Teluk.

NEW MEMBERS OF USUBC
The latest group of new USUBC members has included: 3M Ukraine; AeroSvit Ukrainian Airlines; AGCO Corporation; Aitken Berlin LLP/ASIA; AnaCom, Inc; Asters law firm; CEC Government Relations; ContourGlobal Ukraine; Defense Technology, Inc.; Doheny Global Group; Dunwoodie Travel Bureau, Ltd.; Edelman; Foyil Securities; IBM Ukraine; KPMG Ukraine; Kyiv Mohyla Foundation of America (KMF); Mars Ukraine; Microsoft; Pratt & Whitney - Paton; R & J Trading International; RZB Finance (Raiffeisen Group); SE Raelin/Cajo , Inc.; SoftServe, Inc.; Solid Team LLC; The Washington Group(TWG); Ukraine International Airlines (UIA); Vasil Kisil & Partners law firm; Winner Imports Ukraine (Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, Porsche); Zurich Surety, Credit, & Political Risk; and DRS Technologies, Inc.
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10. UKRAINE'S PROTECTION OF MINORITY SHAREHOLDERS' RIGHTS
FALLS WELL SHORT OF STANDARDS ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE
Corporate Relations Research Center Publishes Study on Minority Shareholders' Rights

Corporate Relations Research Center, Kiev, Ukraine
PRNewswire, Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, May 14, 2009

KIEV - Ukraine's Corporate Relations Research Center, a non-governmental public organization which unites Ukrainian political, economic, financial and media relations experts, today issued a study indicating that the nation's regulatory protection of minority shareholders' rights falls well short of standards elsewhere in Europe.

The study "Impairment of Minority Shareholders' Rights by Majority Shareholders in Domestic Companies" includes analysis of legislation in a number of European countries (Germany, France and Russia) concerning the regulation of relations between minority and majority shareholders. The study focuses on the following questions: Why minority shareholders' rights need protection and how this protection should be implemented?

The difficulty is connected with the method of decision-making in joint stock companies as the procedure is most often based on majority decisions. Therefore, in the absence of mitigating rules, a major shareholder can determine the most important steps of the company, and minority shareholders cannot influence them.

The study contains retrospective and current analysis of a number of corporate conflicts involving Ukrainian joint stock companies where irregularities have been alleged. For instance, an additional share issue at Zaporozhstal CJSC conducted in 2006 in which minority shareholders lost initial stakes is among the cases reviewed, along with another involving the Borschagovskiy Chemical Factory.

The study also criticizes English law which applies where Ukrainian-owned companies are registered in the UK for trading through the London Stock Exchange. The authors focus specifically on an upcoming shareholder vote on a possible share buy-back by Ferrexpo Plc, a London-listed iron ore company whose controlling shareholder is Ukrainian.

The authors contend that such a buy-back could be blocked by minority shareholders in other jurisdictions, such as France, where the Commercial Code specifically prohibits majority shareholders from voting on matters where they have a personal interest.

The research confirms that owners of majority stakes in joint stock companies tend to act in their own interests to the detriment of other shareholders. The research includes a list of legal methods used by some European countries to moderate the rigid majority principle and to prevent majority shareholders from making decisions detrimental to the company.

Such methods as separate voting, stricter quorum requirements, establishment of the qualified majority principle and prohibitions on voting by personally interested persons are applied in various combinations in order to resolve issues potentially harmful to the interests of minority shareholders.

Among such issues are:

[1] Increases and reductions in authorized capital;
[2] Reorganization of a joint-stock company;
[3] Transactions in which certain shareholders are personally interested;
[4] The conduct of large transactions;
[5] Protection of the rights of outside shareholders when the company is entering into a group of enterprises as a dependent or affiliated company;
[6] The conduct of transactions connected with a change of control over the company

Alongside voting mechanisms examined in the research, the rights of minority shareholders are also protected by direct regulations or prohibitions regarding the conditions and special procedures for decision-making which reserve a significant role for minority shareholders.

In the sphere of corporate relations, Ukrainian issuers are characterized first of all by a large number of minority stockholders, having emerged in the course of the privatization process; this peculiarity makes Ukrainian corporate relations very different from those in developed countries (where such relations have a long history of development).

According to the authors of the study, in order to prevent abuse, regulators need to vest in shareholders the right to bring action against company management on behalf of the whole enterprise to repair any damage caused by the officials. The authors also state that regulations need to acknowledge the possibility of transactions in which some shareholders may have an excessive interest and exclude them from voting on such transactions.

NOTE: The study "Impairment of Minority Shareholders' Rights by Major Shareholders in Domestic Companies" is available in English at http://corporativ.info/en/?/expert/2903/.

CONTACTS: Corporate Relations Research Center, +380-44-4900412
Svetlana Goncharova, Project Director, sveta@corporativ.info

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U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC): http://www.usubc.org
Promoting U.S.-Ukraine business relations & investment since 1995.
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11. WORLD VIEW: HOW THE WEST TURNED FROM KIEV
The last thing Ukraine needs is for Paris and Berlin and Washington to create a new kind of axis of complacency.

OP-ED by Denis MacShane, British Labour M.P. and Britain's former minister for Europe.
NEWSWEEK, New York, NY, Sat, Mar 21, 2009, Magazine issue dated Mar 30, 2009

Just five years ago Ukraine was the toast of pro-democracy politicians the world over. The Orange Revolution seemed to be the next strand of the thread going back to the 1989 Velvet and other peaceful European transitions. Despite the bullying of Moscow, the Ukrainians stood their ground and said they wanted to become another Euro-Atlantic nation.

But now, like parents with a sulky, wayward child who just won't grow up, the world's democracies are turning their back on Ukraine. U.S. President Barack Obama will clink glasses with Russian and European leaders in London, Strasbourg and Prague and drop in to say hello to Turkey.

But Ukraine, Turkey's Black Sea neighbor, is off his radar. Silvio Berlusconi openly supports Russia every time there is a dispute over gas. Angela Merkel used to visit Ukraine regularly and hold annual Berlin-Kiev summits, but now she ignores the country.

Russia's ambassador to NATO, the ultranationalist Dmitry Rogozin, boasted to France's Nouvel Observateur that French President Nicolas Sarkozy "opposed America's desire to see Ukraine join the Atlantic alliance," adding that the French president was "Moscow's ally in Europe." That may be just Russian bombast, but increasingly Kiev looks west and sees no alternative.

Yes, Ukraine faces many internal domestic problems that the EU and the United States are largely powerless to influence. Its economy is a shambles. With 40 percent of GDP linked to steel and aluminum, it is seeing a nose dive into negative growth as exports slump. Ukraine's politicians squabble openly and try to tear each other down. Yet everyone in Kiev agrees that democracy has sunk deep roots.

Ukraine has its oligarchs who wheel and deal and buy influence, but they live in their own country and not (as has happened to some of their Russian counterparts) in exile in London waiting for a dose of plutonium to arrive with the coffee or banged up in a Russian prison.

There is no state police, journalists at last are free, and Kiev sparkles and looks more energetic and full of well-dressed people, bustling stores, offices and public spaces and new cars—despite the recession. Unlike neighboring Georgia, which remains a favorite of the West, Kiev avoids provocation. It has abolished nuclear weapons. It has sent troops to all NATO missions.

Ukrainians have remained calm about Russia's Black Sea fleet, and they are fed up with being linked to Georgia as if they were a double act, when Ukraine has a stand-alone claim to be taken seriously as a European nation that wants to fit in with the Euro-Atlantic community.

There was once real hope that Europe meant it when a procession of visitors from Brussels and other EU capitals said Ukraine was en route to a European future. But the West got frightened last August, after the Russian invasion of Georgia, and bought into the Russian line that plans to admit Ukraine to NATO meant trouble and strife—though this had also been the Russian line on NATO membership for Poland, the Baltic states and Black Sea nations like Bulgaria and Romania.

Now this kind of nyetpolitik is getting the upper hand. Earlier this month U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton staged a photo op with her opposite number from Moscow pressing a "reset" button. But reset for Moscow means a free hand to dictate Ukraine's internal affairs.

Clearly, the Kremlin has never adjusted to the idea that Ukraine is its own nation—"whole and free," to use the first President Bush's phrase about the nations that emerged after the end of Sovietism. Russian leaders still think of Kiev as Russia's "mother," compared to its heart in St. Petersburg and brains in Moscow. And, obviously, Russia matters more than Ukraine to both Obama and Europe. On Iran, on nuclear-weapons treaties, on transit access to Afghanistan, Russian cooperation is the goal of post-Bush foreign policy.

But help for Ukraine can come in the form of soft power. EU leaders can visit more and encourage trade and investment. Brussels might end a repressive EU visa regime that means a Ukrainian university professor who used to need only a multiple-entry visa to go repeatedly to universities in Western Europe must now apply for each single trip. The Ukrainian military needs help to modernize, and it should get that help as a thank-you for taking part in NATO missions.

Indeed, with Russia breathing down its neck, the last thing Kiev needs is for Paris and Berlin and Washington to create a new axis of complacency that uses the incoherence of Ukrainian politics to justify accepting the Moscow world view that places Ukraine firmly in Russia's sphere of influence. What's needed now is a new policy that treats Ukraine, warts and all, as a European nation. Instead of listening to the nyet from Moscow, the United States and the EU need to start saying da to Kiev's moderate and modernizing politicians.

Certainly this will be hard for Moscow to accept, but bringing Ukraine into Europe—in the full sense of a path toward EU and NATO membership—might even help encourage Russia to see itself as a future partner of the EU and the United States, in place of the scratchy rivalry Moscow now creates in the Euro-Atlantic community.

LINK: http://www.newsweek.com:80/id/190389
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12. COMMONWEALTH ENERGY PARTNERS LLC (CEP) JOINS
THE U.S.-UKRAINE BUSINESS COUNCIL (USUBC)
Develops and finances "clean'' energyprojects in emerging markets

U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), Washington, D.C., Tue, Mar 3, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Commonwealth Energy Partners LLC (CEP), Alexandria, VA, a developer and financer of "clean energy" projects in emerging markets, has been approved as a member of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), according to the USUBC Executive Committee who announced CEP's membership today, on behalf of the entire USUBC membership of over 100 companies and organizations.

CEP was established in November of 2007 to develop and finance power projects in emerging markets. CEP is focused on developing “clean” energy projects in which the new power plant replaces or offsets green house gas emissions from older inefficient plants.

The CEP company is committed to the goal of global CO2 stabilization by utilizing efficient commercially available technologies (natural gas fired turbines, hydro, or wind turbines) for its projects.

CEP is well positioned to promote these solutions as well as identify viable projects through its network of local partners in emerging markets. Central and Eastern Europe (Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Belorussia) is a major focus area for CEP.

DALE BARONE AND THOMAS FERGUS
The principals in CEP, Mr. Dale Barone, President, and Mr. Thomas Fergus, CEO, have over 35 years of experience working in emerging markets as a result of technical assistance programs they have implemented on behalf of the U.S. government under the banner of Commonwealth Trading Partners (CTP), http://www.ctp-inc.com, headquartered in Alexandria, VA.

They have worked in Ukraine for over fifteen years providing training in non-proliferation and trade security. Dale, Tom and their colleagues have been active in USUBC meetings for some time. CEP President Dale Barone will serve on the USUBC board of directors. He can be contacted at:
dbarone (at) cep-llc.com.

"USUBC is very pleased to have Commonwealth Energy Partners (CEP) as a new member" said Morgan Williams, Director, Government Affairs, Washington Office, SigmaBleyzer Emerging Markets Private Equity Investment Group, www.SigmaBleyzer.com, who serves as President/CEO of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC). "If you need additional information about CEP please contact us."

"USUBC has increased its membership four times over the past 27 months and now has a membership base of over 100 companies and organizations which allows USUBC to provide its members such as DRS Technologies, Inc. with a full-time operation and a significantly expanded program of work," according to Iryna Teluk, USUBC membership director. "We are pleased to be able to expand our working relationship with CEP."

NEW MEMBERS OF USUBC
The latest group of new USUBC members has included: 3M Ukraine; AeroSvit Ukrainian Airlines; AGCO Corporation; Aitken Berlin LLP/ASIA; AnaCom, Inc; Asters law firm; CEC Government Relations; ContourGlobal Ukraine; Defense Technology, Inc.; Doheny Global Group; DRS Technologies, Inc.; Dunwoodie Travel Bureau, Ltd.; Edelman; Foyil Securities; IBM Ukraine; KPMG Ukraine; Kyiv Mohyla Foundation of America (KMF); and Mars Ukraine.

Additional new members include: Microsoft; Pratt & Whitney - Paton; R & J Trading International; RZB Finance (Raiffeisen Group); SE Raelin/Cajo , Inc.; SoftServe, Inc.; Solid Team LLC; The Washington Group(TWG); Ukraine International Airlines (UIA); Vasil Kisil & Partners law firm; Winner Imports Ukraine (Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, Porsche); Zurich Surety, Credit, & Political Risk; and Commonwealth Energy Partners (CEP).
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13. UKRAINE IDENTIFIES THOUSANDS OF STALIN VICTIMS BURIED NEAR KYIV
A memorial to victims of Stalin's regime stands in the Bykivnya forest near Kyiv

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Kyiv, Ukraine Friday, May 15, 2009

KYIV -- Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) officials have announced that they have determined the identities of 14,191 people killed by order of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and buried in the Bykivnya forest outside of Kyiv.

Professor Vasyl Danylenko, of the SBU archives, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that there are 18 places in Ukraine that were used to execute thousands of people during the Stalin era.

He said Bykivnya was heavily guarded in Soviet times and, though many executions were carried out in Kyiv, the dead were buried in mass graves at Bykivnya during the night. Before World War II, most executions were carried out directly in the forest with the victims lined up before ready-dug graves.

Danylenko said of the other 18 mass burial sites in Ukraine that have been identified, some are being used as parks, some have department stores built on them, or are serving as city cemeteries.

Ukraine will officially commemorate victims of political repression on May 17 when thousands of people will visit Bykivnya to pay their respects. Many people have erected signs on trees with the names of relatives they believe are buried there.

LINK: http://www.rferl.org:80/content/Ukraine_Identifies_Thousands_Of_

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14. UKRAINE: OPENING OF SECRET ARCHIVES SHINES
LIGHT ON FAMINE, REPRESSION
President Yushchenko says his country must confront its past. But critics say deeper
examination of authoritarianism and the starvation that killed millions could be dangerous.

By James Marson, Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, MA, Tuesday, May 5, 2009

KIEV, Ukraine - In 1933, Mykola Bokan travelled across the Chernihiv Region of Ukraine taking photographs of his starving compatriots. These were the victims of Holodomor, the "death by starvation" unleashed by Stalin that killed millions across Ukraine. The same year, Mr. Bokan was arrested and sent to a prison camp for 10 years. He didn't survive his sentence.

"Stories like this deepen our knowledge of our own history," says Volodymyr Vyatrovych, director of the archives at the state security service, or SBU, the KGB's successor in Ukraine. "That's why we want the maximum number of people possible to get to know these documents."

In January, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko ordered state archives to declassify, publish, and study all documents relating to Holodomor, the Ukrainian independence movement, and political repressions during the Soviet period from 1917 to 1991.

There's a lot of work for Mr. Vyatrovych and his colleagues to get through: He estimates there are 800,000 documents from which to remove the "secret" seal.

"As a totalitarian system, the Soviet Union relied on the KGB. That means that these documents shed light on all aspects of Soviet life," he says.
The aim of the work is to make the documents available at digital reading rooms across the country and the Internet, and to publish collections. Vyatrovych says the publicity drive has already boosted interest, and not just among historians. "More and more people are coming to find out about relatives," he says.

Unlike many ex-Soviet states, such as neighboring Poland, Ukraine has seen limited attempts at lustration. The country's history, for centuries intertwined with its eastern neighbor Russia, is politically sensitive because of the polar opposite interpretations that people follow.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, for example, which fought in World War II, was portrayed in the Soviet Union as Nazi collaborators. To many in Ukraine, however, they are freedom fighters and symbols of the anti-Soviet independence movement.

But since Yushchenko's dramatic rise to the presidency in the wake of the Orange Revolution in 2004, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets to protest a rigged vote, he has made a concerted effort to draw attention to Ukraine's history. His main focus has been on promoting recognition of Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Although famine struck a number of areas in the Soviet Union as a result of Stalin's initiative to create collective farms, many historians argue that the famine was exacerbated in Ukraine in order to quell separatism and punish Ukrainians.

"Promoting a reappraisal of our history is one of Yushchenko's greatest achievements," says Stanislav Kulchytsky, one of Ukraine's most famous historians, who is best known for his pioneering work on Holodomor. "Sadly, it brings his popularity down, as many people are stuck in the old views they were brought up on."

The opening of the archives has not passed without controversy. Olha Ginzburg, a Communist Party member and head of the state archives committee, claims that all necessary files have already been declassified, and has opposed the publication of archival documents.

Vyatrovych counters that this may be true of some archives, but certainly not of his. "Some political forces don't want the documents to see the light of day because it will affect their popularity."

Some pro-Russian opposition politicians have criticized Yushchenko's drive as nationalistic and dangerous. But Vyatrovych says fears of social tensions are exaggerated.

"My colleagues in other ex-Soviet countries said that when they opened their secret service archives, people also told them not to do it as it would cause a civil war," he says. "But it didn't happen, and won't happen here. It's a myth."

HISTORY AS POLITICS
Yushchenko's portrayal of Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people has also raised hackles at the highest levels in Russia. Confrontations – particularly over gas – have erupted frequently since the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, as Russia has reacted angrily to what it sees as Ukraine's realignment with the West.

When Yushchenko organized a 75th-anniversary commemoration last November, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev refused to attend, accusing his Ukrainian counterpart in an open letter of "[using] the so-called 'Holodomor' … to achieve short-term political goals." A number of countries, including the United States, have recognized Holodomor as genocide.

While Yushchenko has pushed a highly critical approach to Soviet history, Russia has in recent years gone some way towards rehabilitating Stalin's image, portraying him in school textbooks as an "effective manager" whose actions were "entirely rational."
Ukrainian historians complain that access to some Russian archives is much more restricted than it was in the '90s, and numerous requests for cooperation have been rejected.

In February, a group of Russian archivists and historians presented a book of historical documents that they said showed that the famine was not directed specifically at Ukrainians. Vyatrovych welcomed the move, saying he is not concerned by the interpretation.

"We are pleased that we have provoked them to take this step," he says. "The most important thing is that the documents are put out there. They speak for themselves, and much louder than any interpretation that is attached to them."

But not everyone is listening. Professor Kulchytsky, the expert on Holodomor, complains that older generations aren't open to revising their Soviet views. "It was easy to end the economic totalitarianism after 1991," he says. "It's much harder to end totalitarianism in people's heads."

Yushchenko's focus on history has also irked many at a time when he is deeply unpopular at home and the economic crisis is hitting harder in Ukraine than anywhere else in Europe.

But Vyatrovych is adamant that his work has more than academic significance. "The mobilization of society to solve the many problems we have is only possible if it isn't torn apart," he says. "And we can only achieve that if we come to a better understanding of our past."

LINK: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0505/p06s04-wogn.html?page=1\
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Ukraine Macroeconomic Report From SigmaBleyzer:
http://www.sigmableyzer.com/index.php?action=publications
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15. ANNE APPLEBAUM, NOTED AUTHOR, COLUMNIST, HISTORIAN,
TO RESEARCH AND WRITE A NEW BOOK ON HOLODOMOR
New book commissioned by Harvard University Research Institute (HURI)

by Peter T. Woloschuk, The Ukrainian Weekly, No. 13
Ukrainian National Association, Parsippany, NJ, Sunday, March 29, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) announced that it has entered into an agreement with noted author, columnist and historian Anne Applebaum, commissioning her to research and write a new book on the Holodomor.

The book will take into account the most recent evidence that has become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union and will address current scholarly debates on the questions of genocide, intentionality and population loss. In preparation for this work, Ms. Applebaum attended HURI’s two-day International Conference on the Holodomor in November 2008 and had discussions with many of the experts and scholars assembled there.

Ms. Applebaum is currently completing her research for a new book on the Stalinization of post-war Central Europe and afterwards will begin work on the Holodomor book. She will officially join HURI as a research associate early this summer; it is envisioned that she will spend several years on the book project.

As part of her commitment, Ms. Applebaum has agreed to lecture periodically for HURI on her archival research and her findings, and to discuss the progress of her work. She will also make appearances in Kyiv.

ARCHIVAL RESEARCH BY TETIANA BORIAK
Ms. Applebaum, who has indicated a particular interest in reviewing the volumes of eyewitness accounts that have been assembled throughout Ukraine,
will be assisted in her archival research in Ukraine by Tetiana Boriak, a scholar who received her candidate of sciences degree in history with additional specialization in archival and source studies from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University.

Ms. Boriak has previously assisted on other HURI-related projects: the translation from English into Ukrainian of the institute’s publication “Trophies
of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine: World War II and the International Politics of Restitution” by Patricia Kennedy Grimstead (2001).
Currently Ms. Boriak holds the position of senior teacher at the Department for Documental Communication of the State Academy of Executives in
Cultures and Arts.

Commenting on her commitment to the new Holodomor book project, Ms. Applebaum said, “The Harvard Ukrainian Institute has thought a good deal about this issue,” adding that HURI wishes “to approach (the Holodomor) in an objective and professional way. All of us understand the high emotions around the subject of the Famine, and we want its history to be told … as well as possible.”

This new book on the Holodomor is part of HURI’s larger ongoing Holodomor Research Project, which is overseen by a committee of Harvard scholars coordinated by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History.

NEW AND THOROUGH WORK NEEDED
As he discussed the book and the Holodomor Research Project, Prof. Plokhii said, “We certainly need a new and thorough work on the history of the
Great Famine in Ukraine. Since the publication of ‘The Harvest of Sorrow’ in 1986, the formerly secret Soviet Archives have been opened, new
publications have appeared, new questions have been asked, and HURI believes that its task now is to support a new interpretive research on the history of
Applebaum to write book on Holodomor New book commissioned by HURI the Holodomor that will take into account all these new developments in the field.”

“We are very excited that Anne Applebaum has agreed to take this task upon herself, and we expect that her book will not only open new vistas in research
on the Holodomor, but will also make new findings available to the broadest audience possible,” he noted.

HURI will also work with the Ukrainian Studies Fund (USF) in producing a series of booklets dealing with various aspects of the Holodomor as outreach
for the North American public.

The USF has been a co-sponsor of the Holodomor Research Project and has generously agreed to help underwrite much of the work. Dr. Roman Procyk
said of the project: “This work makes a lot of sense, especially today, when the post-colonial society in Ukraine is rethinking its past. This undertaking is
truly important and is an essential dimension of the overall effort to commemorate the Holodomor in the diaspora. It will have an immeasurable impact on future generations as they attempt to understand and deal with the Holodomor.”

JOURNALIST AND PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR
Ms. Applebaum, 45, is a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in
Central and Eastern Europe. Born in Washington, she graduated from the prestigious Sidwell Friends School. She earned a B.A. (summa cum laude) from
Yale University in 1986, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, she earned a master’s degree. She studied at St Antony’s College, Oxford, before moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988.

Working for The Economist from 1988 to 1991, Ms. Applebaum provided coverage of important social and political transitions in Eastern Europe, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She also covered the collapse of communism as the magazine’s Warsaw correspondent. In 1992 she was awarded the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award.

Ms. Applebaum lived in London and Warsaw during the 1990s, and was for several years a widely read columnist for London’s Daily and Sunday Telegraphs and the Evening Standard newspaper. She wrote about the workings of the British government, and opined on issues foreign and domestic.

Ms. Applebaum currently is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. She also writes for a number of other newspapers and magazines, including the
New York Review of Books. She was a member of the Washington Post editorial board in 2002-2006 and worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator magazine in London.

Her first book, “Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe,” was a travelogue, and was awarded an Adolph Bentinck Prize in 1996. It
describes a journey that Ms. Applebaum took through Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, then on the verge of independence.

"GULAG: A HISTORY" WON PULITZER PRIZE
“Gulag: A History,” was published in 2003 and won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004. The Pulitzer committee said that Gulag was a “landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.”

The book narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camp system and describes daily life in the camps, making extensive use of recently opened Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews. “Gulag: A History” has appeared in more than 40 languages, including Ukrainian.
When “Gulag” was released in its Ukrainian edition, Ms. Applebaum traveled to Kyiv, where she was warmly received by the public, as well as by academics, the media and experts on the Soviet penal system.

Over the years, Ms. Applebaum’s writings have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign
Affairs, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, Prospect, Commentaire, Die Welt, Cicero, Gazeta Wyborcza, Dziennik and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in several anthologies. Her Washington Post/Slate column appears in newspapers across the United States and around the world.

Ms. Applebaum has also lectured at numerous colleges and universities, including Yale and Columbia, the University of Heidelberg, the University of Zurich, the Humboldt University in Berlin, and Lafayette, Davidson and Williams colleges. In the spring of 2008 she was a fellow at the American
Academy in Berlin, Germany.

Ms. Applebaum is fluent in English, French, Polish and Russian. She is married to Radosław Sikorski, the Polish minister of foreign affairs. They have two
children, Alexander and Tadeusz.

LINK: http://www.ukrweekly.com/archive/2009/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_2009-13.pdf
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16. LEMKIN ON THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE
'Soviet Genocide in Ukraine'

Journal of International Criminal Justice, Oxford Journals
Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, Vol. 7 (No. 1), 2009; pg. 123-130

We publish below a piece by Raphael Lemkin (1901–1959) on the genocide of Ukrainians perpetrated, according to Lemkin, by the Soviet authorities between 1926 and 1946. This document was kindly brought to our attention by Roman Serbyn, Professor of History at the University of Québec at Montreal, who also supplied a transcript of the original text and wrote an introductory note.

The document was known to Lemkin specialists and experts in genocide, although most scholars have tended to ignore it, or to play it down (notable exceptions are J. Cooper, Ralph Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 253, as well as J.-L. Panné, ‘Rafaël Lemkin ou le pouvoir d’un sans-pouvoir’, in Rafaël Lemkin, Qu’est-ce qu’un génocide? Présentation par Jean-Louis Panné (Monaco: Édition du Rocher, 2008)). It seemed to us that this short article by Lemkin sheds much light on his view of genocide as the annihilation of a ‘national group’. a.c. .

LEMKIN ON THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE
'Soviet Genocide in Ukraine'

Introductory Note: by Roman Serbyn, Professor of History, Universite du Quebec a Montreal

Raphael Lemkin's essay, ‘Soviet Genocide in Ukraine’, is one of the earliest writings on the subject by a non-Ukrainian scholar. A note ‘Begin here’, scribbled in before the second paragraph, which begins with the words ‘What I want to speak about’, suggests that the text was originally composed for Lemkin's address at the 1953 Ukrainian Famine commemoration in New York.

Later Lemkin added it to the material he was gathering for his elaborate History of Genocide which was never published. (1) Lemkin's views on the Ukrainian tragedy are virtually unknown and hardly ever figure in scholarly exchanges on the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, or on genocides in general. (2) Yet his holistic approach to the Soviet regime's gradual destruction of the Ukrainian nation is enlightening and makes a valuable, if belated, addition to scholarly literature.

R. Lemkin was born in 1900 to a Jewish farming family in the village of Bezwodne, near the medieval Rus’ town of Volkovysk, now part of the Grodno region of Belarus. Before World War I the territory belonged to Russia, but after the break up of the Tsarist Empire it was incorporated into Poland. (3) Lemkin studied philology and law at the University of Lviv, where he became interested in the Turkish massacres of the Armenians during World War I.

After studying on a scholarship in Germany, France and Italy, he returned to Poland and pursued a career in the Polish courts of law, mainly in Warsaw. He continued his preoccupation with the problem of legal sanctions against perpetrators of mass exterminations and developed his ideas, which he later presented at various international conferences.

In 1930, Lemkin was appointed assistant prosecutor at the District Court of Berezhany, Tarnopil Province of Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine) where he must have become aware of the collectivization, ‘dekulakization’ and the eventual Great Famine then devastating Soviet Ukraine. Some time later he obtained a similar position in Warsaw, where he also practised law and continued his writings on international law.

After the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet troops in 1939, Lemkin fled to Vilnius and then to Sweden where he lectured at the University of Stockholm. In early 1941, he managed to obtain a visa to the USSR, but then via Japan and Canada went to the United States. In April 1941, he was appointed ‘special lecturer’ at Duke University Law School in Durham, North Carolina. In 1944 he published "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe," which he had started writing in Sweden. (4) The study is a thoroughly documented exposé on German crimes in Europe.

The book contains the first mention of the term ‘genocide’, which has become a generic name not only for the Nazi atrocities but for all mass destructions. The author's relentless lobbying, backed by the prestige of the book, finally succeeded in swaying the United Nations Organization to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, whose fitting 60th anniversary we are commemorating this year.

After World War II, Lemkin devoted his life to the further development of legal concepts and norms for containing mass destructions and punishing their perpetrators. After the fall of Nazism, Lemkin saw the main threat in Communism, which had overrun his native Poland. Towards the end of his life, he had close relations with the Ukrainian and Baltic communities in the United States. In 1953, he took part in the commemoration of the Great Famine by the New York Ukrainian community.

His essay on the Ukrainian genocide shows his empathy for the plight of Ukrainian victims of Communism and Russian imperialism, not only of the Great Famine of the early thirties but also of the periods that precede and followed this tragic event. Lemkin's essay, based on personal observations and supplemented with emotionally charged testimony provided by the Ukrainian community, may appear sketchy and naïve today.

Yet his comments offer an insight that is often lacking in the work of recent authors who can benefit from the documentation unavailable to Lemkin. He rightly extends the discussion of Ukrainian genocide beyond the peasants starving in 1932–1933, and speaks about the destruction of the intelligentsia and the Church, the ‘brain’ and the ‘soul’ of the nation. He puts emphasis on the preservation and development of culture, beliefs and common ideas, which make Ukraine ‘a nation rather than a mass of people’.

Lemkin's essay is being reproduced here with minor updating of terminology (Ukraine instead of ‘the Ukraine’, Romanian instead of ‘Rumanian’ and Tsarist instead of ‘Czarist’) and the transliteration of Ukrainian names from Ukrainian.

"SOVIET GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE"
By Rafael Lemkin (5)

‘Love Ukraine’
You cannot love other peoples
Unless you love Ukraine. (6)
Sosyura

The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy of expansionism, it is not an innovation devised simply to bring uniformity out of the diversity of Poles, Hungarians, Balts, Romanians — presently disappearing into the fringes of their empire. Instead, it has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin — one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the operations of Tsarist Russia. It is indeed an indispensable step in the process of ‘union’ that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the ‘Soviet Man’, the ‘Soviet Nation’ and to achieve that goal, that unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroy the nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe.

What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. This is, as I have said, only the logical successor of such Tsarist crimes as the drowning of 10,000 Crimean Tatars by order of Catherine the Great, the mass murders of Ivan the Terrible's ‘SS troops’ — the Oprichnina; the extermination of National Polish leaders and Ukrainian Catholics by Nicholas I; and the series of Jewish pogroms that have stained Russian history periodically. And it has had its matches within the Soviet Union in the annihilation of the Ingerian nation, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, the Crimean Tatar Republics, the Baltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Each is a case in the long-term policy of liquidation of non-Russian peoples by the removal of select parts.

Ukraine constitutes a slice of Southeastern USSR equal in area to France and Italy, and inhabited by some 30 million people.7 Itself the Russian bread basket, geography has made it a strategic key to the oil of the Caucasus and Iran, and to the entire Arab world. In the north, it borders Russia proper. As long as Ukraine retains its national unity, as long as its people continue to think of themselves as Ukrainians and to seek independence, so long Ukraine poses a serious threat to the very heart of Sovietism. It is no wonder that the Communist leaders have attached the greatest importance to the Russification of this independent[-minded] member of their ‘Union of Republics’, have determined to remake it to fit their pattern of one Russian nation. For the Ukrainian is not and has never been, a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion — all are different. At the side door to Moscow, he has refused to be collectivized, accepting deportation, even death. And so it is peculiarly important that the Ukrainian be fitted into the Procrustean pattern of the ideal Soviet man.

Ukraine is highly susceptible to racial murder by select parts and so the Communist tactics there have not followed the pattern taken by the German attacks against the Jews. The nation is too populous to be exterminated completely with any efficiency. However, its leadership, religious, intellectual, political, its select and determining parts, are quite small and therefore easily eliminated, and so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced labour, exile and starvation.

The attack has manifested a systematic pattern, with the whole process repeated again and again to meet fresh outbursts of national spirit. [1] The first blow is aimed at the intelligentsia, the national brain, so as to paralyse the rest of the body. In 1920, 1926 and again in 1930–1933, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders, were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the Ukrainian Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in 1931 alone. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is conservatively estimated that at least 75% of the Ukrainian intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho–Ukraine and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians (ibid., Summer 1949).

[2] Going along with this attack on the intelligentsia was an offensive against the churches, priests and hierarchy, the ‘soul’ of Ukraine. Between 1926 and 1932, the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, its Metropolitan (Lypkivsky) and 10,000 clergy were liquidated. In 1945, when the Soviets established themselves in Western Ukraine, a similar fate was meted out to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. That Russification was the only issue involved is clearly demonstrated by the fact that before its liquidation, the Church was offered the opportunity to join the Russian Patriarch[ate] at Moscow, the Kremlin's political tool.

Only two weeks before the San Francisco conference, on 11 April 1945, a detachment of NKVD troops surrounded the St George Cathedral in Lviv and arrested Metropolitan Slipyj, two bishops, two prelates and several priests. (8) All the students in the city's theological seminary were driven from the school, while their professors were told that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had ceased to exist, that its Metropolitan was arrested and his place was to be taken by a Soviet-appointed bishop. These acts were repeated all over Western Ukraine and across the Curzon Line in Poland. (9) At least seven bishops were arrested or were never heard from again. There is no Bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church still free in the area. Five hundred clergy who met to protest the action of the Soviets, were shot or arrested.

Throughout the entire region, clergy and laity were killed by hundreds, while the number sent to forced labour camps ran into the thousands. Whole villages were depopulated. In the deportation, families were deliberately separated, fathers to Siberia, mothers to the brickworks of Turkestan and the children to Communist homes to be ‘educated’. For the crime of being Ukrainian, the Church itself was declared a society detrimental to the welfare of the Soviet state, its members were marked down in the Soviet police files as potential ‘enemies of the people’. As a matter of fact, with the exception of 150,000 members in Slovakia, the Ukrainian Catholic Church has been officially liquidated, its hierarchy imprisoned, its clergy dispersed and deported.

These attacks on the Soul have also had and will continue to have a serious effect on the Brain of Ukraine, for it is the families of the clergy that have traditionally supplied a large part of the intellectuals, while the priests themselves have been the leaders of the villages, their wives the heads of the charitable organizations. The religious orders ran schools, and took care of much of the organized charities.

[3] The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible of all — starvation. Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death, an inhumanity which the 73rd Congress decried on 28 May 1934. (10)

There has been an attempt to dismiss this highpoint of Soviet cruelty as an economic policy connected with the collectivization of the wheat-lands, and the elimination of the kulaks, the independent farmers, was therefore necessary. The fact is, however, that large-scale farmers in Ukraine were few and far-between. As a Soviet politician Kosior (11) declared in Izvestiia on 2 December 1933, ‘Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger’, and it was to eliminate that nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity of the Soviet state that the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed.

The method used in this part of the plan was not at all restricted to any particular group. All suffered — men, women and children. The crop that year was ample to feed the people and livestock of Ukraine, though it had fallen off somewhat from the previous year, a decrease probably due in large measure to the struggle over collectivization. But a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order, by plan, through an unusually high grain allotment to the state as taxes. To add to this, thousands of acres of wheat were never harvested, and left to rot in the fields. The rest was sent to government granaries to be stored there until the authorities had decided how to allocate it. Much of this crop, so vital to the lives of the Ukrainian people, ended up as exports for the creation of credits abroad.

In the face of famine on the farms, thousands abandoned the rural areas and moved into the towns to beg food. Caught there and sent back to the country, they abandoned their children in the hope that they at least might survive. In this way, 18,000 children were abandoned in Kharkiv alone. Villages of a thousand had a surviving population of a hundred; in others, half the populace was gone, and deaths in these towns ranged from 20 to 30 per day. Cannibalism became commonplace.

As C. [read instead W.] Henry Chamberlain, the Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, wrote in 1933: The Communists saw in this apathy and discouragement, sabotage and counter-revolution, and, with the ruthlessness peculiar to self-righteous idealists, they decided to let the famine run its course with the idea that it would teach the peasants a lesson.

Relief was doled out to the collective farms, but on an inadequate scale and so late that many lives had already been lost. The individual peasants were left to shift for themselves; and much higher mortality rate among the individual peasants proved a most potent argument in favor of joining collective farms.

[4] The fourth step in the process consisted in the fragmentation of the Ukrainian people at once by the addition to the Ukraine of foreign peoples and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians throughout Eastern Europe. In this way, ethnic unity would be destroyed and nationalities mixed. Between 1920 and 1939, the population of Ukraine changed from 80% Ukrainian to only 63%.12 In the face of famine and deportation, the Ukrainian population had declined absolutely from 23.2 million to 19.6 million, while the non-Ukrainian population had increased by 5.6 million. When we consider that Ukraine once had the highest rate of population increase in Europe, around 800,000 per year, it is easy to see that the Russian policy has been accomplished.

These have been the chief steps in the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation, in its progressive absorption within the new Soviet nation. Notably, there have been no attempts at complete annihilation, such as was the method of the German attack on the Jews. And yet, if the Soviet programme succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people.

The mass, indiscriminate murders have not, however, been lacking — they have simply not been integral parts of the plan, but only chance variations. Thousands have been executed, untold thousands have disappeared into the certain death of Siberian labour camps.

The city of Vinnitsa might well be called the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91 graves there lie the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. Among the gravestones of real cemeteries, in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies lay from 1937 until their discovery by the Germans in 1943. Many of the victims had been reported by the Soviets as exiled to Siberia.

Ukraine has its Lidice too, in the town of Zavadka, destroyed by the Polish satellites of the Kremlin in 1946. (13) Three times, troops of the Polish Second Division attacked the town, killing men, women and children, burning houses and stealing farm animals. During the second raid, the Red commander told what was left of the town's populace: ‘The same fate will be met by everyone who refuses to go to Ukraine. I therefore order that within three days the village be vacated; otherwise, I shall execute every one of you.’ (14)

When the town was finally evacuated by force, there remained only 4 men among the 78 survivors. During March of the same year, nine other Ukrainian towns were attacked by the same Red unit and received more or less similar treatment.

What we have seen here is not confined to Ukraine. The plan that the Soviets used there has been and is being repeated. It is an essential part of the Soviet programme for expansion, for it offers the quick way of bringing unity out of the diversity of cultures and nations that constitute the Soviet Empire. That this method brings with it indescribable suffering for millions of people has not turned them from their path. If for no other reason than this human suffering, we would have to condemn this road to unity as criminal. But there is more to it than that.

This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation. If it were possible to do this even without suffering we would still be driven to condemn it, for the family of minds, the unity of ideas, of language and of customs that form what we call a nation that constitutes one of the most important of all our means of civilization and progress.

It is true that nations blend together and form new nations — we have an example of this process in our own country — but this blending consists in the pooling of benefits of superiorities that each culture possesses. (15) And it is in this way that the world advances. What then, apart from the very important question of human suffering and human rights that we find wrong with Soviet plans is the criminal waste of civilization and of culture. For the Soviet national unity is being created, not by any union of ideas and of cultures, but by the complete destruction of all cultures and of all ideas save one — the Soviet.

NOTES:
(1) Raphael Lemkin Papers, The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation, Raphael Lemkin ZL-273. Reel 3. The paper by Lemkin reproduced here has been published in L.Y. Luciuk (ed.), "Holodomor - Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine" (Kingston, Ontario: The Kashtan Press, 2008), Appendix A, and will be republished in a new Journal: "Holodomor Studies (2009)."

(2) A notable exception is J.L. Panné, ‘Rafaël Lemkin ou le pouvoir d’un sans-pouvoir’, in R. Lemkin (ed.), "Qu’est-ce qu’un génocide? Présentation par Jean-Louis Panné" (Monaco: Édition du Rocher, 2008) 7–66.

(3) Bibliographical data gathered from R. Szawlowski, ‘Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) The Polish Lawyer Who Created the Concept of "Genocide" ’, 2 "Polish International Affairs" (2005) 98–133; Panné, supra note 2.

(4) R. Lemkin, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress" (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), xii–xiii.

(5) If no indication to the contrary is given, footnotes are by Prof. Serbyn.

(6) Verse by Volodymyr Sosyura added in pencil. Sosiura wrote the patriotic poem in 1944, during the German–Soviet war. At first it was praised by the authorities, but in 1948 it was condemned for Ukrainian nationalism. The two verses in the Ukrainian original: [would not reproduce here]

(7) According to the 1959 census there were then a little over 40 million people.

(8) The Charter creating the United Nations was signed by the delegates of 50 countries, including the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, at the Conference held on 25–26 April 1945.

(9) The Curzon Line proposed by the British as a border between Poland and the Soviet state after the First World War eventually served as the basis for the post-World War II border between Poland and the USSR. The border left a large Ukrainian minority in the Polish state.

(10) On 28 May 1934, Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York introduced a Resolution (H. Res. 309) in the House of Representatives, in Washington. The document stipulated that ‘several millions of the population of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic died of starvation during 1932 and 1933’. The resolution further proposed:

that the House of Representatives express its sympathy for all those who suffered from the great famine in Ukraine which has brought misery,
affliction, and death to millions of peaceful and law-abiding Ukrainians;

‘that ... the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ... take active steps to alleviate the terrible consequences arising from this famine,

‘that ... the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Government ... place no obstacles in the way of American citizens seeking to send aid in form of
money, foodstuffs, and necessities to the famine-stricken regions of Ukraine.

The Resolution was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Resolution reproduced in "The Ukrainian Quarterly" (1978) 416–417).

(11) Erroneously identified by Lemkin as ‘Soviet writer Kossies’, Stanislav Kosior was the First Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP(b)U). In a speech delivered at the Joint session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee of the CP(b)U, on 27 November 1933, Kosior stated that ‘at the present moment, local Ukrainian nationalism poses the main danger’.

(12) There was no census in 1920. The official figures from the 1926 and 1939 census are somewhat different from Lemkin's. In 1926, there were 22.9 million ethnic Ukrainians in Ukrainian SSR and the falsified 1939 figure showed 23.3 million, or an increase of 435,000 ethnic Ukrainians. However, the rise in over-all population of Ukrainian SSR by 3.3 million reduced the ethnically Ukrainian portion from 80% to 73%.

(13) On 10 June 1942, 172 males over the age of 16 years were liquidated, the women and children deported and the village of Lidice razed to the ground in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi dictator of Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich. Zavadka Morokhivs’ka, Sianits’kyi povit, Lemkivshchyna, now Zawadka-Morochowska, in Poland.

(14) From W. Dushnyck, "Death and Devastation on the Curzon Line" (note by R.L.).

(15) Lemkin had in mind the United States.
---------------------------------------------------
NOTE: The Journal of International Criminal Justice aims to promote a profound collective reflection on the new problems facing international law.
Established by a group of distinguished criminal lawyers and international lawyers, the Journal addresses the major problems of justice from the angle of law, jurisprudence, criminology, penal philosophy, and the history of international judicial institutions. It is intended for graduate and post-graduate students, practitioners, academics, government officials, as well as the hundreds of people working for international criminal courts.

LINK: http://jicj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/7/1/123
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17. HOLODOMOR STUDIES - NEW JOURNAL DEVOTED
TO THE ANALYSIS OF THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE

Charles Schlacks, Publisher, Idyllwild, CA, USA
Professor Roman Serbyn, Editor, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Action Ukraine Report (AUR), Wash, D.C., Sat, Apr 18, 2009

IDYLLWILD, CA - The first issue of the semi-annual "HOLODOMOR STUDIES" journal has just been published. This unique journal is the first and the only periodical of its kind devoted completely to the analysis of the Ukrainian genocide in all its aspects.

The publication will be instrumental in the dissemination of information about the Ukrainian catastrophe and will contribute to the understanding of this critical event in the history of the Ukrainian nation and the world community by the Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians alike. Contributions submitted for possible publication should be sent to the editor, Professor Roman Serbyn, in e-mail format at Serbyn.Roman@videotron.ca. The number two issue of the new "Holodomor Studies" journal is expected to be available in August-September of 2009.

Annual subscription rates to the semi-annual "Holodomor Studies" journal are: Institutions - $40.00; Individuals - $20.00, plus postage: for the USA - $6.00; for Canada - $12.00; for other Countries - $20.00. The new "Holodomor Studies" journal may be ordered from: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, P.O. Box 1256, Idyllwild, CA 92549-1256, USA, e-mail: schlacks.slavic@greencafe.com.

FIRST ISSUE, APRIL 2009 -----
The first issue of the "Holodomor Studies" journal contains the following material:
PUBLISHER'S PREFACE - Charles Schlacks
EDITOR'S FOREWORD - Roman Serbyn

IN MEMORIAM: RAPHAEL LEMKIN [1900-1959]:
- Lemkin on the Ukrainian Genocide - Roman Serbyn
- Soviet Genocide in Ukraine - Raphael Lemkin

ARTICLES -----
- Competing Memories of Communist and Nazis Crimes in Ukraine - Roman Serbyn
- The Soviet Nationalities Policy Change of 1933, or Why "Ukrainian Nationalism" Became the Main Threat to Stalin in Ukraine - Hennadii Yefimenko
- Foreign Diplomats on the Famine in Ukraine - Yuriy Shapoval
- "Blacklists" as a Tool of the Soviet Genocide in Ukraine - Heorhii Papakin
- The Question of the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933 in the Polish Diplomatic and Intelligence Reports - Robert Kuśnierz

DOCUMENTS -----
- The Great Famine of 1933 and the Ukrainian Lobby at the League of Nations and the International Red-Cross - Roman Serbyn, compiler and editor

BOOK REVIEW -----
- History That Divides - Mykola Riabchuk

SUBSCRIBE TO THE "HOLODOMOR STUDIES" JOURNAL NOW -----
Annual subscription rates to the semi-annual "Holodomor Studies" journal are: Institutions - $40.00; Individuals - $20.00, plus postage: for the USA - $6.00; for Canada - $12.00; for other Countries - $20.00. The new "Holodomor Studies" journal may be ordered from: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, P.O. Box 1256, Idyllwild, CA 92549-1256, USA, e-mail: schlacks.slavic@greencafe.com.
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18. DEADLY ORPHANAGE
The building where over 700 children starved to death in 1932–33 is still there

By Olha Bohlevska, Zaporizhia, The Day Weekly Digest
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Hard facts have been established, revealing the horrible truth about the death of small inmates of an orphanage in downtown Zaporizhia 75 years ago. The city learned the tragic story after the city council’s commission on toponyms began discussing the possibility of installing a memorial sign dedicated to the inmates of the Children’s Home who died in 1932–33.

The evidence, which was discovered almost accidentally, is hair-raising: over 700 inmates of the orphanage, aged between one day and four years, died within a year and a half. Most often the cause of death, as recorded in the archives, was emaciation, intoxication, gastritis, and others. In fact, the small children died of chronic undernourishment. The horrible specter of the Holodomor caught up with them where they were supposed to be rescued and cared for.

Children’s cases were found in the archives a year ago, long before the official measures regarding the Holodomor, by Anatolii Peniok, an amateur ethnographer and foreman at the Zaporizhstal Steelworks. “We learned about the death of 30 orphanage inmates back in 1993 but were unable to locate the institution, he says, so I decided to find it and started digging up the state archives.”

Leafing through public registry files of what was at the time Stalin district, reading handwritten entries faded with time, Peniok came across a large number of death certificates relating to infants and pointing to the same location: Children’s Home at 7 Rosa Luxembug St., or just a children’s home, without an address but with the same names of the medical staff.

He checked the records from May 21, 1932, through Nov. 30, 1933 and meticulously copied the children’s names, drawing up a list of 755 names. Peniok feels sure that a further study of these documents would reveal quite a few silent tragedies.

YURII DNIPROSTROI AND BERNARD SHAW
I have followed in the footsteps of the above-mentioned foreman and the archivists who were tasked with answering a request from the Zhovtnevy district city state administration, and studied the demographic records. I could not help crying as I turned the pages of archival documents. Not a single day would pass at the orphanage without a small inmate’s death; sometimes five to six deaths were registered within 24 hours. Nine children died on May 21, 1933, when the famine was exacerbated by a measles epidemic.

The names of many children are proof of their status as foundlings (e.g., Yurii Dniprostroi, Ivan Stantsiiny, Mykola Fevralsky, Frosia Yuzhna, Nina Dyspanserna, etc.). After exhausting the list of ordinary names, the orphanage’s personnel turned to those of past celebrities: Bernard Shaw, Anna Akhmetova (sic), Lesia Ukrainka, and so on. Yet children died all the same.

A MAN WITH A FULL BELLY THINKS NO ONE IS HUNGRY
Peniok’s discovery became known to Dr. Fedir Turchenko, who holds a Ph.D. in History and is a member of the Zaporizhia City Council’s commission on toponyms. He was in charge of the Zaporizhia volume of the National Book of Memory: victims of the 1932–33 Holodomor in Ukraine.

He was stunned by the functionaries’ cynicism at the time: “That orphanage was … on Rosa Luxemburg St., where there also was the prosecutor’s office, district council, finance department, and other institutions. The Soviet bureaucrats could not have been ignorant of what was happening in a building they passed by every day on their way to work.”

Referring to official documents, Dr. Turchenko notes that the children’s homes in what is now Zaporizhia oblast and what was then part of Dnipropetrovsk oblast had some 40,000 inmates. Peasant parents would often purposefully abandon their babies in that relatively well-supplied industrial area, hoping the foundlings would be spared death by starvation. Vain hopes.

Turchenko is sure that the Soviet civil servants did not suffer from the famine because they received food from special distribution centers that did not cater to the public at large. Proof of this is an archival directive establishing food rations for the senior officials of the Melitopil district executive committee (the first figure indicates the amount per the head of the family and the second one, per a dependent of up to 14 years of age): 600-800/400 grams of bread and 1.0/0.5 kilogram of cereals were part of the daily rations.

The monthly rations included 3.5 kilograms/500 grams of meat; 1.5 kilogram/400 grams of sugar, etc. It stands to reason that the bureaucrats in Zaporizhia did not have poorer rations than their counterparts in the province.

A MEMORIAL PLAQUE
The street that used to bear the name of Rosa Luxemburg now boasts the name of another revolutionary, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Building No. 7 now accommodates the state treasury department and a veterinary clinic. Historians do not have direct evidence that this building once housed the orphanage, but the probability is very high.

It is an old structure, located at an intersection, just like that Children’s Home in the 1930s. Be that as it may, the initiators of the memorial project believe that the main thing is not the exact address but the memories of innocent children’s souls.

“It would be improper to remind people who work here of the sad events of the past every day,” says Mykhailo Levchenko, a member of the commission on toponyms, “so we agreed on a memorial plaque on the wall joining building No. 7 and the next building.”

The initiative of the city council members and the public has been supported by the experts at the city’s architecture and urban planning directorate. Hopefully, the red tape that started last spring will finally end and memories of the children who happened to be born in that horrible period will not sink into oblivion.

LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/263840/
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19. “VERY UGLY SILENCE" BROKEN AS ONTARIO (CANADA)
MPPs COME TOGETHER TO RECOGNIZE UKRAINE GENOCIDE

By Alina POPKOVA, The Day Weekly Digest in English #12
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, 14 April 2009

The legislative assembly of Canada’s province Ontario has passed a law by a unanimous vote for the first time in its history. According to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Vasyl Kyrylych, the law established the fourth Saturday in November each year as Holodomor Memorial Day in Ontario to commemorate the genocide by famine that occurred in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933.

The bill was proposed by representatives of all the political parties in Ontario’s parliament: Dave Levac (Liberal Party), Cheri DiNovo (New Democratic Party), and Frank Klees (Progressive Conservative Party). “The memorial day,” Levac said, “will provide an opportunity to reflect on and to educate the public about crimes against humanity that occurred in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 under the Stalin regime, when as many as 10 million people perished in a man-made famine and genocide. We must speak about these ugly things so they do not repeat in the future.”

He was supported by Cheri DiNovo who noted: “Those who fought long and hard to have Holodomor commemorated deserve the Legislature’s thanks. You are an example to the world, to those who deny oppression and who deny totalitarianism still… A very ugly silence has been broken.”

According to MPP Frank Kless, “a tragedy in which, at its worst, 25,000 people died every single day in a region considered the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, traumatized a nation, leaving its people with deep social, psychological, political scars.” Attending the legislative hearings were A. Danyleiko, Consul-General of Ukraine in Toronto, Archbishop Yurii of Toronto and Eastern Canada, and representatives of Ukrainian civic organizations in Canada.

It will be recalled that on April 6 the genocide of Ukrainians was condemned by the municipality of Santa Susana, Catalonia. The historical fact of the 1932–33 Holodomor has been officially recognized by more than 70 countries. The presidents and heads of government and parliaments of 26 counties called the Holodomor an act of genocide.

Of great political importance was a joint statement on the 70th anniversary of the 1932–33 great famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine adopted, as an official document, by the 58th session of the UN General Assembly. The statement, essentially a declaration, was cosponsored by 36 UN member states. The 1932–1933 events were thus recognized as national tragedy and have been called Holodomor since then at the international level.

LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/272928/
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