Word: yushchenko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Moscow has reacted angrily to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's attempts in recent years to gain NATO membership and to a recent agreement in March under which the European Union would help modernize Ukraine's aging gas-transport system. "This agreement is Exhibit A in Moscow's collection [of complaints]," says Trenin. "It's evidence that Europe is concluding bilateral deals with Ukraine that undermine Russia's interests...
Moscow is particularly irked by Yushchenko's recognition of leaders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, which fought against Soviet - as well as Nazi and Polish - forces in World War II. Members of the group are frequently denounced as "fascists" and "Nazi collaborators" in the Russian media, but Kulchytsky says the reality is more complex and that they "never had an agreement with Hitler...
...Yushchenko has touched a raw nerve among Russian leaders with what they see as attempts to tear apart the two nations, efforts to cement Ukraine's independence - gained in 1991 - and move the country toward the West. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement last week accusing Kiev of trying to drag Ukrainians into "an artificial, contrived confrontation with Russia...
...Yushchenko's moves to bring attention to the crimes of the past have been well received by many in Ukraine, whose citizens suffered widespread political repression under the Soviet regime. "People need to know the history of their own country, not the distorted Soviet view," says Roman Krutsyk, president of the Kiev-based NGO Memorial, which documents Soviet political repressions. "Yushchenko's biggest achievement is that he brought up the question of our history...
...Ukraine's Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression, Yushchenko gave a speech at the Bykivnya forest, a mass grave near Kiev where the bodies of an estimated 100,000 victims of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, were dumped between 1937 and 1941. In the speech, he equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany: "They are comparable in their hatred towards human beings. They are identical in the unprecedented scale of their mass killings...