Difference between revisions of "Ukraine"

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Revision as of 08:07, January 26, 2022

Україна
Ukrayina
Ukraine.PNG
Flag of Ukraine.png
Arms of Ukraine.png
Flag Coat of Arms
Capital Kiev
Government Parliamentary Democracy
Languages Ukrainian (official)

Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Turkic, Yiddish

President Volodoymr Zelensky
Prime minister Denys Shmyhal
Area 209,193 sq mi
Population 38,200,000 (2020)
GDP $150,000,000,000 (2020)
GDP per capita $3,429 (2020)
Currency Hryvnia
Internet top-level domain .ua

Ukraine is an Eastern European country which was part of Russia and then the Soviet Union until its independence in 1991. To the north and east it shares a border with Russia; it shares a border with Belarus to the north and Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west. The counties of Romania and Moldova are to the south-west. The Black Sea is to the south and this offers access to the Mediterranean. The capital city is Kiev and the main religion is Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Ukrainians completely rejects its prior dominance by Russia, to the point of even pronouncing Kiev different from how Russians do (Ki-yeev, not the Russian KEY-ev).[1]

Ukraine is frequently in the news in the United States due to attempts by politicians, most notably Joe Biden's family, to profit from the country. President Donald Trump was then criticized by liberals for asking Ukrainian leaders to investigate the potential corruption.

Ukraine is run by an oligarchy, with a small group of people amassing enormous fortunes as most of the nation labors in poverty. In 2014, the Pro-European bloc overthrew the pro-Russian bloc in an attempt to grab power, resulting in massive chaos, the loss of Crimea to Russia, a pseudo civil war and an economic crisis. This is in addition to how:

  • The worldwide Recession of 2008 hit Ukraine hard and it is seeking international aid.
  • Politics has been chaotic recently.
  • Russia has used its oil and gas exports to control Ukrainian politics and economics.
  • A strong (20%) Russian minority (mostly in the south and east) is campaigning for partition.
  • The legal and economic systems are still controlled by powerful and secretive oligarchs.
  • Ukraine is neutral in its alliances, but has some limited military links to European Union.

The Ukrainian government which was installed in a coup in 2014 by the Obama administration worked with the Democratic National Committee to gin up the Russia Collusion hoax, demonize Vladimir Putin, interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and turn American public opinion against Russia for propaganda purposes.

Russia and the U.S. were strong allies at the start of the Obama administration. After the Maidan coup, the new Ukrainian regime colluded with the DNC to demonize Russia in the Russia Collusion hoax.

Geography

The total area of Ukraine is 603,700 km2 (233,090 sq. mi), making it, after Russia, the second largest country in Europe. Its coastline is 2,782 km.

The land of Ukraine is mostly steppes and plateaus. There are mountains in the west of the country, the Carpathians, and in the Crimean peninsula in the south. The main rivers in Ukraine are the Dnieper and the Dniester.

The Ukrainian climate is considered temperate continental, but in the Crimea it is Mediterranean. The levels of precipitation are highest in the west and north, and lower in east and southeast. The winters vary from cool along the Black Sea to cold farther inland, and the summers are warm across the greater part of the country, and hot in the south.

Demography

The so-called "Revolution of Dignity" which the Obama administration supported. Written on the wall: “Ukraine for Ukrainians.”[2]

Ukraine's population is about 46.5 million and falling, with a population density of about 80 per square kilometer (200 people per square mile).

The population is 73% Ukrainian and 22% Russian (with under 1% each of Poles, Jews, Bulgarians and others). Historically the countryside was heavily Ukrainian, while Russians dominated the cities, but in recent decades many Ukrainians have moved to the cities.

The country has been in demographic crisis since the 1980s. The population is shrinking 150,000 a year because of the lowest birth rate in Europe combined with one of the highest death rates in Europe. Life expectancy is falling. The nation suffers high mortality from environmental pollution, poor diets, widespread smoking, extensive alcoholism, and deteriorating medical care.[3]

The phenomenon of lowest-low fertility, defined as total fertility below 1.3, is emerging throughout Europe and is attributed by many to postponement of the initiation of childbearing. Ukraine, where total fertility (a very low 1.1 in 2001), is one of the world's lowest, shows that there is more than one pathway to lowest-low fertility. Although Ukraine has undergone immense political and economic transformations during 1991-2004, it has maintained a young age at first birth and nearly universal childbearing. Analysis of official national statistics and the Ukrainian Reproductive Health Survey show that fertility declined to very low levels without a transition to a later pattern of childbearing. Findings from focus group interviews suggest explanations of the early fertility pattern. These findings include the persistence of traditional norms for childbearing and the roles of men and women, concerns about medical complications and infertility at a later age, and the link between early fertility and early marriage.[4]

The government-imposed famines of the 1930s, followed by the devastation of World War II, comprised a demographic disaster. Life expectancy at birth fell to a level as low as ten years for females and seven for males in 1933 and plateaued around 25 for females and 15 for males in the period 1941-44.[5]

Language, Religion, Culture

Languages spoken in Ukraine include Ukrainian (70%), Russian (20%), plus 10% miscellaneous, such as Crimean Tartar and also Surzhyk in the southeast (a blend of Russian vocabulary with Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation).

The religion is predominately Eastern Orthodox. In 1992 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church split into two rival denominations. About 10%, primarily in the west, belong to Uniate churches with eastern rites but affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church of Rome. Poles are Roman Catholics of the Latin rite. The Tatars are Muslims. About 4% are atheists.

Ukraine is widely known for its lively Cossack-style dancing ("hopak") and elaborately batiked Easter eggs ("pysanky")

There are not only clear regional differences on questions of identity but historical cleavages remain evident at the level of individual social identification. Attitudes toward the most important political issue, relations with Russia, differed strongly between L'viv, identifying more with Ukrainian nationalism and the Greek Orthodox religion, and Donetsk, predominantly Russian and favorable to the Soviet era, while in central and southern regions, as well as Kiev, such divisions were less important and there was less antipathy toward people from other regions. However, all were united by an overarching Ukrainian identity based on shared economic difficulties, showing that other attitudes are determined more by culture and politics than by demographic differences.[6]

Important Ukrainian literary figures include Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka.

Constitution

Ukraine has a parliamentary-presidential system of government with separate executive, judicial, and legislative branches. The president nominates the defense and foreign ministers, and the Prosecutor General and Chief of the State Security Service (SBU), each of whom must be confirmed by the parliament. Beginning in 2006, the 450-member unicameral parliament (Supreme Rada) names the prime minister, who in turn nominates other ministers. The Supreme Rada initiates legislation, ratifies international agreements, and approves the budget. Its members are elected to five-year terms. Following free elections held on December 1, 1991, Leonid M. Kravchuk, former chairman of the Ukrainian Rada, was elected to a five-year term, and became Ukraine's first president. At the same time, a referendum on independence was approved by more than 90% of the voters.

Shortly after becoming independent, Ukraine named a parliamentary commission to prepare a new constitution, adopted a multi-party system, and adopted legislative guarantees of civil and political rights for national minorities. A new, democratic constitution was adopted on June 28, 1996, which mandates a pluralistic political system with protection of basic human rights and liberties. Amendments that took effect January 1, 2006, shifted significant powers from the president to the prime minister and Supreme Rada.


Freedom of religion is guaranteed by law, although religious organizations are required to register with local authorities and with the central government. Minority rights are respected in accordance with a 1991 law guaranteeing ethnic minorities the right to schools and cultural facilities and the use of national languages in conducting personal business. According to the constitution, Ukrainian is the only official state language. In Crimea and some parts of eastern Ukraine—areas with substantial ethnic Russian minorities—local and regional governments permit Russian as a language for local official correspondence.

Freedom of speech and press are guaranteed by law and by the constitution, and authorities generally respect these rights. Prior to the "Orange Revolution," however, authorities sometimes interfered with the news media through intimidation and other forms of pressure. In particular, the failure of the government to conduct a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation into the 2000 disappearance and murder of independent journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, in which then-government officials have been credibly implicated, negatively affected Ukraine's international image. Freedom of the media and respect for citizens’ rights have increased markedly since the government of President Yushchenko took office in January 2005.

Recent politics

Russian language spoken in Ukraine
2010 election results

Ethnic tensions in Crimea during 1992 prompted a number of pro-Russian political organizations to advocate secession of Crimea and reincorporation to Russia. (Crimea was ceded by the RFSSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, in recognition of historic links and for economic convenience, to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's union with Russia.) In July 1992, the Crimean and Ukrainian parliaments determined that Crimea would remain under Ukrainian jurisdiction while retaining significant cultural and economic autonomy.

Official trade unions have been grouped under the Federation of Trade Unions. A number of independent unions, which emerged during 1992, among them the Independent Union of Miners of Ukraine, have formed the Consultative Council of Free Trade Unions. While the right to strike is legally guaranteed, strikes based solely on political demands are prohibited.

In July 1994, Leonid Kuchma was elected as Ukraine's second president in free and fair elections. Kuchma was reelected in November 1999 to another five-year term, with 56% of the vote. International observers criticized aspects of the election, especially slanted media coverage; however, the outcome of the vote was not called into question. Ukraine's March 2002 parliamentary elections were characterized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as flawed, but an improvement over the 1998 elections. The pro-presidential For a United Ukraine bloc won the largest number of seats, followed by the reformist Our Ukraine bloc of Viktor Yushchenko (who was then a former Prime Minister), and the Communist Party.

The campaign leading to the October 31, 2004 presidential election was characterized by widespread violations of democratic norms, including government intimidation of the opposition and of independent media, abuse of state administrative resources, highly skewed media coverage, and numerous provocations. The two major candidates—Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader (and former Prime Minister) Viktor Yushchenko—each garnered between 39% and 40% of the vote and proceeded to a winner-take-all second round. The November 21 runoff election was marred by credible reports of widespread and significant violations, including illegal expulsion of opposition representatives from election commissions, multiple voting by busloads of people, abuse of absentee ballots, reports of coercion of votes in schools and prisons, and an abnormally high number of (easily manipulated) mobile ballot box votes. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Kyiv and other cities to protest electoral fraud and express support for Yushchenko, and conducted ongoing peaceful demonstrations during what came to be known as the "Orange Revolution."

The OSCE International Election Observation Mission found that the November 21, 2004 run-off presidential election "did not meet a considerable number of OSCE commitments and Council of Europe and other European standards for democratic elections…Overall, State executive authorities and the Central Election Commission (CEC) displayed a lack of will to conduct a genuine democratic election process." Other independent observers were similarly critical. On November 24, 2004, the CEC declared Prime Minister Yanukovych the winner with 49.46% compared to 46.61% for Yushchenko. The U.S. and Europe refused to accept the result as legitimate due to the numerous, uninvestigated reports of fraud. European leaders traveled to Kyiv to mediate a political solution between the parties. On November 27, Ukraine's Supreme Rada passed a resolution declaring that the election results as announced did not represent the will of the people. On December 1, the Rada passed a vote of "no confidence" in the government. On December 3, Ukraine's Supreme Court invalidated the CEC's announced results and mandated a repeat of the second round vote to take place on December 26. An agreement mediated by the European leaders resulted in new legislation being passed by the Rada and signed by the President December 8. The electoral law was reformed to close loopholes that had permitted pervasive electoral fraud. The constitution was amended, effective not earlier than September 2005, to transfer power, especially with respect to appointment of ministers, from the president to the cabinet. Yet another law was passed, in first reading, to devolve some powers of the central government to regional councils. In addition, Prime Minister Yanukovych requested and was granted a leave of absence, and Prosecutor General Hennadiy Vasilyev submitted his resignation.

The December 26 re-vote took place in an atmosphere of calm. While irregularities were noted, observers found no systemic or massive fraud. The OSCE Mission noted that "campaign conditions were markedly more equal, observers received fewer reports of pressure on voters, the election administration was more transparent and the media more balanced than in previous rounds…in our collective view Ukraine’s elections have moved substantially closer to meeting OSCE and other European standards." On January 10, 2005, after the CEC and the Supreme Court had considered and rejected numerous complaints and appeals filed by the Yanukovych campaign, the CEC certified the results: Yushchenko had won 51.99% of the votes, with 44.20% for Yanukovych. President Yushchenko was inaugurated January 23, 2005.

Ukraine held parliamentary and local elections on March 26, 2006. International observers noted that conduct of the Rada election was in line with international standards for democratic elections, making this the most free and fair in Ukraine's history. Unlike the first rounds of the 2004 presidential election, candidates and parties were able to express themselves freely in a lively press and assembled without hindrance. There was no systemic abuse of administrative resources as there had been under the previous regime. The Party of Regions and the bloc of former Prime Minister Tymoshenko, whose government the President dismissed in September 2005, finished ahead of the pro-presidential Our Ukraine bloc. Other parties passing the 3% threshold to enter parliament were the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Communist Party of Ukraine. No party held the majority of Rada seats needed to form a government. Following four months of difficult negotiations, a government led by Prime Minister Yanukovych and including representatives from the Party of Regions, Our Ukraine, and the Socialist Party took office on August 4, 2006. This, the first government formed after the extensive constitutional amendments brokered as part of the Orange Revolution, has been the focus the Prime Minister's growing influence, sometimes at the expense of the President. Amid shifting political alliances, the "Anti-Crisis Coalition" formed by the Party of Regions, Socialist and Communist parties has grown into a "Coalition of National Unity," as some members of the pro-presidential "Our Ukraine" bloc have moved into the Prime Minister's camp. Meanwhile, others have joined forces with Bloc Yuliya Tymoshenko.

On January 16, 2022 Ukraine mandated that all print media are to switch to the Ukrainian language. State Language Protection Commissioner Taras Kremin said in a Facebook post, "In accordance with the law, print mass media can be produced in other languages, on the condition that the number of copies issued in a foreign language is equal to the number of copies issued in the state language [Ukrainian]. All language versions must be issued under the same name and be equal to each other in terms of content, volume, printing techniques. They must enter circulation under the same number and on the same day."[7]

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandara (OUNb) worked hard to start a war between the US and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, “Other statements were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera wing) called for." OUNb follow the same political policy and platform that was developed in the 1930s by Stepan Bandera. When these people go to a Holocaust memorial they are celebrating both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed.[8] The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and want an authoritarian fascism.

Alexandra Chalupa (Ali Chalupa) is a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee. According to the Ukrainian Weekly,[9]

… “The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following the initial Twitter storms. Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko and others.” The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money for the coup. This was how the Ukrainian emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine’s chubby nazi, Dima Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan and Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The “Sniper Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows clearly detailed evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that show who created the “heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital Maidan by both Chalupas is a clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25 year prison sentence attached to it because it ended in a coup.
Members of the Azov Battalion with the NATO flag (left) Azov mascot (center) and Swastika (right). The NATO flag represents globalism; the Cyrillic A3OB in the center spells AZOV; and the swastika represents the NATO and globalists' Russophobic allies in Ukraine. A Ukrainian court found elements in the Ukrainian government colluded with the DNC to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.[10]

Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa described Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important “dreamers.” He is a young activist that founded Euromaidan Press. Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say is who he actually is. Sviatoslav Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy Director position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev.

In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He became the foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni Yatsenyuk, and Oleh Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet Dimitri Yurash you had to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found out.

At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense of Ukraine under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen either behind Yarosh on videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to reporters. From January 2014 onward, to speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an appointment with Yurash.

Andrea Chalupa has worked with Yurash's Euromaidan Press which is associated with Informnapalm.org and supplies the state level hackers for Ukraine.

Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice is Irene Chalupa. From her bio– Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian emigre leader.

According to Robert Parry's article[11] At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council. Their main goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

The Obama State Department colluded with the fascist Azov Battalion to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine in the Euromaidan Rebellion and install a corrupt regime that was sympathetic to, and included, fascists.

The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was “Are you willing to go to war with Russia?” Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions in a Hillary Clinton administration, Dimitri Alperovitch own fellowship status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Donald's Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton needed a boost.

Collusion with the Obama administration

In January 2016 the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington.[12] The meeting brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with Eric Ciaramella[13] and members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ). Ukrainian participants said it didn’t take long to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations: one involving Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and one involving Paul Manafort's lobbying firm, linked closely to then-candidate Trump.

U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, then a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington tasked with organizing the meeting. Telizhenko said U.S. officials said that they had an interest in reviving a closed 2014 investigation into payments to U.S. figures from Ukraine’s Russia-backed Party of Regions. That 2014 investigation was focused on Manafort. The FBI closed the case without charging Manafort. DOJ officials asking investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) if they could help find new evidence about the Party of Regions’ payments and its dealings with Americans. “It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to U.S. media during the 2016 election,” Telizhenko said.

Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort — a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions — was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the NABU, after Manafort was named Trump’s campaign chairman: “Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious.” Kholodnytskyy said he explicitly instructed NABU investigators who were working with American authorities not to share the ledger with the media. “I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort. For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case. And there is some other interests in this case not in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial.”

Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general’s international affairs office, said that, shortly after Ukrainian authorities returned from the Washington meeting, there was a clear message about helping the Americans with the Party of the Regions case. “Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public.” Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures, such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych’s party. But the Americans weren’t interested: “They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else.”

Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016. NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S. media the ledgers showed payments to Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the Trump campaign in August 2016.

A Ukrainian court in December concluded NABU’s release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. And a member of Ukraine’s parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Hillary Clinton.

The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting involved Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter as both a board member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to Rosemont Seneca, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer's firm in 2014-15, bank records show.

U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Victor Shokin, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor in March 2016. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington confirmed that the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions. "Unfortunately, the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., was not invited to join the DOJ and other law enforcement-sector meetings."

Telizhenko’s claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ’s own documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie Ohr, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele. Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for Fusion GPS, that was hired by Clinton’s campaign and DNC to find dirt on Trump. Steele wrote the famous dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion to the DOJ through her husband Bruce during the election.

DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband Bruce and two DOJ prosecutors to the discovery of the “Black Ledger” files that led to Manafort’s prosecution. “Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions’ Black Cashbox,” Nellie Ohr wrote to her husband and federal prosecutors Lisa Holtyn and Joseph Wheatley, attaching a news article on the announcement of NABU’s release of the documents.

Bruce Ohr and Steele worked on their own effort to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who had a soured business relationship with Manafort. Deripaska was “almost ready to talk” to U.S. government officials regarding the money that “Manafort stole,” Bruce Ohr wrote in notes from his conversations with Steele. The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which Andrew McCabe asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous.

Politico reported that the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington assisted Clinton’s campaign through Alexandra Chalupa, a DNC contractor. The Ukrainian Embassy acknowledges it got requests for assistance from Chalupa to find dirt on Manafort.

Military and security

Security forces are controlled by the president, although they are subject to investigation by a permanent parliamentary commission. Surveillance is permitted for reasons of national security.

After independence, Ukraine established its own military forces of about 780,000 from the troops and equipment inherited from the Soviet Union. Under defense reform legislation passed in 2004, Ukraine is strengthening civilian control of the military, professionalizing its non-commissioned officer (NCO) corps, modernizing force structure to improve interoperability with NATO, and reducing troop numbers, all with an eye toward achieving NATO standards. Current force levels are approximately 225,000 (plus 90,000 civilian workers in the Ministry of Defense). The Ministry of Defense plans to continue force reductions by approximately 20,000 personnel per year to reach a final end state of 143,000 by 2011. Ukraine's stated national policy is Euro-Atlantic integration, including with both NATO and the European Union. NATO offered Ukraine an "Intensified Dialogue on Membership Issues" in April 2005. Ukraine had previously signed an agreement with NATO on using Ukraine's strategic airlift capabilities and has been an active participant in Partnership for Peace exercises, in Balkans peacekeeping, and Coalition operations in Iraq. Ukrainian units have been serving in the U.S. sector in Kosovo, and served in the Polish-led division in Iraq. Currently, Ukraine participates in six United Nations peacekeeping missions and has up to 50 troops serving in supporting roles in Iraq.

Ukrainian intelligence

Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The network communication goes through a secondary source.

Dimitri Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups is where things really heat up. Alexandra Chalupa works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.

Investigating Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, the question arises as to why the CEO of a $150 million company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and its hackers individually. There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. Crowdstrike is also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC hack. It closely resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.

Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon Overwatch and Falcon DNS. In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA.[14] They consider the CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency.”

Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it’s the official twitter account for Ukraine’s Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list.

Should someone tell Dimitri Alperovitch that Gerashchenko, who is now in charge of Peacekeeper recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his “Peacemaker” site as a target? The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the past.

Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA Intelligence) tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the Ukrainian Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter. This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves and not draw unwanted attention.

These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through the portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded and directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and with to promote the story of Russian hacking.

When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article, one of the hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor members by the Pravy Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor admitted to killing the people at the Maidan protest and sparked the coup.

Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say "Let’s understand that Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very powerful group. Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA… I don’t know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don’t think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics.”

What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US intel efforts.

The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated.

According to the Esquire interview “Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal in his battle cry. “A lot of people who are born here don’t appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they’ve never had it any other way,” he told me. “I have.”

While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine.

The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for conflict of interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these hackers are the real Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in international politics. By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment of an outgoing President of the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of rumor.

Foreign Relations

The government has declared Euro-Atlantic integration to be its primary foreign policy objective and has sought to maintain good relations with Russia. The European Union's Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with Ukraine went into force on March 1, 1998. After the 2004 round of EU expansion, the EU did not signal a willingness to consider Ukraine for an association agreement, as Ukraine had hoped for, but instead included it in a new "neighbor" policy, disappointing many Ukrainians. An agreement on intensified cooperation is possible after Ukrainian WTO accession. On January 31, 1992, Ukraine joined the then-Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (now the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—OSCE), and on March 10, 1992, it became a member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. Ukraine signed a Charter Agreement with NATO in 1997, sent troops to Kosovo in close cooperation with NATO countries, signed an agreement for NATO use of Ukrainian strategic airlift assets, and has declared interest in eventual membership. It is the most active member of the Partnership for Peace (PfP). In April 2005, NATO offered an "Intensified Dialogue on Membership Issues" to Ukraine.

Ukraine maintains peaceful and constructive relations with all its neighbors, though there are some unresolved maritime issues along the Danube and in the Black Sea with Romania; it has especially close ties with Poland and Russia. Relations with Russia are complicated by differing foreign policy priorities in the region, energy dependence, payment arrears, disagreement over compliance with the 1997 agreement on the stationing of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, and a dispute over bilateral boundaries in the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait. Ukraine co-founded the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) on December 8, 1991, but in January 1993 it refused to endorse a draft charter strengthening political, economic, and defense ties among CIS members. Ukraine was a founding member of GUAM (Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova) and has taken the lead with Georgia to promote cooperation among emerging democracies in the Community for Democratic Choice, which held its first summit meeting December 1–2, 2005 in Kyiv.

In 1999-2001, Ukraine served as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. Soviet Ukraine joined the United Nations in 1945 as one of the original members following a Western compromise with the Soviet Union, which had asked for seats for all 15 of its union republics. Ukraine has consistently supported peaceful, negotiated settlements to disputes. It has participated in the five-sided (now "5+2") talks on the conflict in Moldova and under President Yushchenko has actively boosted efforts to seek a resolution. Ukraine has also promoted a peaceful resolution to conflict in the post-Soviet state of Georgia and has advocated a return to democracy in neighboring Belarus. Ukraine has also made a substantial contribution to UN peacekeeping operations since 1992.

Trump-Russia

See also: Ukrainian collusion timeline

Evidence of DNC collusion with Ukraine to dig up dirt on the 2016 Trump campaign:

From: Chalupa, Ali

Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2016 11:56 PM
To: Miranda, Luis
Subject: Re: You saw this, right?

A lot more coming down the pipe. I spoke to a delegation of 68 investigative journalists from Ukraine last Wednesday at the Library of Congress - the Open World Society's forum - they put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort and I invited Michael Isikoff whom I've been working with for the past few weeks and connected him to the Ukrainians. More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I'm working on you should be aware of.

Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo account despite changing my password often:

[image1.JPG]

Sent from my iPhone

On May 3, 2016, at 10:50 PM, Miranda, Luis <MirandaL@dnc.org<mailto:MirandaL@dnc.org>> wrote:

http://www.politifact.com/global-news/article/2016/may/02/paul-manafort-donald-trumps-top-adviser-and-his-ti/

<http://www.democrats.org/>[SigDems]<http://www.democrats.org/><http://www.democrats.org/>Luis Miranda, Communications Director
Democratic National Committee

202-863-8148 - MirandaL@dnc.org<mailto:MirandaL@dnc.org> - @MiraLuisDC<https://www.twitter.com/MiraLuisDC>[15]
According to the Kyiv Post,
“Chalupa said she first came across Manafort after she organized a meeting with then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s National Security Council and leaders of Ukrainian-American organizations in January 2014, to brief the White House about the Euromaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014.”

In late 2015, Alexandra Chalupa expanded her research into Paul Manafort to include the Trump campaign and possible ties to Russia.

In January 2016, Chalupa informed an unknown senior DNC official that she believed there was a Russian connection with the Trump campaign. Notably, this theme would be picked up by the Clinton campaign in the summer of 2016. Chalupa also told the official to expect Manafort's involvement in the Trump campaign.

Chalupa’s forecast proved prescient, as Manafort reached out to the Trump campaign shortly after, on Feb. 29, 2016, through a mutual acquaintance, Thomas J. Barrack Jr. According to Manafort, he and Trump hadn’t been in communication for years until the Trump campaign responded to Manafort’s offer. On March 28, 2016, Manafort was hired by the Trump campaign. He was reportedly initially hired to lead the Trump campaign’s delegate effort, but was soon promoted, and on May 19, 2016, Manafort became Trump’s campaign chairman and chief strategist.

Just days prior to Manafort’s hiring, on March 24, 2016, Chalupa spoke with the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, Valeriy Chaly, and told him of concerns she had regarding Manafort. Reportedly, her concerns were initially rebuffed as Chaly didn’t think Trump had a real chance of winning the presidency.

According to Politico, the day after Manafort’s hiring, Chalupa provided a briefing on “Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia” to the DNC's communications staff. Notably, “with the DNC’s encouragement,” Chalupa asked the Ukrainian Embassy staff to attempt to arrange an interview with Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko and have him discuss Manafort's ties to former Ukrainian President Yanukovych. The Ukrainian Embassy reportedly declined the request but, according to Chalupa, did begin working with reporters who were researching Trump.

Andrii Telizhenko, who worked in the Ukrainian Embassy under one of Chaly's top aides, Oksana Shulyar, has repeatedly stated that Chalupa was working closely with the Ukrainian Embassy to obtain information on Trump.[16] In an interview with the Gateway Pundit, Telizhenko said he met Chalupa in the spring of 2016 at the Ukrainian Embassy, where Chalupa told him she was “a DNC operative working for the DNC” and the “Clinton campaign.” Telizhenko continued, noting that Chalupa said she was “collecting any dirt or background information on Manafort, presidential candidate Trump or any other campaign official from the Trump campaign” and was looking for “connections to Russia or the FSB or Russian mob, or Ukrainian mob, etc.” According to Telizhenko, Chalupa said the information would “be used for committee hearings in Congress under a congresswoman.”[17] Telizhenko didn't disclose the identity of the congresswoman, noting, “I don’t want to mention her name on record.”

In January 2017, Telizhenko told Politico that Chalupa said, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”

In a recent tweet, Telizhenko summed the situation succinctly, noting
“The Clinton campaign had a Democratic operative working with Ukraine’s embassy in Washington to research Trump’s Russia ties, as well as a Ukrainian lawmaker feeding information to Fusion GPS.”

The “Democratic operative” refers to Chalupa, while the “Ukrainian lawmaker” refers to Leshchenko.

Crowdstrike

See also: Murder of Seth Rich

CrowdStrike is an Irvine, California cyber security company founded in 2011. Crowdstrike was founded by Dimitry Alperovitch, a Ukrainian oligarch and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Another owner and senior manager of Crowdstrike is a former senior FBI man Shawn Henry, who was promoted by Robert Mueller to be the FBI's Head of Cyber Security in the 2000s.

Crowdstrike is funded by Google,[18] the arms industry, NATO, the US Military, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and another Ukrainian oligarch who donated $10 million to the Clinton Foundation named Victor Pinchuk.[19] Pichuk hosted the September 2013 confabulation in Yalta, Crimea attended by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Tony Blair to discuss how Ukraine's assets would be carved up after the forthcoming Ukrainian coup.

Russian hacking claims of DNC servers in the Spring of 2016 rely entirely on a report by CrowdStrike.[20] Despite repeated requests from the FBI, Crowdstrike and the DNC refused to turn over evidence.[21] The Obama administration never examined the DNC servers to determine if indeed they were hacked, or attempted to identify who the hacker might have been.[22] On July 25, 2019, President Trump requested President Zelensky of Ukraine to assist in recovering evidence from Crowdstrike, which contracts with the Ukrainian military.[23]

  • According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page “After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington),[24] it triggered high-level concerns within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. “That’s when we knew it was the Russians,” said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, “we told her to stop her research.”” July 25, 2016
  • If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the work done by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection.
  • How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election in a new direction. According to Esquire.com, Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the measures taken were directly because of his work.
  • Alperovitch’s relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers [show a conflict of interest]. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.

Fancy Bear is Ukrainian Intelligence

Dimitry Alperovitch, the founder of Crowdstrike, tweeting with Fancy Bear. Crowdstrike claimed the Russians hacked the DNC. The FBI never verified the claim. Private investigators determined it was Ukrainian intelligence who were hired by Alexandra Chalupa, a member of the Democratic National Committee.

George Eliason has identified Fancy Bear as Ukrainian intelligence.

Alexandra Chalupa hired this particular hacking terrorist group, which Dimitry Alperovich and Crowdstrike dubbed "Fancy Bear", in 2015 at the latest. While the Ukrainian hackers worked for the DNC, Fancy Bear had to send in progress reports, turn in research, and communicate on the state of the projects they were working on. Let's face it, once you're in, setting up your Fancy Bear toolkit doesn't get any easier. This is why I said the DNC hack isn't the big crime. It's a big con and all the parties were in on it.

Hillary Clinton exposed secrets to hacking threats by using private email instead of secured servers. Given the information provided she was probably being monitored by our intrepid Ruskie-Ukie union made in hell hackers. Anthony Weiner exposed himself and his wife Huma Abedin using Weiner's computer for top-secret State Department emails. And of course Huma Abedin exposed herself along with her top-secret passwords at Yahoo and it looks like the hackers the DNC hired to do opposition research hacked her.

Here's a question. Did Huma Abedin have Hillary Clinton's passwords for her private email server? It would seem logical given her position with Clinton at the State Department and afterward. This means that Hillary Clinton and the US government top secret servers were most likely compromised by Fancy Bear before the DNC and Team Clinton hired them by using legitimate passwords.

Biden's proxy war

On November 20, 2021, Trump-Russia hoaxer and Biden DNI Avril Haines[25] alleged that Russia had massed 100,000 troops at the border with Ukraine and was planning an invasion. In late December 2021 Jake Sullivan said a four-week window was left to prevent such an invasion and that if it were to happen the sanctions against Russia "would be overwhelming, immediate and inflict significant cost on the Russian economy and their financial system."[26] Germany had called upon the US not to impose sanctions, insisting that doing so will "damage transatlantic unity", Axios reported,[27] citing newly obtained German documents dated November 19, 2021 and marked as "classified":

"US Sanctions targeting Nord Stream 2 would undermine the commitment given to Germany in the Joint Statement, weaken the credibility of the US government, and endanger the achievements of the Joint Statement, including the provisions supporting Ukraine."[28]

The ongoing reality was a massive buildup and activity of NATO forces inside Ukraine, which Putin had warned about crossing Russia's red line days before Haines panicked statements.[29] CIA leaker David Ignatius told the Washington Post that the US was supporting an anti-Russian military insurgency in Ukraine.[30] Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reported that ten thousand NATO soldiers, including four thousand Americans, were already stationed and active in Ukraine. Drones and Stingers have been provided and used in eastern Ukraine.[31]

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reported that ten thousand NATO soldiers, including four thousand Americans, were already stationed and active in Ukraine. Drones and Stingers have been provided and used in eastern Ukraine.[32] In light of all the threatening activity on its border, on December 17, 2021 President Putin presented two treaties to be signed, one with the US[33] the other with NATO,[34] the essence of which is that the West pledges not to threaten Russia's borders by offering membership to Ukraine or by arming and basing missiles in Ukraine. Putin stated, "You are on our doorstep. We cannot back down." Putin promised a response if the NATO powers do not stop their offensive actions. NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg rejected them out of hand. Russia's deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko said on December 18, 2021 that NATO has been living in a fantasy world and that Europeans must think about whether they mean to turn their continent into a field of military confrontation.

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock wrote in Krasno Analysis on December 14, 2021 that interference by the U.S. and its NATO allies in Ukraine's civil struggle has exacerbated the crisis within NATO and raised the specter a possible conflict between the nuclear powers. Russia is extremely sensitive about foreign military activity adjacent to its borders, as any other country would be, and as the United States has always been. Russia has signaled repeatedly that it will stop at nothing to prevent NATO membership for Ukraine. Ukraine's friends in Europe and America should help them understand, rather than Ukraine is pursuing what could easily turn out to be a suicidal course. He concluded, "back in October 1962 it was the U.S. southern border that was being approached closely by Soviet soldiers and missiles in Cuba which threatened the devastating first strike. Today it is the relentless march of NATO, closer and closer to Russia's borders. 60 years ago president John F. Kennedy said. "within the past week unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island," and he said that "this is in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the U.S. and is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country." President Kennedy demanded that the Soviet Union remove and never again try to place nuclear-capable missiles and aircraft virtually on the U.S. border and in an area with a special and historical relationship to the U.S.[35]

President Putin's agreement proposed to Biden on December 7, 2021 was that the United States ensure that Ukraine would not join NATO and thereby have U.S. and NATO forces and missiles of various types placed right on Russia's border and in an area with a special and historical relationship to Russia.

Economy

With rich farmlands, a well-developed industrial base, highly trained labor, and a good education system, Ukraine has the potential to become a major European economy. After eight straight years of sharp economic decline from the early to late 1990s, the standard of living for most citizens declined more than 50%, leading to widespread poverty. Beginning in 2000 economic growth has averaged 7.4% per year, reaching 12.1% in 2004 and 7.0% in 2006. Personal incomes are rising. The macro economy is stable, with the hyperinflation of the early post-Soviet period now reduced to just over 11.6% (2006). Ukraine's currency, the hryvnia, was introduced in September 1996 and has remained stable despite a small nominal appreciation in April 2005. While economic growth continues, Ukraine's long-term economic prospects depend on acceleration of market reforms. The economy remains burdened by excessive government regulation, corruption, and lack of law enforcement, and while the government has taken steps against corruption and small and medium enterprises have been largely privatized, much remains to be done to restructure and privatize key sectors such as energy and telecommunications and to allow the free sale of farmland.

Ukraine is rich in natural resources. It has a major ferrous metal industry, producing cast iron, steel, and steel pipe, and its chemical industry produces coke, mineral fertilizers, and sulfuric acid. Manufactured goods include airplanes, turbines, metallurgical equipment, diesel locomotives, and tractors. It also is a major producer of grain, sunflower seeds, and sugar and has a broad industrial base, including much of the former U.S.S.R.'s space and rocket industry. Although proven onshore and offshore oil and natural gas reserves are small, it has important energy sources, such as coal, and large mineral deposits, and is one of the world's leading energy transit countries, providing transportation of Russian and Caspian oil and gas across its territory.

Ukraine encourages foreign trade and investment. The foreign investment law allows Westerners to purchase businesses and property, to repatriate revenue and profits, and to receive compensation in the event that property were to be nationalized by a future government. However, complex laws and regulations, poor corporate governance, weak enforcement of contract law by courts and particularly corruption have discouraged broad foreign direct investment in Ukraine. While there is a functioning stock market, the lack of protection for minority shareholder rights severely restricts portfolio investment activities. Total foreign direct investment in Ukraine was approximately $21.2 billion as of January 1, 2007. At $447 per capita, this was one of the lowest figures in the region.

While countries of the former Soviet Union remain important trading partners, especially Russia and Turkmenistan for energy imports, Ukraine's trade is becoming more diversified. Europe is now the destination of over one third of Ukraine's exports, while around one quarter of Ukraine's exports go to Russia and the CIS. Exports of machinery and machine tools are on the rise relative to steel, which constitutes over 30% of exports. Ukraine imports over 80% of its oil and 73% of its natural gas. Russia ranks as Ukraine's principal supplier of oil and Russian firms now own and/or operate the majority of Ukraine's refining capacity. Natural gas imports come from Russia and Turkmenistan, which deliver the gas through a pipeline system owned and controlled by Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas monopoly. In 2005 and 2006, Ukraine switched from barter to cash payments for gas imports. Ukraine controls the gas pipelines on its territory that are also used to transit Russian gas to Western Europe. The complex relationship between supplier, transporter, and consumer has led to some tensions, including Russia's decision to cut off gas supplies for three days in January 2006.

The Government of Ukraine's 12-month $605 million precautionary standby agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expired in March 2005, and Ukraine currently does not receive IMF financing. In Article IV Consultations, the IMF recommends fiscal discipline and structural reforms, particularly of Ukraine's pension system. In July 2005, the World Bank approved a $250 million Development Policy Loan (formerly a Programmatic Adjustment Loan) to support reforms to improve the investment climate, public administration and financial management, and social inclusion. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) project outlays more than doubled in 2005 to 530 million Euros, bringing its portfolio to 2.2 billion Euros.

In 1992, Ukraine became a member of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is a member of the EBRD but not a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Ukraine applied for membership in the WTO in 1995. Progress on its application had been slow but picked up momentum in 2006. The government has made accession to the WTO a priority in 2007.

Economic data

Ukraine is classified as a lower middle-income nation, evolving into a post-soviet developing economy.

Approximate economic statistics are as follows:

  • Ukraine's GDP is $103 billion ($103,000,000,000), and has been growing at a rate of 6% fairly consistently.
  • Per capita GDP is $2,200, with per capita purchasing power at $7,700.
  • Foreign debt is 7% of GDP, and foreign investment is 2% of GDP.
  • Average monthly salary is 200 euros per month.
  • Commercial prime lending rate is 15%.
  • The inflation rate is currently 10%.

The Ukrainian currency is the hryvnia (worth about 20 cents, in $USD), which was introduced 1996 to stabilize runaway inflation (and is currently trading at 5:1 for United States dollars, and at 6:1 for European Union euros).

Taxation rates are as follows:

  • Personal income tax is 15%.
  • Corporate income tax is 25%.
  • Value-added tax (VAT) is 20%.
  • Social insurance tax is 30%.

Import/export goods include:

  • Metals (35%)
  • Machinery (25%)
  • Fuel & chemicals (10%)
  • Agricultural (10%)
  • Other (20%)

Mining includes fuel ores of coal, oil, and natural gas, and metal ores of iron, manganese, titanium, magnesium, nickel, and mercury.

Major trade partners are Russia (25%), then about 5% each for Germany, Poland, Italy, Turkey, and China, and others.

Environmental Issues

Radiation-affected areas from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as of 1996

Ukraine is interested in cooperating on regional environmental issues. Conservation of natural resources is a stated high priority, although implementation suffers from a lack of financial resources. Ukraine established its first nature preserve, Askania-Nova, in 1921 and has a program to breed endangered species.

Ukraine has significant environmental problems, especially those resulting from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986 and from industrial pollution. In accordance with its agreement with the G7 and European Commission in 1995, Ukraine permanently closed the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in December 2000. Urgent measures for radiation and worker safety as well as structural improvements to the "sarcophagus" erected by the Soviet Union are largely complete, and the contract for construction of the new shelter to be built around the sarcophagus is expected to be awarded in 2007.

Ukraine also has established a Ministry of Environment and has introduced a pollution fee system, which levies taxes on air and water emissions and solid waste disposal. The resulting revenues are channeled to environmental protection activities, but enforcement of this pollution fee system is lax. Ukraine ratified the Kyoto Protocol in April 2004.

Construction of a shipping canal through a UN-protected core biosphere reserve in the Danube Delta, which began in May 2004, is an environmental issue of international interest.

Burisma Holdings

Vice President Joe Biden oversaw the disbursement of $1 billion allocated by the U.S. to the new government of Ukraine. In 2014, Biden's son Hunter Biden, was appointed to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, the largest oil and gas company in Ukraine. Hunter Biden was hired by Mykola Zlochevsky, who served as Ukraine's ecology minister in the previous administration. Hunter Biden was paid $166,000 per month. The money was split with the nephew of Whitey Bulger.

Zlochevsky came under investigation by the new administration for alleged embezzlement of $5 billion while ecology minister. The prosecutor traced payments made to Hunter Biden. Vice President Biden threatened the new Ukrainian administration to withhold $1 billion in U.S. allocated funds unless the prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden was fired.[36]

Biden bragged about having caused the firing of the Ukraine prosecutor to a CFR conference.

Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations: "‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money'...Well, [SOB], he got fired."[37]

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Joe Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine. Biden threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending Ukraine toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin who was investigating his son, Hunter. Biden recounted,

"'You’re not getting the billion'. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money'...Well, [SOB], he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."[38][39]

Yuriy Lutsenko, who replaced Shokin as the prosecutor looking into Burisma, said the evidence in the Burisma case he'd like to present to William Barr, particularly the vice president's intervention.

Between April 2014 and October 2015, more than $3 million was paid out by Burisma to an account linked to Biden's and Devon Archer's Rosemont Seneca firm, according to the financial records placed in a federal court file in Manhattan in another case against Archer. The bank records show that, on most months when Burisma money flowed, two wire transfers of $83,333.33 each were sent to the Rosemont Seneca–connected account on the same day. The same Rosemont Seneca–linked account typically then paid Hunter Biden one or more payments ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 each. Ukrainian prosecutors reviewed internal company documents and wanted to interview Hunter Biden and Archer about why they had received such payments, but couldn't because of Joe Biden's intervention.

On September 4, 2019, former Prosecutor General Victor Shokin made a sworn affidavit outlining Joe Biden's shakedown.[40]

History

The name "Ukraine" literally means "Borderlands".

Early history to 1100AD

Beginning in the first millennium B.C., the territory of what is now Ukraine was populated by Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, and other nomadic peoples. Ancient Greek colonists set up city-states in southern Ukraine. Eastern Slavic tribes settled in Ukraine in the sixth century A.D. Kiev was established in the sixth or seventh century and was taken by the Varangian prince Oleg of Novgorod in 882 A.D.. Well located at the intersection of major trade routes, Kiev soon developed into the center of a mighty state, Rus'. At its height under grand princes Vladimir I (980-1015) and Yaroslav I the Wise (1019-1054), Kievan Rus' was the largest state in Europe in terms of area. Vladimir I adopted Christianity in 988; Yaroslav the Wise codified the laws; he married his daughters advantageously to the kings of France, Hungary, and Norway.

Although Russian historians identify Rus' as the progenitor of modern Russia, it was also the progenitor of Ukraine and Byelarus. Ukrainian scholars are divided whether the Rus' comprised a loosely organized conglomerate of diverse peoples, or whether it was a more homogeneous nation of Ukrainians. Following the Communist collapse in 1992, two schools of historiography regarding Kievan (Kyivan) Rus' have competed, the Ukrainophile and the East Slavic. The Ukrainophile school promotes an identity that is "mutually exclusive" of Russia. It has come to dominate the nation's educational system, security forces, and national symbols and monuments, although it has been dismissed as nationalist by Western historians. The East Slavic school, an eclectic compromise between Ukrainophiles and Russophilism, has a weaker ideological and symbolic base, although it is preferred by Ukraine's centrist former elites.[41]

Decline of Rus'

Feudal fragmentation caused the decline of Kievan Rus' in the 12th century. In 1169 Kiev was sacked by Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky of Vladimir; in 1240 it was virtually destroyed by the Mongols under Batu Khan. The Principality of Galicia-Volhynia continued as the successor state of Kievan Rus' in what is now Ukraine until the 14th century, when it was annexed by Poland and Lithuania. In the 13th and 14th centuries the Ukrainian people developed a distinct culture.

Cossacks

Dmytro Vyshnevetsky Hetman in 1550

Peasant refugees from Polish landlord rule escaped to the steppes of Ukraine in the 15th and 16th centuries, where they became frontiersmen called Cossacks. Their main center was Zaporizhska Sich, a wild town on the lower Dnieper River. Outlaws and frontiersmen, fighters and pioneers, the Cossacks seized the Ukrainian imagination. They ranged the steppe in covered wagons, pulling them into tight squares to face a Tatar attack. Urged on by Polish subsidies, they launched lucrative raids on the ports of Poland's enemy Turkey, using sixty-foot‐long double-ruddered galleys. The men boasted splendid moustaches, red boots and wide baggy trousers as they danced, sang and drank horilka in heroic quantities.[42] Some Cossacks aligned with Poland; others led rebellions against the Poles in 1591, 1595, 1625, 1635 and 1637.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky led the famous revolt against the Polish Commonwealth in 1648-1654

The rebellions climaxed in 1648-1654 in a popular uprising, accompanied by widespread pogroms against Jews, led by the Cossack hetman (general) Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595-1657).[43] Khmelnytsky's victory over Poland led to a Cossack "state," the hetmanate.[44] As the creator of the first quasi-independent Cossack state in the 16th century, Khmelnitsky became immortalized in Ukrainian national sentiment. In the Communist era Moscow bolstered his status. The exploits of Khmelnitsky and the Cossacks became the focus of numerous ceremonial acts, exhibitions and dedications. Since 1991, however, Ukrainian scholars are more divided over the issue of whether he sold out the national interest to Russia.[45]

Polish and Russian control

In 1657-1686 came "The Ruin," a devastating 30-year war between Russia, Poland, Turks and Cossacks for control of Ukraine. For three years Khmelnytsky's armies controlled present-day western and central Ukraine, but deserted by his Tatar allies, he suffered a crushing defeat at Berestechko, and turned to the Russian Czar for help. In 1654, Khmelnytsky signed the Treaty of Pereiaslav, forming a military and political alliance with Russia that acknowledged loyalty to the Czar. The wars escalated in intensity with hundreds of thousands of deaths. Defeat came in 1686 as the "Eternal Peace" between Russia and Poland gave Kiev and the Cossack lands east of the Dnieper over to Russian rule and the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper to Poland. In 1709 Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687-1709) sided with Sweden against Russia in the Great Northern War (1700-1721). Mazepa, a member of the Cossack nobility, received an excellent education abroad and proved to be a brilliant political and military leader enjoying good relations with the Romanov dynasty. After Peter the Great became czar, Mazepa as hetman gave him more than twenty years of loyal military and diplomatic service and was well rewarded. Eventually Peter recognized that in order to consolidate and modernize Russia's political and economic power it was necessary to do away with the hetmanate and Ukrainian and Cossack aspirations to autonomy. Peter refused to assist Cossack forces in protecting Ukraine from imminent attack by Sweden, thus abrogating treaty obligations between Russia and Ukraine. Mazepa accepted Polish invitations to join the Poles and Swedes against Russia. The move was disastrous for the hetmanate, Ukrainian autonomy, and Mazepa. He died in exile after fleeing from the Battle of Poltava (1709), where the Swedes and their Cossack allies suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of Peter's Russian forces

The hetmanate was abolished in 1764; the Zaporizhska Sich abolished in 1775, as centralized Russian control became the norm. With the partitioning of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper were divided between Russia and Austria. From 1737 to 1834 expansion into the northern Black Sea littoral and the eastern Danube valley was a cornerstone of Russian foreign policy.

Lithuanians and Poles controlled vast estates in Ukraine, and were a law unto themselves. Judicial rulings from Cracow were routinely flouted. Heavily taxed peasants were practically tied to the land as serfs Occasionally the landowners battled each other using armies of Ukrainian peasants. The Poles and Lithuanians were Roman Catholics and tried with some success to covert the Orthodox lesser nobility. In 1596 they set up the "Greek-Catholic" or Uniate Church, under the authority of the Pope but using Eastern rituals; it dominates western Ukraine to this day. Tensions between the Uniates and the Orthodox were never resolved, and the religious differentiation left the Ukrainian Orthodox peasants leaderless, as they were reluctant to follow the Ukrainian nobles.[46]

The Cossack-led uprising called Koliivshchyna that erupted in the Ukrainian borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1768 involved ethnicity as one root cause of Ukrainian violence that killed tens of thousands of Poles and Jews. Religious warfare also broke out between Ukrainian groups. Increasing conflict between Uniate and Orthodox parishes along the newly reinforced Polish-Russian border on the Dnepr River in the time of Catherine II set the stage for the uprising. As Uniate religious practices had become more Latinized, Orthodoxy in this region drew even closer into dependence on the Russian Orthodox Church. Confessional tensions also reflected opposing Polish and Russian political allegiances.[47]

Origins of Ukraine: 19th century and World War I

In the 19th century the Ukrainian was a rural area largely ignored by Russia and Austria. With growing urbanization and modernization, and a cultural trend toward nationalism inspired by romanticism, a Ukrainian intelligentsia committed to national rebirth and social justice emerged. The serf-turned-national-poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) and the political theorist Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841-1895) led the growing nationalist movement. Nationalist and socialist parties developed in the late 19th century. Austrian Galicia, which enjoyed substantial political freedom under the relatively lenient rule of the Hapsburgs, became the center of the nationalist movement. The first Ukrainians were Carpathian Russians in Austria-Hungary who denounced Orthodox Christianity for Roman Catholicism in 1893.[48] Defeat in World War I and the Russian revolutions of 1917 destroyed the Hapsburg and Russian empires. The Ukrainian elite declared statehood: the Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed at Kiev on Nov. 20, 1917, becoming independent on Jan. 22, 1918. The West Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed at Lviv on Nov. 1, 1918. A rival Ukrainian Soviet Republic was established at Kharkiv on Dec. 24, 1917. On Jan. 22, 1919, the two people's republics united. By then, however, the military situation was desperate, as Polish and Bolshevik armies pressed the Ukrainian nationalists from west and east and the peasant anarchists led by Nestor Makhno took control of large areas. Lenin expanded it's territory, making it an artificial state in the style of the EU.[49][50][51][52] Because communist theory denies the existence of race as the adherents flip flop to favor one group over another, Lenin made the Soviet Union autonomous republics so not one ethnic group will have too much power.

Soviet era to 1939

The war in Ukraine continued for another two years; by 1921, however, most of Ukraine had been taken over by the Soviet Union, while Galicia and Volhynia were incorporated into independent Poland.

A powerful underground Ukrainian nationalist movement rose in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s, led by the Ukrainian Military Organization and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The movement attracted a militant following among students and harassed the Polish authorities. Legal Ukrainian parties, the Ukrainian Catholic Church, an active press, and a business sector also flourished in Poland. Economic conditions improved in the 1920s, but the region suffered from the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The situation in Soviet Ukraine under Communist control were sharply different. The communists gave a privileged position to manual labor, the largest class in the cities, where Russians dominated. The typical worker was more attached to class identity than to ethnicity. Although there were incidents of ethnic friction among workers (in addition to Ukrainians and Russians there were Poles, Germans, Jews, and others in the Ukrainian workforce), industrial laborers had already adopted Russian culture and language to a significant extent. Workers whose ethnicity was Ukrainian were not attracted to campaigns of Ukrainianization or de-Russification in meaningful numbers, but remained loyal members of the Soviet working class. There was no significant antagonism between workers identifying themselves as Ukrainian or Russian; however, anti-Semitism was widespread.

Moscow encouraged a national renaissance in literature and the arts, under the aegis of the Ukrainization policy pursued by the national Communist leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk (1872-1933).

Famine

see Ukrainian Famine

With Stalin's change of course in the late 1920s, however, Moscow's toleration of Ukrainian national identity came to an end. Systematic state terror of the 1930s destroyed Ukraine's writers, artists, and intellectuals; the Communist Party of Ukraine was purged of its "nationalist deviationists"; and the peasantry was crushed by means of collectivization, resulting in the Great Famine or "Holodomor" (Голодомор) of 1932-1933, which claimed some 3-7 million lives as crops failed and remaining food wtocks were forcibly removed by the government. Besides Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Volga region were also hit by the famine. Stalin had full knowledge of the destructive force of the famine. It was a by-product of his war on the peasantry that began with collectivization and dekulakization and as an attempt to eradicate peasant culture in its entirety. Ellman explains the causes for the excess deaths in rural areas of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan during 1931-34 by dividing the causes into three groups: objective nonpolicy-related factors, like the drought of 1931 and poor weather in 1932; inadvertent result of policies with other objectives, like rapid industrialization, socialization of livestock, and neglected crop rotation patterns; and deaths caused intentionally by a starvation policy. The Communist leadership perceived famine not as a humanitarian catastrophe but as a means of class struggle and used starvation as a punishment tool to teach peasants to work well in the collective farms.[53]

It was largely the same groups of individuals who were responsible for the mass killing operations during the civil war, collectivization, and the Great Terror. These groups were associated with Efim Georgievich Evdokimov (1891-1939) and operated in Ukraine during the civil war, in the North Caucasus in the 1920s, and in the Secret Operational Division within General State Political Administration (OGPU) in 1929-31. Evdokimov transferred into Communist Party administration in 1934, when he became Party secretary for North Caucasus Krai. But he appears to have continued advising Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov on security matters, and the latter relied on Evdokimov's former colleagues to carry out the mass killing operations that are known as the Great Terror in 1937-38.[54]

World War II: 1939-1945

Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera.

In 1939, after Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Galicia and Volhynia were annexed to Soviet Ukraine. Northern Bukovina, formerly part of Romania, was incorporated into Ukraine in 1940, as was formerly Czechoslovakian Subcarpathian Ruthenia (the Transcarpathian Oblast) in 1945.

By mid-1941, the Ukrainian SSR had the largest population of Jews in Europe. The addition of the eastern provinces of Poland in late 1939 as well as the seizure of sections of Romanian territory in June 1940 led to some 2.7 million Jews living within the borders of the newly enlarged republic. About 85% lived in cities. By 1944, 1.6 million of these Jews had died at the hands of the Germans and their allies and auxiliaries. Unlike the majority of the Holocaust's victims who died in the industrialized mass murder of the death camps, the overwhelming bulk of Ukraine's Jews died in mass shootings during the initial stages of the war.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was welcomed by many Ukrainians at first; the OUN even attempted to establish a government under German auspices. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) considered Ukraine a strategically important region that should be occupied through capturing the hearts and minds of the Ukrainians. According to Rosenberg, everything should have been done to make the Ukrainians view the Germans as liberators. Though he presented his views on different occasions, Adolf Hitler's anti-Slavic racial views prevailed and overrode strategic considerations, leading to a harsh occupation. Very soon the realization that Nazi policies were brutal toward all the Ukrainians, and not only the Jews and Communists, drove most Ukrainians into opposition to the Nazis. Germany forced many Ukrainians to work within the so-called Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU) on tasks such as agriculture, road and railway building, and the construction of fortifications. The German authorities soon faced a serious local labor shortage, especially among skilled workers, as a result of Soviet evacuations before the invasion, the ongoing murder of the Jewish population, and the brutal recruitment, arrest, and deportation of other groups, usually with the cooperation of the local civilian, military, and police authorities. The pool of labor was further reduced as the Germans lost territory in the later stages of the conflict. Nazi administrator Fritz Sauckel's labor recruitment measures strained relations with local officials responsible for selecting the deportees, leading to bribery and corruption. The Kiev area was the main focus for recruitment and deportation, along with the Vinnitsa region of central Ukraine. Over a million locals and prisoners of war were forced into labor in the Ukrainian coal mines in the Donbas region (Donets Basin). The forced laborers endured fines, starvation, imprisonment, beatings, and hanging, but also had better chances for more food, money, and mobility.

In Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia the first stage of partisan development, from 1941 to the fall of 1942, was uncoordinated and resulted in a great many losses. The second stage, late 1942 to 1944, was better coordinated; partisan groups were better defined, and relatively large-scale operations were carried out, often in cooperation with the Red Army. Organized leadership and cadres were created, various forms of actions (such as diversions, sabotage, and direct attacks) were developed; the Germans responded with vicious punitive activities against the partisans. In all, more than 1.3 million partisans took part in actions in Germany's rear in 6,200 units; more than 300,000 received decorations for their actions. The OUN created a nationalist partisan fighting force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA); many Ukrainians also joined the Soviet partisans and fought in the Soviet Army against the Germans. After World War II, the OUN and the UPA continued a hopeless guerrilla struggle against Soviet rule until 1953. The devastation caused by the war included major destruction in over 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages.

1945 to 1991

Reconstruction proceeded rapidly in the late 1940s and the 1950s, as the Soviets n\eeded the food and raw materials of Ukraine. Political repression of nationally conscious Ukrainians also intensified. The widespread acculturation and assimilation of the Soviet Jews by the 1930s led Stalin to consider the "Jewish question" as settled; he now viewed the Jews as a national rather than a religious group. With the influx of Jews into the Ukraine and Russia from Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Bukovina following the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, there followed an intensification of Jewish religious activity, and the reopening of many synagogues. However, political unrest preceding the creation of the state of Israel unleashed Stalin's massive repression against Jews during the "black years" of 1948-53. Suspected of Zionism and cosmopolitanism, Jews were systematically removed from positions of leadership in culture, science, medicine, politics, and economics. The anti-Semitic campaign ended only with the death of Stalin in March 1953.

In 1948, the CIA report NSC 20/1, section 4: “US objectives with respect to Russia” warned that separating Ukraine from Russia will not work.[55]

Stalin's death finally brought relief in many ways. The thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, who had served as Ukrainian party chief in the 1930s, led to the emergence in the late 1950s and the early 1960s of the "sixties generation" of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Following Khrushchev's downfall in 1964, Moscow, under Leonid Brezhnev initiated a series of crackdowns on Ukrainian dissidents, including Ivan Dziuba (b. 1931), the author of Internationalism or Russification?; Vyacheslav Chornovil (b. 1938), the editor of the underground Ukrainian Herald; and Valentyn Moroz (b. 1936), the author of stinging attacks on Soviet policy. In 1972, Petro Shelest, the national-Communist Ukrainian party chief, was replaced by hardliner Volodymyr Shcherbytsky.

The Number Four reactor at Chernobyl exploded during a routine power test in April 1986. Radioactive contaminants from the Chernobyl disaster fell on northern Ukraine and several neighboring countries, reaching as far as Japan and the United States, causing casualties, sparking a major embarrassment for the Soviet Union, and inciting fears of nuclear energy.[56]


The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 started a slow revolution. The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 undercut trust in Moscow. "Glasnost" permitted Ukrainian intellectuals to discuss the "blank spots" in their history, and growing political liberalization led to the reemergence of dissident groups and the emergence of nationally minded cultural organizations. A major turning point occurred in late 1989, with the founding of Rukh and the removal of Shcherbytsky from power.

Independence, 1991-

Ukrainian contractors serving with the ISAF in the Afghan war. The Biden regime abandoned them in Afghanistan in August 2021, along with contractors from Bulgaria, Romania, and the Georgian Republic. The Russian Federation evacuated them.[57]

In 1990 Leonid Kravchuk, formerly in charge of ideology in the CPU, was appointed chairman of the presidium of a revamped supreme soviet, one fourth of whose deputies were nationalists and "democrats" elected in the semifree elections of 1990. On July 16, 1990, Ukraine proclaimed its sovereignty, an ambiguous formula that meant independence to the nationalists and autonomy to the Russian minority. On Nov. 21, 1990, Ukraine and Russia signed a treaty recognizing each other's sovereignty and promising not to interfere in each other's affairs.

As the Communist system collapsed in 1991, Ukraine, Russia, and the other republics engaged in lengthy negotiations with Gorbachev over the form of a new union. In August 1991 an abortive coup by committed KGB operatives in Moscow destroyed Gorbachev's strength and impelled the republics to go their own way. The Ukraine national assembly declared independence on Aug. 24, 1991. Several days later the CPU was suspended and its property was confiscated. A popular referendum on independence was held on December 1, and over 90 percent of the voters supported the declaration. Most of the countries of the world recognized the new Republic of Ukraine in the months that followed. Ukraine became a member of the Council on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and after much controversy a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program in 1994. As a consequence of the autonomous republics system, Ukraine became a second Yugoslavia.[58]

The nominal successor to the Soviet Union was the Commonwealth of Independent States; Ukraine joined on Dec. 8, 1991. Serious tensions soon emerged with Russia as Moscow took possession of the Black Sea fleet anchored at Sevastopol, while some Russian politicians wanted the Donbas and the Crimea; the latter, being in Russian hands since 1783, had been transferred to Ukraine by the Soviet authorities without referendum or self-determination of peoples in 1954. The Ukrainian government responded by taking steps to create its own army and navy. Crimean secessionists elected Yuri Meshkov as president of the Crimea in early 1994. The Kiyv government established closer economic and political ties with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Ukrainian nationalists fears of Russia led it to postpone action on its earlier promise to give up strategic nuclear missiles, prompting concern in the West. After the signing the Budapest Memorandum by the presidents of Ukraine, Russia, and the United States in early 1994, Ukraine began shipping these weapons to Russia. Thereafter, Ukraine's relations with the United States and western Europe improved.

Leonid Kravchuk, the most powerful politician, became Ukraine's first popularly elected president, with over 60 percent of the vote, on Dec. 1, 1991. His authority, like that of the legislature, declined precipitously, however, as he proved unable to solve the country's mounting economic difficulties. In contrast to Rukh, which had split into pro-Kravchuk and anti-Kravchuk factions in 1992, the former Communists remained strong, controlling many local government councils, industrial plants, and collective farms. The CPU was officially reconstituted as a powerful political force in late 1993. Ukrainian neo-Nazis also become more prominent. Elections for the supreme soviet in March 1994 yielded a legislature in which the CPU and its left-wing allies were the strongest bloc, followed by the center-right nationalists grouped about what remained of Rukh and the centrist pro-government "independents." Kravchuk ran for reelection in the presidential election in June 1994. No candidate won a majority, so a second round was held in July, pitting Kravchuk against former premier Leonid Kuchma. Kuchma won the election with 52 percent of the vote.

The national goal was the creation of a market-oriented economy and the establishment of stable democratic institutions and a system of laws. However the goals were partly frustrated by political deadlock, inexperience, an inefficient state apparatus, a collapsing economy, internal anti-Russian xenophobia, and external tensions with the Russian Federation. The Soviet culture of corruption continued after independence, and rampant criminality became even more widespread in the mid-1990s. In the latter 1990s, Viktor Yushchenko, as chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine, tamed rampant inflation and introduced responsible economic controls. From 1999 to 2004, Ukraine's GNP nearly doubled.

Orange Revolution: 2004

Kuchma's second term in office as president (1999-2004) was characterized by the collapse of the national democratic-centrist alliance, the "Kuchmagate" crisis, the rise of a non-Communist opposition in the 2002 elections, and the election of Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 following the Open Society Foundations' Orange Revolution. The deep divisions that have become evident under Yushchenko had their origins in Ukraine's regionalism, the "Kuchmagate" crisis, antiregime protests, and different attitudes to dealing with the past. The country is divided by linguistic and regional cleavages that appear sharply in regional polarization in national elections. These divisions have led to constant questioning of the viability of the Ukrainian state and predictions of violence and civil war. Secessionist movements have made few inroads, however, and violence has been nonexistent. Because the Russian "minority" group in Ukraine is actually quite large, it has immense influence in the state without resort to regional autonomy or secession. The balance of power between Ukraine's regions and ethnic groups has ensured that neither side has dominated. This does not make for rapid reform.

Ukrainian Crisis: 2014/2015

See main article: Crisis in Ukraine
Swastika on display in a Kiyv mall , February 2019.[59]

2010 Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian "Party of Regions" won the elections. In a 2013, a color revolution started, in which the Ukrainian People protested against Yanukovych and wanted a pro-European course by the government.[60] These protests were called "EuroMaidan".[61] The key figures of the opposition were Yulia Tymoshenko, Vitali Klitschko and Oleh Tyahnybok. As a result, prime minister Mykola Azarov resigned[62] and Yanukovich was discontinued on February 22, 2014 by the parliament.[63]

In response to armed fascists in the Maidan coup of a democratically elected regime, Russian soldiers landed in Crimea the same month. Because many of the people living in Crimea are ethnic Russians, there was a dispute whether Crimea belongs to Ukraine or to Russia.[64] On March 11, 2014, Crimea declared its indepence from Ukraine.[65] On March 16, 2014, Russia sponsored a referendum in Crimea about joining Russia. The United States and the European Union called the referendum "illegal".[66] Because the referendum gave voters only two choices: join Russia now or later, experts already declared that most Crimeans will vote for the connection to Russia.[67] As a result of it 95.5% of voters supported joining Russia.[68] Since March 18, 2014, Russia claims Crimea as a part of its territory.[69] Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela recognized Crimea as a part of Russia.[70] On March 27, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution (100 in favor, 11 against and 58 abstentions) declaring Crimea's referendum invalid.[71][72][73][74][75] In response, the United States and Europe imposed the Magnitsky Act sanctions sponsored by Sen. John McCain against Russian trade. In February 2017 President Trump accused Russia of taking Crimea by force and asked whether Obama was too soft on Russia.[76]

As a result of the reincorporation of Crimea, the Russian-backed so-called "Donetsk People's Republic" and the "Lugansk People's Republic" declared their independence and created an confederation called "Federal State of Novorossiya".[77] Novorossiya was dissolved in May 2015. The Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics however still exist. In June 2014 Petro Poroshenko was elected as new president of Ukraine[78] and Arseniy Yatsenyuk became prime minister. Since then the Ukrainian government tries to defend its territorial integrity and fights the separatist forces. In December 2017 the Trump administration approved the export of lethal small arms to Ukraine, including a multimillion-dollar sniper rifle deal – something the Obama Administration refused to do – ramping up its support for the country in the simmering conflict with Russia-backed separatists.[79]

Ukrainian collusion: 2016

Main article: Ukrainian collusion

Nine days after the U.S. presidential election, the Russian Federation sponsored a U.N. Resolution entitled Combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance aimed at condemning the neo-fascist groups openly displaying Nazi symbols and regalia in Ukraine and Donbas. The Obama administration voted against the resolution.[80]

Impeachment 2.0

See also: Impeachment 2.0

Historiography

The scholarly study of the Ukraine's history emerged from romantic impulses in the late 19th century. The outstanding leaders were Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908), based in Kiev, and his student Michael Hrushevsky (1866-1934).[81] For the first time full-scale scholarly studies based on archival sources, modern research techniques, and modern historical theories became possible. However, the demands of government officials—especially Soviet, but also Czarists and Polish—made it difficult to disseminate ideas that ran counter to the central government. Therefore, exile schools of historians emerged in central Europe and Canada after 1920.[82]

Strikingly different interpretations of the medieval state of Kievan Rus' appear in the four schools of historiography within Ukraine: Russophile, Sovietophile, Eastern Slavic, and Ukrainophile. The Sovietophile and Russophile schools have become marginalized in independent Ukraine, with the Ukrainophile school being dominant in the early 21st century. The Ukrainophile school promotes an identity that is mutually exclusive of Russia. It has come to dominate the nation's educational system, security forces, and national symbols and monuments, although it has been dismissed as nationalist by Western historians. The East Slavic school, an eclectic compromise between Ukrainophiles and Russophilism, has a weaker ideological and symbolic base, although it is preferred by Ukraine's centrist former elites.[83]

Many historians in recent years have sought alternatives to national histories, and Ukrainian history invited approaches that looked beyond a national paradigm. Multiethnic history recognizes the numerous peoples in Ukraine; transnational history portrays Ukraine as a border zone for various empires; and area studies categorizes Ukraine as part of Eurasia, or more often as part of East-Central Europe. Plokhy (2007) argues that looking beyond the country's national history has made possible a richer understanding of Ukraine, its people, and the surrounding regions.[84]

After 1991, historical memory was a powerful tool in the political mobilization and legitimation of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state, as well as the division of selectively used memory along the lines of the political division of Ukrainian society. Ukraine did not experience the restorationist paradigm typical of some other post-Soviet nations, including the Baltic states, although the multifaceted history of independence, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Soviet-era repressions, mass famine, and World War II collaboration were used to provide a different constitutive frame for the new Ukrainian nation. The politics of identity (which includes the production of history textbooks and the authorization of commemorative practices) has remained fragmented and tailored to reflect the ideological anxieties and concerns of individual regions of Ukraine.[85]

See also

Bibliography

Ukraine-Subtelny.jpg
* Encyclopedia of Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 1984–93) 5 vol; from Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, partly online


Recent (since 1991)

  • Aslund, Anders, and Michael McFaul.Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (2006)
  • Aslund, Anders. How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy (2009)
  • Birch, Sarah. Elections and Democratization in Ukraine (2000) online edition
  • Kubicek, Paul. The History of Ukraine (2008) excerpt and text search
  • Kuzio, Taras. Ukraine: State and Nation Building Routledge, 1998 online edition
  • Whitmore, Sarah. State Building in Ukraine: The Ukrainian Parliament, 1990-2003 (2004) online edition
  • Wilson, Andrew. Ukraine's Orange Revolution (2005)
  • Wilson, Andrew. The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, 2nd ed. 2002; online excerpts at Amazon
  • Wolczuk, Roman. Ukraine's Foreign and Security Policy 1991-2000 (2002) excerpt and text search
  • Zon, Hans van. The Political Economy of Independent Ukraine. 2000 online edition

Historical

  • Brandon, Ray, and Wendy Lower, eds. The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization. (2008). 378 pp. online review
  • Kohut, Zenon E.; Nebesio, Bohdan Y.; and Yurkevich, Myroslav. Historical Dictionary of Ukraine. (2005). 854 pp.
  • Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. (2004). 448 pp.
  • Dimarov, Anatoliy et al. A Hunger Most Cruel: The Human Face of the 1932-1933 Terror-Famine in Soviet Ukraine (2002) excerpt and text search
  • Gross, Jan T. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (1988).
  • Hrushevsky, Michael. A History of Ukraine (1986)
  • Kubicek, Paul. The History of Ukraine (2008) excerpt and text search
  • Luckyj, George S. Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995. (1996)
  • Lower, Wendy. Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. U. of North Carolina Press, 2005. 307 pp.
  • Magocsi, Paul Robert. A History of Ukraine (2nd. ed. 2009)
  • Redlich, Shimon. Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945. Indiana U. Press, 2002. 202 pp.
  • Reid, Anna. Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine (2003) online edition
  • Subtelny, Orest. Ukraine: A History (3rd ed. 2009), 800pp; the best history in English
  • Yekelchyk, Serhy. Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (2007), 20th century history
  • Zabarko, Boris, ed. Holocaust in the Ukraine. Vallentine Mitchell, 2005. 394 pp.

External links

References

  1. https://www.polygraph.info/a/hey-daily-mail-it-s-ky--yeev-not-keev-/30281142.html
  2. https://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/tag/upass-bandera-crimes/
  3. Hanna H. Starostenko, "Economic and Ecological Factors of Transformations in Demographic Process in Ukraine" Uktraine Magazine #2 1998 online at [1]
  4. Brienna Perelli-Harris, "The Path to Lowest-low Fertility in Ukraine" Population Studies 2005 59(1): 55-70. Issn: 0032-4728; not online
  5. Jacques Vallin; Meslé, France; Adamets, Serguei; and Pyrozhkov, Serhii. "A New Estimate of Ukrainian Population Losses During the Crises of the 1930s and 1940s." Population Studies (2002) 56(3): 249-264. Issn: 0032-4728 Fulltext in Jstor
  6. Oksana Malanchuk, "Social Identification Versus Regionalism in Contemporary Ukraine." Nationalities Papers 2005 33(3): 345-368. Issn: 0090-5992 Fulltext in Ebsco
  7. https://tass.com/world/1388729
  8. http://www.infoukes.com/galiciadivision/
  9. http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/2014-ukrainians-in-the-u-s-advocates-for-ukraine/
  10. Ukraine Court Rules Manafort Disclosure Caused 'Meddling' in U.S. Election, The New York Times, December 12, 2018. National Anti-Corruption Bureau Director Artem Sytnyk and legislator Serhiy Leshchenko broke the law by revealing Manafort's name. The disclosure “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state,” the court said. https://www.theepochtimes.com/ties-to-ukrainian-national-a-unifying-theme-in-early-attacks-on-trump_2872609.html
    In October 2019, an audiotape of Sytnyk was release discussing his efforts to help Hillary during the 2016 election. He and Leschenko were responsible for publishing the Black Ledger which forced Paul Manafort to resign from Trump’s campaign.
    https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-audio-email-evidence-shows-dnc-colluded-with-ukraine-to-boost-hillary-by-harming-trump-report-says
  11. https://consortiumnews.com/2016/10/22/washingtons-new-lock-step-march-of-folly/
  12. How the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to give Russia collusion narrative an early boost.
  13. ""telizhenko,andriy,g,U67540,100561,VA,1/19/16 10:57,D1101,1/19/16 12:53,,01/19/2016 12:00:00 AM,1/19/16 11:00,1/19/16 23:59,,1,KH,WIN,1/19/16 10:51,KH,Ciaramella,Eric,OEOB,230A,HARTWELL,KYLE,,,04/29/2016 07:00:00 AM +0000",,,," [2] Judicial Watch: White House Visitor Logs Detail Meetings of Eric Ciaramella.
  14. http://euromaidanpress.com/2016/11/02/ukraine-hackers-cyberhunta-surkov-putin-ruh8-cyberalliance/
  15. https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/3962
  16. https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/double-standards-on-ukraine/
  17. Rep. Marcy Kaptur.
  18. https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/03/23/what-is-crowdstrike-firm-hired-by-dnc-has-ties-to-hillary-clinton-a-ukrainian-billionaire-and-google/
  19. Victor Pinchuk, the Clintons & Endless Connections, by Jeff Carlson, March 11, 2018.
  20. https://www.voanews.com/usa/think-tank-cyber-firm-center-russian-hacking-charges-misread-data
  21. https://slate.com/technology/2017/05/the-fbi-is-harder-to-trust-on-the-dnc-hack-because-it-relied-on-crowdstrikes-analysis.html
  22. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/17/fbi-never-saw-crowdstrike-unredacted-or-final-report-on-alleged-russian-hacking-because-none-was-produced/
  23. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-mentioned-crowdstrike-to-ukrainian-president-and-crowdstrike-doesnt-seem-to-know-why-2019-09-25
  24. https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/3962
  25. https://the-war-economy.medium.com/spygate-part-9-the-deputies-meetings-cde47d4d08a6
  26. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/19/politics/joe-biden-russia-ukraine-obama-2014/index.html
  27. Scoop: Germany urges Congress not to sanction Putin’s pipeline, Zachary Basu, Axios, Nov 28, 2021.
  28. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21118732-germany-non-paper
  29. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/putin-accuses-nato-of-ignoring-russian-warnings-about-red-lines
  30. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/19/biden-ukraine-insurgents-russia/
  31. https://tass.com/world/1376191
  32. https://tass.com/world/1376191
  33. https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790818/?lang=en
  34. https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/?lang=en&clear_cache=Y
  35. https://ccisf.org/ambassador-jack-matlock-ukraine-tragedy-of-a-nation-divided/
  36. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/world/europe/corruption-ukraine-joe-biden-son-hunter-biden-ties.html
  37. https://haciendapublishing.com/articles/deep-dark-secrets-rich-famous-and-powerful-cliff-kincaid
  38. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/436816-joe-bidens-2020-ukrainian-nightmare-a-closed-probe-is-revived
  39. https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vice-president-joe-biden
  40. https://www.scribd.com/document/427618359/Shokin-Statement
  41. Taras Kuzio, "Nation Building, History Writing and Competition over the Legacy of Kyiv Rus in Ukraine." Nationalities Papers 2005 33(1): 29-58. Issn: 0090-5992 Fulltext: in Ebsco
  42. Reid (2000) p. 30
  43. He is called Bogdan Khmelnitsky in Russian and Bogdan Chmielnicki in Polish.
  44. The Cossacks formed a military regime but most historians say the hetmanate was not a fully formed state, as it lacked borders, stable laws, an administrative apparatus or an ethnic population base. Apart from Russia it did not seek diplomatic recognition through the exchange of ambassadors.
  45. Serhii Plokhy, "The Ghosts of Pereyaslav: Russo-Ukrainian Historical Debates in the Post-soviet Era." Europe-Asia Studies 2001 53(3): 489-505. Fulltext: in Jstor; Zenon E. Kohut, "In Search of Early Modern Ukrainian Statehood: Post-Soviet Studies of the Cossack Hetmanate." Journal of Ukrainian Studies 1999 24(2): 101-112. Issn: 0228-1635 not online
  46. Reid (2000) p 27-30
  47. Barbara Skinner, "Borderlands of Faith: Reconsidering the Origins of a Ukrainian Tragedy." Slavic Review 2005 64(1): 88-116. Fulltext: in Jstor
  48. https://russian-faith.com/persecution/struggle-russian-christian-faith-europe-carpatho-russians-n1122
  49. https://russophile.org/is-ukraine-an-artificial-state-popular-youtuber-says-yes/
  50. https://orientalreview.org/2017/08/21/ukraines-misunderstanding-lenin-helps-explain-americas-fight-re-invented-historical-statues/
  51. https://russian-faith.com/persecution/struggle-russian-christian-faith-europe-carpatho-russians-n1122
  52. https://www.sott.net/article/391652-The-history-of-Ukraine-as-an-artificial-state
  53. Michael Ellman, "The Role of Leadership Perceptions and of Intent in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1934." Europe-Asia Studies 2005 57(6): 823-841. Issn: 0966-8136 Fulltext in Ebsco
  54. Stephen G. Wheatcroft, "Agency and Terror: Evdokimov and Mass Killing in Stalin's Great Terror." Australian Journal of Politics and History 2007 53(1): 20-43. Issn: 0004-9522 Fulltext in Ebsco; Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet collectivization and the terror-famine (1986). Mark B. Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933" Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 70-89, notes the harvest was unusually poor. online in JSTOR; R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger, S. G. Wheatcroft, "Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933," Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 642-657 [3]; online in JSTOR; Michael Ellman. "Stalin and the Soviet famine of 1932-33 Revisited," Europe-Asia Studies, Volume 59, Issue 4 June 2007 , pages 663-93.
  55. http://www.sakva.ru/Nick/NSC_20_1.html
  56. Jim T. Smith, and Nicholas A. Beresford, Chernobyl: Catastrophe and Consequences. Springer, 2005. 310 pp.
  57. https://www.brighteon.com/200d714d-92c4-445e-b42e-a67fab991fd3
  58. https://orientalreview.org/2014/09/15/eight-reasons-why-ukraine-is-new-yugoslavia/
  59. https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Ukraine-mall-displays-Nazi-swastika-on-staiFile:Bandera-in-ss-uniform%20(1).jpgrcase-581065
  60. http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/ukrainian-people-power/
  61. http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/putin-vs-pro-west-ukrainians/
  62. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25932352
  63. https://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/02/22/ukrainian-protesters-claim-control-over-capital/
  64. https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-warns-russia-over-military-moves-crimea
  65. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2578160/Ukraines-fugitive-president-blasts-bandit-regime-says-country-heading-civil-war.html
  66. https://www.voanews.com/content/eu-crimea-referendum-illegal/1865590.html
  67. http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/international/europe/2014/03/experts_russia_will_take_crimea
  68. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26599776
  69. https://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03/18/russia-moves-to-annex-crimea-laughs-at-us-sanctions/
  70. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/world/asia/breaking-with-the-west-afghan-leader-supports-russias-annexation-of-crimea.html?ref=asia&_r=1
  71. "U.N. General Assembly declares Crimea secession vote invalid", Mar 27, 2014. 
  72. "U.N. General Assembly resolution calls Crimean referendum invalid", March 27, 2014. 
  73. "Backing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, UN Assembly declares Crimea referendum invalid", 27 March 2014. 
  74. "UN General Assembly approves referendum calling Russia annexation of Crimea illegal", March 27, 2014. 
  75. "Ukraine: UN condemns Crimea vote as IMF and US back loans", BBC. 
  76. Donald Trump accuses Russia of taking Crimea by force in attempt to distance himself from campaign allegations
  77. https://web.archive.org/web/20140607011548/http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_05_24/Donetsk-Lugansk-Peoples-Republics-unite-in-Novorossiya-1012/
  78. http://news.yahoo.com/poroshenko-sworn-ukraines-president-073208251.html
  79. Betz, Bradford (December 21, 2017). Trump administration OKs sale of lethal arms to Ukraine. Fox News. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  80. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-votes-against-anti-nazi-resolution-at-united-nations/
  81. Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (2005)
  82. KubijovyČ, ed. Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia (1963) 1:559-74
  83. Taras Kuzio, "National Identity and History Writing in Ukraine," Nationalities Papers 2006 34(4): 407-427, online in EBSCO
  84. Serhii Plokhy, "Beyond Nationality" Ab Imperio 2007 (4): 25-46,
  85. See Andryi Portnov, "Exercises with history Ukrainian style (notes on public aspects of history's functioning in post-Soviet Ukraine)," Ab Imperio 2007 (3): 93-138, in Ukrainian