By Niall Green:
An appeal to the Orange Revolution’s paymaster
Ukraine’s president writes in the Washington Post
7 December 2006
Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western president of Ukraine, wrote an opinion column in the Washington Post on November 29 marking the second anniversary of the so-called Orange Revolution, the American-orchestrated coup that brought him into power.
Titled “Building a Democracy: The Orange Revolution lives on in Ukraine,” the piece appears at a point of deep crisis for the Yushchenko administration.
Less than two years after assuming office, Yushchenko is widely hated for presiding over a corrupt administration that has implemented “free market” policies, compounded by rising food and fuel prices that are making life ever harder for Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, a tiny group of oligarchs continues to enrich themselves.
In Independence Square, which in 2004 was the focal point of the mass demonstrations that Yushchenko utilised to gain the presidency, almost no evidence of the Orange Revolution was to be found during the anniversary apart from some “Orange” merchandise on sale to tourists.
Festivities in the square were cancelled and pictures of Yushchenko taken down due to opposition from rival factions of the former Orange movement and the lack of popular support for the president.
Stymied by the parliamentary success of his rivals and unable to push through his unpopular commitment to join NATO, the Ukrainian president is clearly concerned for his political survival and hopes to maintain support for his weakened and discredited presidency among his principal backers in the Washington establishment.
Uzbek refugees in Ukraine: here.
Homophobia in Ukraine: here.
Anti-Semitism in Ukraine: here.
And from the Google cache of Dear Kitty ModBlog:
Ukraine: President honours anti-Semite
Date: 2/5/06 at 8:27PM
Playing: The Fuehrer’s Face, by Spike Jones
From Direland blog:
UKRAINE’S YUSHCHENKO HONORS ANTI-SEMITE IN YET ANOTHER BETRAYAL OF THE ‘ORANGE REVOLUTION’
Remember all the frothy praise of Viktor Yuschenko and what a great democrat he was — back when he was the leader of the so-called Orange Revolution that toppled the corrupt Ukrainian regime of President Leonid Kuchma — from George Bush, the neocons, Freedom House, and the Western press in general?
Well, this week a little-noticed dispatch from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (the worldwide Jewish news service founded in 1917) related how now-President Yushchenko has just awarded Ukraine’s highest honor — the “Hero of Ukraine” medal — to a notorious anti-Semite, Ivan Spodarenko.
But not a word of this outrage has appeared in the major U.S. dailies.
So much for the myth of “the Jews” controlling the US media …
US rulers some times play at being opponents of anti-Semitism, but that’s a different issue …
Also from the Google cache.
Ukraine: NATO allies include anti-Semites
Date: 6/19/05 at 12:31AM
Playing: The Fuehrer’s Face, by Spike Jones
We already pointed out the presence of open admirers of Adolf Hitler in the present, pro Western, “democratic”, government alliance in Ukraine.
The following item ran in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on June 6:
Participants at an anti-Zionist [in the context of that conference, a code word of anti-Semites to cover their asses] conference in Kiev called for the deportation of Jews from Ukraine.
The call came from one of the participants in the June 3 meeting in the Ukrainian capital.
David Duke, a U.S. white supremacist [they misspell the name of this nazi, ex candidate for George W. Bush’s Republicans for governor of Louisiana; it is David Puke], presided over the one-day conference, titled “Zionism as the Biggest Threat to Modern Civilization.”
A number of Ukrainian politicians and public figures took part in the conference, including Levko Lukyanenko, a member of Parliament from the bloc headed by Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko.
The conference, which billed itself as an academic event, was held at the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management, or MAUP, Ukraine’s largest private university, whose leaders have a history of anti-Semitism.
Also at this conference: Swedish anti-Semite Jöran Jermas, under his “Israel Shamir” pseudonym.
See also on this local newspaper Kyiv Post (which is somewhat too kind to Ms Timoshenko).
David Duke and other anti-Semites in Ukraine: here.
UPDATE, Ukraine 27 May 2007: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Jun 5, 11:49 AM EDT
Mass Grave Containing Bodies of Thousands of Jews Killed by Nazis Found in Southern Ukraine
By NATASHA LISOVA
Associated Press Writer
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine near the site of what was once a concentration camp, a Jewish community representative said Tuesday.
The grave was found by chance last month when workers were preparing to lay gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community.
The Nazis established two ghettos during World War II near the village and brought Jews there from what is now Moldova as well as Ukrainian regions, Shvartsman said. In November 1941, they set up a concentration camp and killed about 5,000 Jews, he said.
“Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie there,” Shvartsman told The Associated Press.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the finding was no surprise: “It underscores the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of the Nazis and their collaborators in eastern Europe.”
“The scope is enormous, the number of places where murders were carried out is very large and that is why even now at this point, so late after the events, graves are still being discovered,” he added.
Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust scholar and a former director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, said his research indicated some 28,000 Jews were gathered in the area from surrounding towns. He said 10,000 of those died at a rate of around 500 people a day.
Shvartsman said that Jewish community knew about the mass killing but did not know where the bodies were located.
Anatoly Podolsky, director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, said there are believed to be some 250-350 mass grave sites from the Nazi occupation, during which some 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews are believed to have been killed – including those massacred near their homes and those deported to camps elsewhere. He said most of the site have been discovered, many of them since the Soviet collapse of 1991, but others have not.
“Ukraine was an enormous killing field, hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered and the entire region is literally filled with hundreds of mass graves,” Zuroff said.
Ilia Levitas, the head of Ukraine’s Jewish Council, put the number of mass Jewish graves in the country at over 700 and said more than 100 are without monuments to the victims.
According to Shvartsman, the names of 93 Jews killed at the Gvozsdavka-1 site have been established. He said Jewish community members plan to conduct studies at the site to identify more victims.
“We must figure out their names. It is our debt before victims and survivors,” he said.
Odessa’s chief rabbi, Shlomo Baksht, hopes to fence the site off and erect a monument to the victims by the end of the year.
Ukraine’s Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital Kiev where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the tragedy.
About 240,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Odessa region, according to Shvartsman. He said a mass grave with remains of about 3,500 Jews was found in the region last year.
—
Associated Press writer Aron Heller contributed to this report from Jerusalem.
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