Author Archives: RomanInUkraine

“and cover mommy”

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Now that he’s two, we decided to get my son off breast milk. We’d made a few half-hearted efforts earlier, that consisted of his mother’s refusal, his increasingly hysterical protests, and acquiescence. It seemed to me that this would be as hard on Danylo’s mother as it would be on him.

Danylo has been walking to the bed, uncovering a corner of the covers. Climbing in, and calling for milk. Very manager-like. His grandmother jokes that he’s like the “holova kolhospu” (head of the collective farm).

After a talk yesterday, we decided that today was the day. We were still at Yuliia’s parents for the Easter holiday and it’d be easier with their support. Yuliia has been playfully cursing me all day. Danylo called for milk a few times, but we distracted him with toys or calling attention to the cat, or the sun, or going outside to play.

When Yuliia tried to put him down for his afternoon nap, Danylo went into hysterics. We tried driving him around in the car, but it didn’t help. He didn’t get any milk during lunch, and didn’t nap either. His sobbing hysterics relented with grandma offering playful distraction.

So he didn’t go sleep.

In the afternoon he continued getting extra attention from everybody, and went to the schoolyard with his grandfather. He also rode a bus for the first time, which was a big deal for him. He knows, cars, trains, buses and other modes of transportation very well. Combined with his knowledge of colors, this is often a subject of our conversations. Yuliia drove behind the bus for several stops, until Danylo and his grandfather existed.

At dinner, he was obviously exhausted and ate handfuls of macaroni with a sort of glazed look over his eyes.

When it was dark, his grandmother brought him into the bedroom where Yuliia was already laying down, pretending to sleep. “Mama is sleeping,” his grandmother told him, in Ukrainian.

“And Danny will sleep,” he answered. He laid down near her.

Grandma called me to look. He was quietly curled up in the center of the bed.

“I’ll cover you,” I said quietly and laid his baby blanket over him.

“And cover mommy,” he said.

Touched, and not wanting to disturb anything, I quickly moved to another room to get a blanket with which I covered Yuliia.

Everything was happening better than we could have hoped. I returned to my computer to work. A few minutes later, Danylo, in his diaper came into my room, picked up a plastic box of q-tips which he likes to play with. There was also a bed where I sat working and Danylo pulled open the corner of the cover. “Do you want to sleep here?” I asked. “No,” he said, and walked back to the bedroom where his mother lay. I followed and gave him a little boost as he climbed into bed, which for him is almost shoulder-high. He was still holding the box.

I covered him again. Gave both his mom and him a kiss, and laid down next to him until he was sound asleep. Yuliia reached over him and pinched me again — playfully. Making sure I realize what I’m putting her through. Then she held my hand as Danylo fell into a deeper and deeper sleep.

Addendum: The second day was very similar to the first. Crying after lunch. Not napping. Lots of attention, and then falling asleep quickly in the evening. On the third day we’d returned to our apartment. Danylo hadn’t napped. In the evening Yuliia read to him in bed. It was Yuliia who fell asleep. When she woke, she found Danylo sleeping on the floor beside the bed, facedown in a book. She called me to come look. He did not wake up as we lifted him carefully and tucked him in.

The victims of Soviet deportations remembered in Estonia

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On 25 March, twenty thousand candles, one for each of the men, women and children deported by the Soviets to Siberia in 1949, will be lighted in Tallinn, Tartu and Pärnu. Nearly 3% of the Estonian population were seized in a few days and dispatched to remote areas of Siberia.*

In the summer of 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as a result of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Estonia lost approximately 17.5% of its population.

http://estonianworld.com/life/25-march-victims-soviet-deportations-remembered-estonia/

Savchenko arrested on terrorism charges with parliamentary approval

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Ukraine’s parliament voted on March 22 to remove the political immunity of MP Nadiya Savchenko in order to allow for her arrest and prosecution for terrorism-related charges. 291 MPs voted to open a criminal case against Savchenko (out of a 226-vote minimum majority), 277 MPs voted to detain her and 268 MPs voted to arrest her.

Ahead of the votes, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko presented 28 minutes of three days’ worth of video evidence gathered by secret surveillance that showed Savchenko explaining her plot to violently overthrow the Ukrainian government, including planning bombings inside the parliament building and a mortar attack on the Kyiv city center. At one moment, she rejects her accomplice’s proposal for a widescale revolution, instead suggesting a swift overthrow. “They need to be eliminated physically,” she said. “All of them and quickly, at that.” Among these she planned to have assassinated are President Petro Poroshenko, National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

In response to the charges against her, Savchenko criticized the government as an evil force that is working against peace. She criticized her colleagues in parliament for failing to make enough efforts to stop the warfare in Donbas and continuing to indulge in corruption. She accused Lutsenko and his fellow EuroMaidan activists of doing the same thing in overthrowing the Yanukovych government that she had planned, essentially repeating a Kremlin talking point. The difference is that they succeeded “but the people didn’t succeed,” she said, casting herself as the people’s representative in warning that the Ukrainian people will be the biggest threat to parliament, not her. She refused to surrender her Hero of Ukraine award that she gained from the president during her incarceration in Russia as a war prisoner.

Zenon Zawada: In the big picture, what’s most important from these events is the information that has been revealed from the recordings of Savchenko planning her coup with her accomplices. Savchenko, who was in close contact with self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic leader Aleksandr Zakharchenko, revealed that his ideal scenario is to be reintegrated into Ukraine, but without the current government in place. Savchenko planned to kill Ukraine’s leaders in order to fulfill this goal, though it remains unclear whether Zakharchenko had any realistic hope for Savchenko to succeed or merely allowed her to fall victim to her own delusions. Savchenko also reveals, through her interactions with Zakharchenko, that Russia is not interested in annexing its occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Our best explanation for these bizarre events is that Savchenko is an idealist of the extreme kind who is incapable of applying a rational framework to her motives of punishing evildoers. It’s this reckless, unbounded idealism that led her to join Ukrainian paramilitary forces in Donbas, to repeatedly defy the Russian government with risky hunger strikes and now to overthrow a Ukrainian government that she accuses of killing its own citizens by waging this war in Donbas.

We expect Savchenko will be prosecuted and convicted of her crimes, receiving a harsh prison sentence despite her apparent cognitive deficiencies. The Ukrainian government will have to make an example of her to dissuade any other paramilitaries or separatists from considering similar overthrow attempts. Only until after the war is over, and the Russian threat neutralized, can she hope to be released, possibly on the basis of her cognitive deficiencies.

Needless to say, this is an incredibly tragic turn of events after Savchenko had become an international hero in her defiant stand against her illegal arrest and incarceration by the Russian government. Now she stands accused of plotting to overthrow the Ukrainian government, which could imprison her for life, far longer the 22-year sentence imposed by the Russian courts.

Explicit targeting of Jews by OUN and UPA

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This historian is in conflict with other parts of the Ukrainian community. In this interview, he outlines the evidence of OUN and UPA explicitly killing Jews, advocating their displacement, and rounding them up on behalf of the Nazis.

OUN/UPA viewed Russian and Poles as their main enemy, but believed Jews were also against a Ukrainian state, and in some cases sympathetic to the Soviets.

I would be curious to look for evidence of the reasoning behind these decisions. Was there an association between the Communism, the Red Terror and Holodomor on one hand, and Ukraine’s Jewish community on the other. This association certainly exists in today’s far-right communities. Is this a recent invention, or was it palpable then?

I’ve heard elsewhere that some UPA leaders made a distinction between religious Ukrainian Jews who weren’t communism, and secular Russian Jews who were fervently Communist.

Good News. Privat Bank fraud still being investigated

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A new court ruling in PrivatBank’s lawsuit against its former owners provides the first inside look at the court case, which has already seen Ukrainian oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholyubov lose access to $2.5 billion in assets after a global asset freeze.

Judge Joanna Smith of the High Court of Justice in London ordered three companies linked to Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov’s Privat group to give up detailed information surrounding a series of loan agreements with the oligarchs’ former bank.
The contracts are alleged to be at the center of a massive embezzlement scheme that drove the bank to the brink of collapse in December 2016, when the Ukrainian government nationalized it to fill a $5.6 billion hole at the lender.
https://www.kyivpost.com/business/london-court-ruling-sheds-light-2-5-billion-privatbank-lawsuit.html

Russia Routed Millions to Influence Clinton in Uranium Deal, Informant Tells Congress

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Told you so.

Moscow routed millions of dollars to the U.S. expecting the funds would benefit ex-President Bill Clinton’s charitable initiative while his wife, Hillary Clinton, worked to reset relations with Russia, an FBI informant in an Obama administration-era uranium deal stated.

In a written statement to three congressional committees, informant Douglas Campbell said Russian nuclear executives told him that Moscow hired American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide to influence Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, among others in the Obama administration, The Hill reported on Wednesday.

Campbell said Russian nuclear officials expected APCO to apply its $3 million annual lobbying fee from Moscow toward the Clintons’ Global Initiative. The contract detailed four $750,000 payments over a year’s time.

http://www.newsweek.com/russia-routed-millions-influence-clinton-uranium-deal-informant-tells-congress-801686