• An Austrian court on April 30 denied a request by the U.S. to extradite Dmytro Firtash for trial on criminal charges including bribery and racketeering. Mr. Firtash, a Ukrainian natural gas trader, magnified his wealth with his tight connections to the Yanukovych administration. Mr. Firtash has told reporters that he plans to return to Ukraine, but President Petro Poroshenko has made it clear that Mr. Firtash would be subject to his campaign to reduce the influence of oligarchs.
• Razom for Ukraine’s Kobzar Project incorporated two definitions of “kobzar”: the bard who traveled from village to village, and Taras Shevchenko’s collection of poems. The project began with Ruslana bringing Shevchenko’s “Kobzar” to the ATO zone in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian soldiers, volunteers and average people passed the book from town to town, many writing a note in the book to future readers. Andrii Gorobets, originally from Donetsk and now a post-doc fellow at Michigan State University, traveled the U.S. in late spring/early summer as part of the Kobzar Project, bringing the book to Ukrainian American communities.
• Marta Iwanek of Toronto was the 2015 winner of the Tom Hanson Photojournalism Award, presented by the Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) and The Canadian Press at the CJF gala on June 3. The award offers a six-week paid internship at the Canadian Press head office in Toronto. Although Ms. Iwanek went to Kyiv in November 2013 to make a film with Nove Pokolinnia (the organization known in Canada as Help Us Help the Children), she stayed for three months covering the events on the Maidan as a freelance photographer. Her photos were published by Maclean’s magazine as “The Maidan Story.”
• Roman Borys received an honorary Doctor of Music degree on June 12 from Carleton University in Ottawa in recognition of his outstanding achievements as a musician of international renown, an educator and a leader in bringing together some of Canada’s most talented artists to perform on the international stage. Mr. Borys is a founding member of the two-time Juno Award-winning Gryphon trio, and the artistic director of the Ottawa Chamber Music Society, overseeing all aspects of programming its summer Chamberfest and its fall-winter concert series.
• Prof. Lubomyr Luciuk of the Department of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, was honored on June 25 with a Royal Ontario Volunteer Service Award for 50 years of community activism, at a ceremony sponsored by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade. Dr. Luciuk’s most recent book, co-edited with Declan Curran and Andrew G. Newby, is “Famines in European Economic History: The Last Great European Famines Reconsidered.” He also recently oversaw publication of “ ‘Tell Them We Are Starving’ – The 1933 Diaries of Gareth Jones.”