The Ukrainian Weekly (https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/author/mark/page/12/)
KYIV – Controversy is swirling over a biopic film about the last days of Ukrainian poet and human rights activist Vasyl Stus, who died in 1985 at the age of 47 in a forced labor camp, where he was imprisoned for defying Soviet authorities and advocating Ukraine’s self-determination.
VOROKHTA, Ukraine – Emotion overpowered Ruslana Wrzesnewskyj as she approached this picturesque Carpathian Mountain town in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast situated 2,788 feet above sea level. Tears began to trickle down her cheeks that her black-rimmed sunglasses partially concealed just steps away from the Hutsul settlement situated along the Prut River flowing southward.
“We finally did it, we did it,” she said as tears kept dribbling while hugging the nine walkers with whom she entered the town, including Ukrainian-Swiss friend Patricia Shmorhun who “gave me courage to continue.”
KYIV – If the fictitious archaeologist Indiana Jones were to descend several meters underground at the Dnipro riverside Poshtova Ploshcha (Postal Square), he would discover an ancient 1,500-square-meter living quarter with two bisecting streets dating to the 11th-12th centuries of the Kyivan Rus’ era.
Unearthed in 2015 when an opaque construction firm started digging to build a two-tier underground shopping center, the magnificent site features an ancient street aligned with deteriorated wooden gates that leads to the historic Podil district and southward, parallel to Ukraine’s main waterway.
KYIV – The mandate of the 57-state international body charged with monitoring a truce in the Donbas war may have been further compromised after allegations emerged that sensitive information about the Ukraine mission was passed to Russian intelligence.
Hundreds of internal documents of the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) dating to autumn 2016 were handed over to Russia’s Federal Security Service, according to a July 16 report aired by German channel ARD.
PUSHCHA-VODYTSIA, Ukraine – Although it was graduation day, there were still four more topical discussions taking place at the Ukrainian Leadership Academy (ULA) on June 23.
The concurrent session on 182 soon-to-be graduates got to choose from entrepreneurship, education, local governance or health care under the overarching concept of society’s challenges.
KYIV – As World Cup host Russia was losing to Uruguay 0-3 in the quadrennial soccer tournament on June 25, Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov was in the 43rd day of his hunger strike at a Siberian prison and 44 pounds lighter from when he first started refusing solid food.
Another political prisoner, Volodymyr Balukh, was in the 99th day of his, at first partial and subsequently full, hunger strike in a Crimean prison. The farmer had hung a Ukrainian flag atop his house in the Russia-annexed Ukrainian peninsula, according to human rights groups, and was charged with “insulting an official” for calling Russian police officers “occupiers.”
KYIV – The Verkhovna Rada passed another bill to complete the architecture of establishing a separate court to prosecute corrupt public officials on June 21, but failed to revise clauses that make it possible for graft cases to skirt the judiciary body.
Choosing to vote for creating the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) in its entirety, instead of the optional two readings, 256 lawmakers voted in favor of President Petro Poroshenko’s bill.
KYIV – Ukrainian Canadian realtor and community activist Ruslana Wrzesnewskyj of Toronto has begun a 650-kilometer (404-mile) trek from Kyiv to the Carpathian Mountain town of Vorokhta in Ivano-Frankvisk Oblast in an effort to raise awareness about the plight of orphans in Ukraine. Her route ends in the area where she regularly holds camps for socially vulnerable and at-risk children. As of June 21, she had hiked 74 kilometers and was in the Zhytomyr Oblast town of Popilne via the Kyiv Oblast towns of Vasylkiv, Fastiv, Olenivka and Kozhanka.
Advocating under the banner of Help us Help the Children, Ms. Wrzesnewskyi is marking the 25th anniversary of her endeavor to provide better lives for children who are orphaned or whose guardians were deprived of their parental rights. One of her daughters is an orphan from Lviv.
Since the Euro-Maidan revolution in 2014 and subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine, she has included children whose parents have either suffered or perished in the conflicts at her summer and winter camps. Ms. Wrzesnewskyi, 64, has pushed the Ukrainian government to implement a child foster care system modeled after the Canadian one.
Only 10 to 20 percent of children at state care centers are actual orphans who’ve lost both parents.
KYIV – A peaceful resolution to the Donbas war remained elusive following talks between Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Pavlo Klimkin and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that was mediated by the top diplomats of France and Germany in Berlin on June 11.
KYIV – A last-minute change to a bill for creating a separate court to prosecute corrupt officials will temporarily bypass the judiciary body during appeals in cases that a newly formed graft-fighting investigative bureau sends to courts.
Forming the High Anti-Corruption Court is a precondition to further unlocking a vital $17.5 assistance package from the International Monetary Fund. High-level Ukrainian officials said it is compliant with the Washington-based lender’s demands and that $2 billion in renewed funding would be available by autumn after the bill was passed on June 7.