The Ukrainian Weekly (https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/author/mark/page/16/)
KYIV – Tensions between Ukrainian politician Mikheil Saakashvili and erstwhile ally Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko were further strained after the former Georgian leader called on the president to resign in an open letter he published on his Facebook page on December 19.
KYIV – Not since the Euro-Maidan revolution have Kyiv’s streets seen such unrest as what occurred last weekend and turned out to be President Petro Poroshenko’s worst domestic political crisis to date.
KRAMATORSK-AVDIYIVKA, Ukraine – As the shelling renewed at 3 p.m. less than an hour before dusk, women were still calmly seen carrying grocery bags, and an unmarked school bus was shuttling children home through an armed checkpoint.
KYIV – The Ukraine that Canadian Ambassador Roman Waschuk knew while serving as political counselor for his country’s diplomatic corps in 1994-1998 has outlived its legacy.
Back then, Leonid Kuchma was in his first of two terms as president and starting to build the corrupt, oligarchic economic model that the nation’s post-revolutionary government inherited in 2014 and has been replacing incrementally ever since.
KYIV – Four years after the Euro-Maidan Revolution erupted in November 2013, political and sociological experts still believe that the following year, 2014, was a breakthrough year for Ukraine that firmly set the country’s course of development towards democratization and embracing European values.
KYIV – Among the first people to pinpoint that Russia engages in lies on an industrial scale packaged as actual news was Yevhen Fedchenko, 41, director of the Mohyla School of Journalism.
He and his colleagues noticed the practice during the Revolution of Dignity that ended in February 2014. That month, disgraced Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia after leaving behind a dry treasury and a graft-infested, dysfunctional government, along with 100 civilians killed by his law enforcement personnel.
KYIV – Ukraine’s reformist yet occasionally obdurate legislature, the Verkhovna Rada, moved ahead this week with more bills to further enhance a constantly overdue pro-European agenda on the back of promises of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.
A more representative electoral bill was approved in the first of two readings on November 7. It foresees replacing half of the nation’s 225 voting districts, in which single candidates got elected based only on who receives the most votes, with regional political party lists, whereby candidates get elected based on the proportion of votes their party receives.
KYIV – A day after an Odesa-born medic and sniper of Chechen heritage who fought in the Donbas war was fatally shot, the Security Service of Ukraine detained the alleged Kremlin-guided assassin of one of their own high-ranking officials.
It was the latest reminder for this war-weary country of 42.5 million people that the conventional battle in the easternmost regions of the Donbas is being waged also nationwide asymmetrically through alleged Moscow-controlled cells of agents, provocateurs and trained assassins.
KYIV – Ukraine adopted a crucial legislative health care package on October 19 that is designed to improve the health of its people and remove Europe’s largest country from the list of nations that have the world’s highest death rates. It is the first comprehensive change to the country’s Soviet-era health care system since Ukraine gained independence in 1991.
CONCLUSION
(Go to Part I)
KYIV – Rutgers University-Newark political science professor Alexander Motyl is known for swimming against the tide when it comes to speaking about post-Maidan Ukraine. All is not lost and not everything is “doom and gloom,” his writings and observations often say. On October 13, the professor, novelist and poet spoke with The Ukrainian Weekly via an online messenger service, just five days before political opposition groups, including one led by Mikheil Saakashvili, former Georgian president and ex-Odesa Oblast governor, staged a rally in Kyiv’s government district to call for the creation of a separate anti-graft court, election reform to make ballots open to the public and the stripping of immunity from prosecution for members of Parliament. Prof. Motyl makes the case for “evolutionary,” not “revolutionary” change.
After earning his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1984, Prof. Motyl embarked on an academic and teaching career. The Ukrainian American has earned a reputation for having expertise on “Ukraine, Russia and the USSR,” according to the World Affairs Journal.