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Yanukovych trial for treason starts as Interpol removes him from wanted list

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KYIV – A day before the trial of Viktor Yanukovych for treason started in Kyiv on May 4, his lawyers announced that the disgraced former president of Ukraine is no longer wanted by Interpol. The world’s largest international police organization subsequently confirmed the information. “Interpol has thus confirmed the fact that criminal cases against Yanukovych are politically motivated,” said Yuriy Kirasir, the exiled politician’s spokesman. The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said it will appeal the decision. Now living in Russia at an undisclosed location, the former head of state, whose truncated administration is widely accused of large-scale embezzlement of up to $40 billion, is being tried for aiding Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine.

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Ukraine media environment improved, challenges remain, says Freedom House

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Occupied Crimea among worst in press freedom

KYIV – Crimea is the fourth least press-friendly territory or country in the world, independent democracy watchdog Freedom House found in its latest report on press freedom published in April. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s media environment, according to the Freedom of the Press report, “has significantly improved since a change in government in 2014, and ongoing reforms continue to strengthen the legislative environment for journalists and outlets.”

Notably, only North Korea, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were rated worse than Crimea, which was rated separately from Ukraine. Human Rights groups in and outside Ukraine have said civil liberties, including freedom of the press, have sharply deteriorated since Russia illegally occupied the Ukrainian peninsula of 2.3 million people in March 2014. Crimean Tatars, who numbered around 300,000 before the Russian invasion, and ethnic Ukrainians have been subject to kidnappings, arbitrary detentions and prosecution on trumped of charges of either “extremism” or “terrorism.” Only Russian state-controlled media currently operate in Crimea. Over all, the report covering the year 2016 said, only 13 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that boast a free press.

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American paramedic killed in Donbas

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First OSCE observer killed in Russia’s war against Ukraine

KYIV – It usually takes events of international significance for the world to once again notice that Russia is still waging war in Ukraine, which is already in its fourth year and has claimed more than 10,000 lives and uprooted 2 million people from their homes. This time, it was the tragic death of Joseph Stone, a 36-year-old American paramedic who was killed on April 23 when the armored vehicle he was in likely struck a landmine in the village of Pryshyb in occupied Luhansk Oblast. He was part of a team of unarmed observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the 57-nation body that is charged with monitoring a truce that has never fully taken hold between the warring sides. The incident marked the first death of an active duty OSCE observer in Ukraine since the monitoring mission started in March 2014. Two other monitors, a German woman and a Czech man, were injured in the blast, but are in stable condition.

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Banker embarks on overhauling Ukraine’s Soviet-era prison system

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KYIV – The dimly lit cavernous hallways of the tsarist-era Lukyanivska Prison emit a dank and musky smell. Unmitigated mold growth and years of neglect have rendered a whole cell wing and the basement uninhabitable, even by Ukraine’s Soviet-era prison standards. Called “Katka” by its inmates – after Catherine II of Russia who ruled the tsarist empire when the facility was built in 1863 – the prison has had several units added since, the latest being the women’s ward built with Swiss-funded money in 2007. Notoriety always accompanied the Lukyanivska Prison. Used mostly to hold prisoners in between court appearances for alleged crimes, it has a history of prisoner mistreatment and inhumane conditions associated with sanitation, overcrowding, and poor health care and food.

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Gontareva, fearless head of NBU, resigns after tackling ‘zombie’ banks, oligarchs

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KYIV – As the outgoing central bank governor, Valeria Gontareva will be a hard act to follow. Her resignation on April 10 expectedly came after the International Monetary Fund released an additional $1 billion as part of its $17.5 billion country support program, and after three years as head of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Under her watch, 87 out of some 180 banks lost their licenses because they couldn’t meet the stricter regulations she put in place in one of Europe’s most corrupt and shaky banking systems. As a result, total banking sector assets shrank to $53.8 billion by year-end 2016 from more than $120 billion three years earlier. Put another way, if the ratio of corporate loans to gross domestic product was around 50 percent before Ms. Gontareva’s tenure, and the household loans to GDP ratio was 13 percent, then today they are 35 and 7 percent, respectively. “I came here to implement reforms.  My mission is fulfilled – the reforms are implemented,”  Ms. Gontareva told journalists on the day of her resignation.

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Canada and Ukraine sign defense cooperation agreement

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OTTAWA – One month after the Canadian government announced a two-year extension of its military training mission in Ukraine, Canada formalized its support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and security through a bilateral defense cooperation agreement both countries’ defense ministers signed here on April 3.

“The arrangement will enable us to collaborate closely on issues of mutual security and defense concerns,” Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan told reporters at the signing ceremony at National Defense headquarters in Ottawa. “This defense cooperation agreement demonstrates just how strongly Canada is committed to Euro-Atlantic security and our unwavering support for Ukraine.”

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New bill forces graft watchdogs to file declarations of assets

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KYIV – Controversial amendments to the nation’s “e-declaration” law that require corruption watchdogs registered in Ukraine to file asset declarations went into effect on March 30. President Petro Poroshenko signed the bill this week after the Verkhovna Rada approved changes to Ukraine’s anti-corruption legislation on March 23. The measure obliges employees of civil society groups that monitor graft and the vendors with whom they conduct business to disclose their incomes and purchasing activity. Their first asset declarations are due in 2018. Non-governmental organizations that fight corruption will now join the 50,000 high-level public officials, including the president, the prime minister, Cabinet members, lawmakers, judges, prosecutors, local government officials and managers of state-owned companies who must file electronic declarations.

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Shevchenko Prize laureate Malkovych offers eloquent defense of the Ukrainian language

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KYIV – When Ivan Malkovych, the renowned poet and book publisher, took the podium to accept this year’s Taras Shevchenko National Prize for literature, he passionately exalted the Ukrainian language and voiced disapproval for how the award’s namesake is portrayed in society. The selection committee for the nation’s most prestigious state award in the arts had asked him to give a five-minute speech for his prize-winning poetry collection “A Plantain with New Poems” (Podorozhnyk z Novymy Virshamy). Mr. Malkovych, 55, instead spoke twice as long, and very quickly at that, on March 9. He first lamented that school curriculums still portray Mr. Shevchenko as a “serf and peasant poet-martyr.”

Instead, the founder of the A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA publishing house called the bard “modern and contemporary… because the real meanings of Shevchenko in many of his works sound like heavy, hard rock, and not syrupy pop music.”

The Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast native then called for a law that will predominantly replace Russian with the Ukrainian language in media, including television and radio, and on advertisements by introducing quotas. Noting that “language is the most significant marker of national self-identity,” Mr. Malkovych invoked the 19th century Irish nationalist Thomas Davis by saying that “a nation should defend its language more than its territory…”

He added, “if there’ll be Ukrainian language here, then we’ll have order; and if not, then we’ll have an eternal Putin [a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin], no matter what he may be called.”

Another historical reference was to Winston Churchill.

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Ukraine halts cargo traffic with the occupied Donbas

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KYIV – Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council halted the flow of road and rail cargo traffic in the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, following a decision during an ad hoc meeting on March 15. The measure also ordered the Security Service of Ukraine (known as the SBU) to probe the banks that have capital from state-owned Russian financial institutions and to, “within a day, provide relevant proposals, in particular, the introduction of sanctions against them.”

President Petro Poroshenko said he convened the extraordinary meeting due to a trade blockade that Donbas war veterans, helped by a group of lawmakers mostly from the Samopomich party, had started six weeks ago. The blockade had led to clashes between the pro-blockade activists and police in Donetsk Oblast and in Kyiv on March 14, as well as reciprocal measures enacted by the Kremlin-installed proxies in the occupied parts of easternmost Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Nationwide protests in support of the blockaders in at least 13 cities in 12 regions also were held this week. Pro-blockade lawmakers from the Samopomich and Batkivshchyna parties assert that the trade helps prop up the Kremlin-installed proxies in the Donbas and say the business ties are “tainted with blood.”

In turn, Mr. Poroshenko called the blockade, which started on January 25, counterproductive to restoring sovereignty over the territory Kyiv doesn’t control.

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Kyiv faces dilemma over occupied Donbas business ties

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KYIV – Ukraine’s precarious dilemma on conducting trade with businesses in occupied Donbas made it to the International Court of Justice at The Hague where Kyiv is accusing Russia of financing terrorism and discrimination in the Crimea. The Russian side, while addressing Ukraine’s accusations on March 7, asserted that Kyiv authorities negotiate with the Kremlin-backed proxies via the “Minsk peace process” and even do business with enterprises located in the occupied Donbas, “thus providing a large share of the budget to the unrecognized entities,” BBC’s Russian service reported. It’s the same point that a group of Ukrainian lawmakers, mostly from the Samopomich Party (Self-Reliance), and dozens of war veterans whom they’re helping, have made. “Trade with the occupiers is amoral, it finances terrorism and promotes corruption,” Samopomich lawmaker Semen Semenchenko told The Ukrainian Weekly over the phone at a rail blockade in Donetsk Oblast. The founder and former commander of the Donbas Battalion said that among the goals of cutting off all trade except humanitarian aid, including vital links between industrial plants on both sides of the frontline, is to force the Ukrainian government to recognize the area it doesn’t control as occupied, name Russia as the aggressor and call the armed conflict a war.