Author: Askold S. Lozynskyj

Because of the war, we missed the 15th anniversary of the death of artist Opanas Zalyvakha in 2022, who died in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 2007. But we are now thinking ahead. The year 2025 will mark the 100th anniversary of his birth on November 26, 1925, in Husynka, Ukraine. And so we write in anticipation...

This is not about the war. This is about all of Ukraine’s wars, spanning centuries, and one man, a poet, who passed away on January 29 at the ripe old age of 92. He was a great poet, certainly, one of the most prominent Ukrainian poets of the modern era. It has been said that...

The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) is located in the Russian Far East, along the Arctic Ocean. It has a population of roughly 1 million people. Yakutsk is its capital and largest city. The republic has a reputation for an extreme and severe climate, with the lowest temperatures on the planet being recorded there. Regular winter...

The Bashkirs are an ancient people of Eurasia, formed in the Southern Urals as an independent ethnos in the first half of the first millennium. The first written mention of individual tribes that became part of the Bashkir people are found in the writings of Herodotus (fifth century B.C.). The territory of the historical lands...

The Buryats are a Mongolian-speaking people living on both sides of Lake Baikal, as well as in Mongolia and China. Their total population is estimated to be from 550,000 to 690,000. The Buryat language belongs to the Mongolian branch of the Altaic language family and is one of the state languages of the Republic of...

A federation is a group of states with a central government in which, in theory, those states may maintain independence in internal affairs. The Russian “Federation” is not that kind of federation. It is an empire accumulated over half a millennium with direct central authority over all aspects of the affairs of its constituent republics....

It was different. Eighty years ago, it was indeed David against Goliath. David was all alone facing more than one Goliath. No one supplied lethal weapons. The Ukrainian soldiers used their own sometimes very primitive weapons, or those they captured. Nevertheless, by some accounts the struggle lasted into the late 1950s. It was partisan warfare...

As I get older wisdom remains neutral as experience broadens and brain cells wither. Irony and paradox are the hallmarks of septuagenarians. Pure unadulterated idealism is replaced by practical considerations, after all politics are defined as an art of what is possible. Each new event leads to a strain on my thought processes. I saw...

On Thursday, July 14, The New York Times carried a relatively even story about the recall of Ukraine’s ambassador in Germany, Andrij Melnyk, for comments he had made concerning Berlin’s lack of support for the Ukrainian war effort. The New York Times went a little further, expounding on the current Ukrainian-German political conundrum, lack of...

To start, it is important to note that Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.), while in fact having been born in Ukraine and currently serving as a member of Congress, in no way represents the interests of Ukraine or the Ukrainian American community. It is unfortunate that she has chosen at this time of great peril to...

The New York Review of Books recently published a review of two new publications on language that read: “There are recent reports that Ukrainian defense forces are making their prisoners pronounce the word palianytsia (a kind of bread) as a reliable indicator of Russian or Ukrainian upbringing.” It seems that the Russians cannot pronounce the...

I spoke on the phone with a longtime friend in Kyiv on March 25. I have known him for many years. Our conversation relaxed me and more importantly it seemed to be good for him. He is extremely proud of our men and women who are defending Ukraine. However, there are repeated moments during the...