Month: January 25, 2019 7:52 am

NEW YORK – A group of both male and female professionals gathered together from across various industries came together on November 28, 2018, to discuss the issues that women face in male-dominated industries. 

JENKINTOWN, Pa. – After more than three years of ambitious transformation at Manor College, its board renewed President Jonathan Peri’s contract nearly a year early. When Dr. Peri arrived at Manor in late 2015, the college was facing financial challenges. Within seven months he led the college to a balanced budget, erased deficits, created significant excess revenues and restructured debt by fiscal year end. By fall 2017, and for the first time in about 10 years, both enrollment and revenues increased.

Tymoshenko launches bid for presidency

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has officially announced she will run for president, with polls showing her as the front-runner in the March presidential election. “A great country is my goal, from which I will not back down a single step. That is why I am running for president today,” she told a congress of her opposition Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party in Kyiv on January 22.

PARSIPPANY, N.J. – Two exarchs of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople – Archbishop Daniel of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A. and Metropolitan Emmanuel of France – will be represented on a panel of experts who will answer questions about Ukraine’s Orthodox autocephaly during a nationwide call-in virtual town hall meeting hosted by the Order of St. Andrew, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America on January 26 in New York. News of their participation was released on January 22.

KYIV – The March 31 presidential election is “wide open” and “unpredictable” Ukraine experts and analysts have noted, as findings from fresh public opinion polls were released in the last two months before the New Year. 

Current national lawmaker and two-time Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is the front runner, followed by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and newcomer Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a showman and perhaps the country’s most popular comedian.

Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatars, said that the goal of his nation is “the establishment of a platform for the return of Crimea on the basis of the Budapest Memorandum,” the 1994 accord under which Russia and the West agreed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its surrender of nuclear weapons.

EDMONTON-TORONTO – The publication in 2018 of “The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor” (CIUS Press) by Stanislav Kulchytsky was an important milestone in the work of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) at the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). An updated translation into English of his “Ukraïnskyi Holodomor v Konteksti Polityky Kremlia Pochatku 1930-ykh Rokiv” (2014), this latest work, supported by HREC, can be considered a distillation of 30 years of study of the topic by one of Ukraine’s leading historians. 

Risa Asanov, one of the Crimean Tatar activists who recently carried aid to Moscow for the 24 Ukrainian POWs seized by Russia, was viciously attacked on January 2. The two assailants waited for him to regain consciousness to say that this was his “last warning” and that he would not live through the next attack. 

Mr. Asanov has played a major role in supporting political prisoners and their families since returning to Crimea from Poland in 2017, and he is certain that the attack was linked with his strong civil stand against rights violations in occupied Crimea.

2018 was not an easy year for Ukraine. The war in the east of the country is on for the fifth year, Crimea’s annexed status did not change, dozens of Ukrainian political prisoners are held in Russian jails, and an unprecedented escalation happened in the Azov Sea. The year is also the last one in President Petro Poroshenko’s current term of office (he was elected in spring 2014 after the Revolution of Dignity). Ukrainians question the achievements made during his term, including combatting corruption, judicial reform, investigations of attacks on activists – these are issues of serious concern to civil society. Nevertheless, 2018 brought a lot of positive changes in the country. What were Ukraine’s biggest wins in 2018? The Ukraine Crisis Media Center takes a look back. 

The European Union has reiterated its call on Moscow to release all Ukrainian citizens “illegally detained” both in Russia and in the occupied Crimea peninsula.

In a statement on January 10, a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini cited the cases of Pavlo Hryb, a 20-year-old Ukrainian man charged with abetting terrorism, and Crimean Tatar activist Edem Bekirov, who was detained last month upon entry into Crimea.

KYIV – President Petro Poroshenko addressed Ukrainians after the Christmas liturgy in St. Sophia Cathedral conducted by the primate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Epifaniy, and emphasized that a miracle had happened during the holy days. 

The January 6 announcement of autocephaly for an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine marks a historic achievement as Ukraine seeks to chart its own future. On this momentous occasion, the United States reiterates its unwavering support for a sovereign, independent Ukraine.