Month: January 18, 2019 9:57 am

PARSIPPANY, N.J – Zenowij Onyshkewych, a prolific Ukrainian American artist, whose oeuvre includes a wide range of media, died on December 30, 2018 at the age of 89.

OTTAWA – Gene Zwozdesky, former speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, former member of the Legislative Assembly, and long-time Ukrainian Canadian community leader and volunteer, died on January 6. He was 70.

Many commentators have suggested that the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is a great victory for Ukrainians but a defeat for Russians, but that is not the case, according to Andrey Illarionov. It is a defeat for Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin but it is very much a victory “for the free citizens of Free Russia in the future.” 

Russian commentator Andrey Illarionov has carefully compared the status of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in terms of 25 basic issues of Church life and concluded that the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) is now completely out from under the control of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), has expanded its powers over its internal life and become an independent actor in international Church affairs. 

The news is full of reports of human rights violations: in Crimea and the Donbas since the 2014 Russian invasions, as well as in dozens of countries around the world with a variety of political systems. But compared to the vogue for human rights in the 1970s, enthusiasm seems to have waned. 

Russian court extends sailors’ detention A Moscow court has prolonged the pretrial detention of 24 Ukrainian sailors detained by Russian…...

HILLSIDE, N.J. – St. Nicholas visited Immaculate Conception Ukrainian Catholic Parish in Hillside, N.J., on Sunday, December 2, 2018. The children performed a wonderful program in Ukrainian and English in his honor that included music and poetry. 

Kurt Volker was in the headlines at the beginning, middle and end of 2018 as the United States’ designated special representative for Ukraine negotiations. Speaking in Brussels on January 22, Ambassador Volker made it clear that the two Minsk accords (of September 2014 and February 2015) had not been implemented because Moscow had not shown “willingness to implement them.” The next day Mr. Volker met with President Petro Poroshenko to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine, which at that point was responsible for more than 10,300 deaths.

The bilateral relationship between Canada and Ukraine was further strengthened at the top of the year when the Queen’s representative in Canada, former Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, visited Ukraine in mid-January and met with President Petro Poroshenko. 

KYIV – If Ukrainians worldwide waited over 70 years to regain independence as a nation, a significant portion of its Orthodox Christian congregants had to wait more than three centuries to restore spiritual freedom from the same overlord – Russia. 

It came on January 6 when Christmas Eve is observed in accordance with the Julian calendar. St. George Cathedral in Istanbul, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, was the setting. A Ukrainian delegation consisting of Church hierarchs and politicians came for the historic ceremonies led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

Upon completion of the ceremony of signing the Tomos, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew addressed Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine Epifaniy (referred to below as Epiphanios). The  following text was provided by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will go down in history as having “lost Ukraine” for good. Mr. Putin has experienced two “geopolitical tragedies” with the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 and disintegration of the Russian world in 2018.