About Us

The Ukrainian Weekly has been published continuously since 1933.

Founded at first to serve the Ukrainian American community and to function as a vehicle for communication of that community’s concerns to the general public in the United States, The Weekly today publishes news about Ukraine and Ukrainians around the world.

A major stimulus for the newspaper’s inauguration in 1933 was the Famine-Genocide, or Holodomor, then raging in Ukraine due to the policies instituted by Joseph Stalin. The Ukrainian National Association, a fraternal benefit life insurance society which had been publishing a Ukrainian-language daily newspaper, Svoboda (founded in 1893), decided to publish an English-language newspaper as well in order to tell the world the truth about the Holodomor. [The Moscow-based correspondent of The New York Times, Walter Duranty, in his news reports denied that there was a famine, while privately telling U.S. diplomats that millions were dying.]

Today the newspaper’s primary audience is in North America. However, the newspaper has subscribers around the globe, wherever there are readers interested in news about Ukraine and Ukrainians. For example, there are subscribers in such diverse places as India, Puerto Rico, Australia, South America and nearly all the countries in Europe, including Ukraine

With the movement toward independence in the late 1980s and the re-establishment of Ukraine’s independence in 1991, came a renewed focus on Ukrainians’ ancestral homeland. The Ukrainian Weekly has a correspondent in Kyiv, capital of Ukraine. Related to this is a marked increase in the number of non-Ukrainians subscribing to the newspaper – persons from all walks of life who are now interested in Ukraine for academic, business or other reasons.

The Weekly also has correspondents and free-lancers in major U.S. and Canadian cities, as well as other countries. Thus, the newspaper reports on Ukrainian-related news from wherever there are Ukrainians. In addition, notable scholars are regular contributors of analytical articles dealing with current events in Ukraine.

In 1983, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor, The Ukrainian Weekly’s editors compiled a special commemorative booklet called “The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust.” The 88-page publication included scholars’ articles about the Holodomor, eyewitness recollections and press accounts. 

The Weekly’s editors also released “The Ukrainian Weekly 2000,” a two-volume compilation of the most significant news stories and commentaries published in the years 1933-1999, complete with a decade-by-decade introduction that provides the context for the articles that follow. The Weekly’s book “Ukraine Lives!” was published in 2002 in celebration of the first decade of Ukraine’s renewed independence.

The newspaper annually publishes a “Year in Review” supplement covering the major developments of the year.