Author: Andrew Fedynsky

CLEVELAND – The Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) announced it has won a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The grant came after U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Fiscal Year 2024 Transportation-HUD Appropriations bill early in March. The grant, sponsored by Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, will allow the UMA...

Speaking to thousands waving Lithua­nian, American and Ukrainian flags at Vilnius University Square in July, U.S. President Joe Biden reflected on Lithuania’s generations-long struggle for independence before speaking on behalf of America and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). “Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken,” he said. “We will stand for freedom today, tomorrow...

Roman Wasylyszyn was an artist; his wife, Volodymyra, was a poetess. He died last year; she passed away in 2011. Their respective artistic and literary legacies are now preserved in Cleveland’s Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA), which will be dedicating a room to their memory that will include a celebration of their artistic legacy on September 15....

On June 7, the Ukrainian American community lost a pillar, a leader and difference-maker like few others. Me? I lost a dear friend. So did countless others. Taras Szmagala, Sr. (1933-2023) was 90 years old when he passed away in suburban Cleveland following a massive stroke.  Those who knew Taras – and we’re talking hundreds,...

There are many images on the internet and on billboards and monuments in Ukraine of Taras Shevchenko in contemporary military gear holding a shoulder-mounted missile, an assault weapon or the blue and yellow flag. They’re meant to inspire his countrymen seven generations removed to defend their freedom and independence. And they do. You know the...

When Nazi Germany attacked Britain in 1940, members of parliament proposed cutting funding for culture and diverting the money toward the military. Prime Minister Winston Churchill rose in opposition: “So what are we fighting for,” he posited, “if not for our culture, our very existence?” Mobilizing his nation, he also reached out to America for...

Ukraine has had a lot of history to absorb over the past 100-plus years. Two world wars, multiple famines, terror, Soviet and Nazi slave labor, concentration camps, mass emigration, revolutions – peaceful as well as violent – and now yet another war. The Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) of Cleveland has a map that was published in...

There’s good news and bad news for Ukraine after the midterm elections. Wonderful news: Marcy Kaptur won! Arguably, the strongest congressional supporter of Ukraine ever, she won re-election in a Republican gerrymandered district. Her opponent (how to put this delicately?) was a blowhard with no qualifications who chartered a bus to bring former U.S. President...

PARMA, Ohio – On a beautiful August Saturday, members of the Ohio Ukrainian community and their many friends came out in large numbers to celebrate the 31st anniversary of Ukraine’s renewed independence with a parade through the Ukrainian Village in Parma, Ohio. “The parade was the largest in Parma’s history in regards to parade participants,”...

I have been a lifelong lover of music. Sometime in the 1960s, as a teenager, I discovered the Red Army Chorus sang magnificent renditions, including Taras Shevchenko’s “Reve ta Stohne” (“The Dnipro Roars and Moans.”)  My mother, Lesia, asked me not to play it. But it’s so beautiful, I said. I know, she replied –...

Less than 24 hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale war on Ukraine on February 24, former President Donald Trump hailed his KGB comrade as a genius: “He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. … really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people,...

Before flying out of Kyiv in the summer of 2008, I went to a bookstore to buy a novel for the long flight home. Most of the stock was in Russian, with only a small section in Ukrainian. I bought “Я Богдан” (“I’m Bohdan”) by historical fiction author Pavlo Zahrebelnyi, who should have won the...