Author: Andrew Fedynsky

I will be 75 in September: that is already a generous life span with 1,000 adventures and countless interesting experiences, nearly all of them happy; a few not so much. And now this. I came into the world in 1947. The war in most of Europe had ended two years earlier, with tens of millions...

Late 19th Century German field marshall Helmut von Moltke wrote how war is unpredictable: “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” I hope someone is telling that to Russian President Vladimir Putin so he thinks long and hard before invading Ukraine. Previous Russian wars have...

In July 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin released a 5,000-word article asserting that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people – a single whole.” Referencing 9th Century Kyivan Rus’, he declared that Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians are all descendants, “bound together by one language.” Now more than 1,000 years later, he argued that “true sovereignty of...

Bob Dole died on December 5 at age 98. Having served his country in World War II and in a decades-long political career, he was one of the most distinguished members of America’s “Greatest Generation.” I had the privilege of working for him and of seeing him up close. I was 30 years old in...

Every November we commemorate the Holodomor, pausing to reflect on one of history’s most horrific crimes. From my earliest days, the Kremlin-instigated famine in Ukraine was part of my consciousness. I was seven years old in 1955, one of 30 or so first graders in Cleveland’s Saturday Ridna Shkola Heritage School, nearly all of us...

I don’t envy Joe Biden, now eight months in office. No president in my lifetime (I was born in 1947) has faced as many problems coming in. Consider the following: The worst health crisis since the Spanish Flu in 1918: when Mr. Biden took the oath, tens of millions of Americans had already been infected...

In the 1840s, Karl Marx famously wrote that “religion is the opium of the masses.” That’s no longer true; now it’s sports and I’m addicted. I’m a Cleveland Indians, Browns, Cavaliers fan; I root for the Ohio State football team unless they’re playing my alma mater Notre Dame, and then I root for the Fighting Irish; I root for the U.S. in World Cup soccer; I root for Ukraine in the Euro Cup. No doubt most of you reading this have your own favorites – religious affiliation notwithstanding.

As a volunteer at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, I often come across some curious items. Consider, for example, a 1950s membership application to join the “Organization of Elderly Ukrainians” in Detroit, Mich.; “eligibility beginning at age 40...”

I had never before heard of Yulian Dorosh (1909-1982). Who, you might ask? Well, Dorosh was a distinguished Ukrainian cultural figure, I recently learned, a pioneering filmmaker and photographer starting in 1920s, 1930s and active his entire life.

Time flies and memory fails, but I remember precisely where I was 50 years ago on July 20 at 10:56 p.m. – in the sweltering attic above the kitchen and dining hall at the “Pysany Kamin” (Painted Rock) Ukrainian Plast Scout camp sitting in front of a TV, along with more than 200 campers – all of us on edge, waiting for live images from the moon, not knowing from minute to minute, second to second, whether the landing would end in success, failure or tragedy. And then, Neil Armstrong stepped out from the Eagle to proclaim a small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind, his grainy image sent back to Earth for us at PK and for billions around the world.

My wife, Chrystia, and I watched live television as the Notre Dame Cathedral burned.  I couldn’t help but cry.  For me and millions of others, the cathedral is special.  I was a college sophomore in 1966 when I disembarked with 39 classmates from a trans-Atlantic voyage on the SS United States, arriving in Paris soon after for lunch, awaiting another train to Innsbruck for a year abroad at the university there. 

Our family moved to Cleveland on Labor Day in 1954, my seventh birthday. A week later I was enrolled in a Ridna Shkola Saturday heritage class in a dismal upstairs room lighted by bare bulbs in a fading commercial building in the old Ukrainian neighborhood. It was all the immigrant community could afford, having come off the boat from DP camps four-five years before.