Ukraine List

So elections are coming up in Ukraine and the one I am going to be watching is the local election on Serpent Island in the Black Sea. In an attempt to give the island a more substantial status (a democratic one), Ukraine’s Vice Premier, Aleksandr Kuzmuk, announced that there would be local elections on the […]

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I have been following the film dubbing debate recently where language politics are playing out through the film industry. Essentially, the government, courts, and distributors are battling it out on how best to promote and regulate the use of Ukrainian language in films. The arguments can be quite heated at times as it brings up […]

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In a recent post, I noted that the Ukrainians and Romanians opened a new frontier bridge between the two countries. It was a good mark of cooperation, but one issue that had to be pushed to the background was the current dispute about Serpent Island (Острів Зміїний in Ukrainian). I usually find international boundary and […]

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Since the 2006 elections in the US have shifted the balance of power to Democrats, I thought I would look at the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus (CUC) to see how the representatives fared.
First of all, a definition. Congressional caucuses are voluntary groups of members of the US Congress with a shared interest. It is sort of […]

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So after years of not even hearing the name of David Duke in the US, it comes as a bit of an unfortunate surprise to see his name so frequently associated with Ukraine. Of course, the David Duke presence would be well-known by many in Ukraine, but it is largely off the radar in the […]

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I ran into the Ethnologue site today, which I found quite interesting. It lists the various ethnic groups and languages of Ukraine, and though some of the statistics may be a bit dated, it is ultimately a useful reference if you are interested in ethnic and language issues.
For instance, I found the Greek portion of […]

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The New York Times reminds us that on 30 October 2001 Ukraine destroyed its last nuclear missile silo left over from the Soviet Union as part of the START I agreement. On 13 November 2001, Russian president Putin also announced that the last nuclear missile warhead from Ukraine was destroyed in Russia in late October.
This […]

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On 27 October, the EU effectively said ‘no’ (for now) to Ukrainian accession talks to enter the European Union. Yushchenko went to Finland for the EU-Ukraine summit hoping to get an agreement to start talks by 2008, but alas this did not happen. According to the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, neither the EU […]

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