WAR IN UKRAINE: November 26, 2022
The Holodomor monument in central Kyiv
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 276
Today marks the start of the 90th anniversary commemoration of the Ukrainian Holodomor, or Great Famine, in which millions of Ukrainians died in a man-made atrocity in 1932-33 under then Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Observations will be held globally.
On Saturday, a residential neighborhood in Dnipro Ukraine targeted in latest Russian missile attack. Six people injured in the strike. Photos published by the National Police show significant damage
Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba says that all of Germany’s parliamentary factions had agreed on joint resolution recognizing the Holodomor as genocide of Ukrainian people. The anniversary of the Holodomor -in which millions died by forced starvation in 1932-33 - is being observed globally today
Ukrainian repair crews continue to scramble to return power to millions of homes following devastating Russian missile attacks this week on infrastructure facilities, while Kyiv said near-constant Russian bombing was affecting a handful of population centers in the east.
In a rare public spat involving Ukrainian leaders, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticized the mayor of Kyiv for doing what he said was a poor job setting up emergency shelters to help those without power and heat after Russian attacks. Tens of thousands of residents in Kyiv, are still without electricity, according to the local authorities.
The Netherlands is ready to accept a new wave of refugees from Ukraine due to Russia's constant attacks on Ukraine's critical infrastructure. “If Ukrainians leave Ukraine en masse again because of the war, they will be accepted by the Netherlands again," said Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra.
Required reading…
During the 1970s, while my non-Ukrainian friends headed for the hockey rink or football pitch, my Saturdays and Sundays were spent in various Ukrainian schools in Canada and Britain learning about the painful history of Ukraine. Even if my teachers were unsuccessful in drilling wartime massacres, deportations and famines into my head, those stories would sink in one way or the other through folk songs shared at Ukrainian summer camps, family gatherings and in various community halls during anniversaries of Ukrainian independence.
If you are a member of our large diaspora, chances are you eventually caught on that the themes of Ukrainian folk songs essentially fall into three categories: love, mama and war. Family dinner table talk, especially when relatives from Ukraine paid a visit, often drifted into dark memories of Russian attempts over the past quarter millennium to eradicate the Ukrainian language, culture and religion. As the offspring of a world-renowned specialist on the suppression of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Bohdan Bociurkiw, my siblings and I were at a very early age privately schooled by our father on the atrocities of Joseph Stalin and other Kremlin leaders to follow. There was no mincing of words in his recounting of history.
Read my full Globe and Mail OpEd here