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The recent tensions over Hungarys election interference in Ukraine, which have led Budapest to threaten to block Kyivs Euro-Atlantic integration efforts, should be resolved bilaterally, a Commissions spokesperson said on Tuesday (27 October).

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraineon Monday night that his country had banned entry of two high-ranking Hungarian officials, one of whom is the state secretary of the prime ministers office, for interfering with local elections and breaking Ukrainian law.

In response, his Hungarian counterpart Pter Szijjrt called the decision pathetic and nonsense, adding that it only sends the message that they have given up on Hungarys support for their European and Euro-Atlantic integration efforts.

Kuleba said his ministry had also started the procedure to ban more Hungarians for interference in Ukraines internal affairs during the campaigning period, adding that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission has already been informed of the decision and the Hungarian partners will be soon.

Tensions rose after Szijjrt campaigned on social media for the candidates of the Hungarian Cultural Federation in Transcarpathia (KMKSZ) during Sundays municipal elections.

This came on the heels of an earlier warning from Kyiv, when a local NGO alleged that the Hungarian state secretary for national policy, Jnos rpd Potpi, had campaigned for the same party during his October visit.

The Ukrainian MFA said the moves ran contrary to the Ukrainian law and constituted interference in internal affairs.

Szijjrt said that labellingcontact with the Hungarian minority as interfering in Ukraines internal affairs was nonsense,as all existing European and international regulation speaks of the fact that minority affairs and minority rights cannot be considered an internal affair in any way.

Though the final results of the Sunday elections are yet to be announced, the Hungarian party in question said it had performed well and the city of Beregovo (Beregszsz) would retain its ethnic Hungarian mayor.

Budapest and Kyiv have been locked in a row over minority rights since Ukraines parliament in 2017 adopted the law On Ensuring the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language, which Budapest says tramples on the right of the Transcarpathian ethnic minority to study in Hungarian.

In turn, Hungary continues toblock Ukraines cooperation with NATO and the holding of Ukraine-NATO Commission talks.

Hours before a Russian state visit to Budapest on Wednesday (30 October), Hungary vetoed a joint NATO statement about Ukraine because it did not mention the deprivation of rights of the Hungarian minority in the neighbouring countrys Transcarpathia region.

Before the latest diplomatic friction, thanks partially to the efforts of the new Ukrainian administration, relations between the two neighbours seemed to be improving over the past year.

Asked if the EU should play a mediating role in the spat, Commission spokesperson Peter Stano said these are issues of bilateral relations between the two countries and the only thing that you can do is to encourage everyone who is involved in bilateral issues to try to solve them based on EU values and principles, and based on the principles of good neighbourly relations.

The EU continues its very close cooperation with Ukraine based on a very clear set of criteria and expectations and agreements, and this is not changing at this moment, and I will not go into speculation whether it might be changed later on, Stano said.

The decisions by the EU are taken by unanimity when it comes to questions related to third countries and especially their ambitions to get as close to the EU as possible, but at this point what we have are decisions that have been taken, decisions that have been made, he added.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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EU Commission to stay out of Ukraine-Hungary row - EURACTIV

A 12-year-old boy from Ukraine lost his arm and an Egyptian tourist lost a leg in a rare shark attack while snorkeling in the Red Sea, Egypt's Environment Ministry said in a statement.

The boy had been snorkeling with his mother, their tour guide, and four others on Sunday in the Red Sea, off the coast of Ras Muhammad National Park near the resort town Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, when the shark attacked, officials said.

A social media video seen by the Environment Ministry showed a two-meter-long (six-foot-long) oceanic whitetip shark acting "hostile" toward humans near the area of the attack, and the officials said it was "likely" that the shark "was the fish that attacked the injured."

The ministry did not release any information on the status of anyone injured, but said an undisclosed number of people had been taken to the hospital.

Ukraine's State Agency for the Development of Tourism said on Monday that the 12-year-old boy had lost his arm in the attack, and is recovering in an intensive care unit.

A health official told the Associated Press that the tour guide lost a leg in the attack and the boy's mother experienced minor injuries.

The area of Ras Mohammed National Park where the shark attack happened was closed after the incident.

Shark attacks are rare in the Red Sea, but in 2010 a number of attacks believed to be carried out by a whitetip shark led to several injuries and the death of a tourist.

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12-year-old boy and his tour guide lost limbs in Red Sea shark attack - Insider - INSIDER

KYIV, Ukraine, Sept. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- At the beginning of the 20th century, one Jew out of four in the world was living on the territory of present-day Ukraine, which made it the largest Jewish country in the world. After a near total extermination, the Ukrainian Jewish community is now witnessing a true renaissance.

"The revival of the Ukrainian Jewry was made possible by the inner strength of our community, but also by the immense support we have received from our brothers and sisters from Israel, the United States and Europe; now it is time for us to give back to the world," declared Boris Lozhkin, President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine and Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress, at the opening of the Kyiv Jewish Forum.

This global online conference to debate the future of world Jewry was organized on September 8-9 by the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine in partnership with the Jerusalem Post. The event featured global leaders discussing ways to fight anti-Semitism, the memorialization of the Holocaust, the future of US-Israel relations, the Iran deal, the future of Judaism and many other topics.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Israel Reuven Rivlin, Alternate Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Gantz, President of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder, US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat anti-Semitism Elan Carr, US Congressman Ted Deutch, UK Lord Jonathan Mendelsohn and UK Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks were among the numerous leaders who participated in the Forum. They vowed to fight anti-Semitism and urged for unity between Israel, its diaspora and partners.

President Zelensky, declared that the Kyiv Jewish Forum illustrates the strategic importance of the relationship between Ukraine and Israel. "It is essential that we work together to prevent xenophobia, intolerance and anti-Semitism [and] work together to promote tolerance and respect for all ethnicities and religions," Zelensky stated.

President Rivlin sent a special address where he called for unity to counter rising anti-Semitism, hatred and discrimination. "We must be clear and united when we say zero tolerance for racism or xenophobia in any form and place," Rivlin stated. Alternate Prime Minister Gantz urged Jewish people within and outside of Israel to "listen closely to each other" and unite to remain strong through these uncertain times of the pandemic.

The conference can be watched online:

https://kyivjewishforum.com

JCU

[emailprotected]

SOURCE Kyiv Jewish Forum

https://kyivjewishforum.com

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Kyiv Jewish Forum: Ukraine, once the main centre of world Jewry, wants to contribute to the future of Judaism - PRNewswire

MOSCOW Maria Kolesnikova, a prominent opposition leader in Belarus who vanished on Monday in what her supporters said was a kidnapping by security agents, reappeared overnight at her countrys southern border with Ukraine.

But an elaborate operation aimed at forcing her to leave Belarus came unstuck, according to opposition activists who were at the border with Ms. Kolesnikova when she destroyed her passport to make it impossible for Ukraine to admit her.

At a news conference in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, on Tuesday evening, two Belarusian activists, Anton Rodnenkov and Ivan Kravtsov, told how they had been seized in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, on Monday and taken to the border with Ukraine, along with Ms. Kolesnikova, by masked security agents who warned that if they did not leave the country they would be jailed indefinitely.

After passing through a Belarusian border checkpoint, they said, Ms. Kolesnikova grabbed her passport and started shouting that she was not going anywhere. She tore the passport into small pieces and threw them out of the window.

Mr. Rodnenkov and Mr. Kravtsov continued onto Ukraine without her. She climbed out of the car and started walking back toward the Belarus border, Mr. Kravtsov said. She is very brave and dedicated to what she is doing.

Ukraines deputy minister for internal affairs, Anton Gerashchenko, confirmed that the authorities in Belarus had planned a forced expulsion of Ms. Kolesnikova, but said the plans were not completed because this brave woman took action to prevent her movement across the border. He added that she remained on the territory of the Republic of Belarus.

The whereabouts of Ms. Kolesnikova had been the focus of intense speculation since she disappeared from a street in Minsk early on Monday. A witness quoted by local media said Ms. Kolesnikova, a leading member of a coordinating council set up by opponents of Belarus embattled president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, had been grabbed by masked abductors and bundled into a van.

Her supporters denounced the apparent abduction as the work of Mr. Lukashenkos security forces and a sign that the authorities had shifted their strategy in response to nearly a month of protests over a disputed election on Aug 9.

Instead of attacking protesters with often savage violence, the security apparatus now seems to be trying to demobilize the opposition movement by picking off its leaders one by one and sending them out of the country.

Mr. Lukashenko, in an interview with Russian journalists, gave his own account of events at the border, claiming that Ms. Kolesnikova had tried to flee Belarus illegally in a car with two fellow activists, but had been thrown out of the vehicle on the way to Ukraine. He said that Belarusian border officers then arrested her.

Dressed in business attire and unarmed, unlike in a previous public appearance when he swaggered outside the presidential palace wearing a black track suit and waving an assault rifle, Mr. Lukashenko used the interview to try and project an image of calm confidence.

He conceded that, after 26 years in power, he had perhaps overstayed a bit, but made clear that he had no intention of stepping down, claiming that his supporters would be slaughtered if he quit. Im not going to simply throw it all away, he said.

He also repeated what has become his favorite pitch for Russian support, asserting that Belarus could not survive without him and that if Belarus collapses today, Russia will be next.

Belta, the official Belarus news agency, reported that a car carrying Ms. Kolesnikova and her two opposition colleagues had arrived near the border around 4 a.m. on Tuesday but that Ms. Kolesnikova had been pushed from the vehicle as it sped off toward the Ukrainian border post.

This bizarre version of events cast what seems to have been a forced departure gone awry as an unsuccessful escape attempt. Belta claimed that the car carrying Ms. Kolesnikova had posed a threat to the life of a border guard.

Ms. Kolesnikova had been the last member still active inside Belarus of a trio of female activists behind a groundswell of opposition to Mr. Lukashenko. The other two, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Mr. Lukashenkos main challenger in the disputed election, and Veronika Tsepkalo, the wife of a would-be candidate who fled before polling day, both left Belarus to avoid arrest soon after Mr. Lukashenko claimed re-election.

Since then, a number of other opposition activists have also left Belarus under duress, threatened with long jail terms and trouble for their families if they stayed.

This program of expulsions seems to have begun at the advice of security officials from Moscow, who have become more involved in advising Mr. Lukashenko in recent weeks and have urged him to stop inflaming the anger of protesters with beatings and mass arrests.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has never warmed to Mr. Lukashenko but still sees him as an important bulwark against the West, announced at the end of August that he had formed a reserve force of Russian security officers to assist Belarus if the situation gets out of control.

In another sign of close collaboration between the two countries, Belarus announced on Tuesday that it would hold military exercises later this week with troops from Russia and Serbia. The exercises, called Slavic Brotherhood 2020, underscore an important propaganda point for Mr. Lukashenko, suggesting that he is not alone in his struggle for political survival but a sentinel for broader Slavic interests against the West.

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv.

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Opposition Leader in Belarus Averts Expulsion by Tearing Up Passport - The New York Times

A woman in Minsk confronts a member of the Belarus security services with images of injuries inflicted during the country's crackdown on pro-democracy protests. Kremlin support for Belarus dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka has helped prop up his regime but is also fueling anti-Russian sentiment in the country. (Tut.By/Handout via REUTERS)

As the crisis in Belarus has unfolded over the past month, there has been a growing sense of deja vu about the Russian response. Officials and media in Moscow have attacked the Belarusian pro-democracy protests as the work of extremists and foreign agents, while at the same time warning of a nationalist threat and drawing emotionally explosive parallels to the WWII Soviet struggle against Nazism. These narratives are not new. They directly echo the Kremlin reaction to the 2004 and 2014 pro-democracy uprisings in neighboring Ukraine.

Moscows lack of originality should come as no surprise. This script sells itself in modern Russia, where attitudes towards the former captive nations of the Soviet and Tsarist eras remain strikingly imperialistic and few question the ethics of continued Russian domination. Such thinking makes it all too easy for the Kremlin to demonize non-Russian national awakenings in the post-Soviet world as little more than treacherous Russophobia. It also obscures the nation-building processes that began in 1991 and are still very much underway.

Similar claims of Russophobic nationalism have also been at least partially embraced by a significant number of academics and Putin sympathizers in the West, reflecting the continued dominance of russocentric thinking towards the former Soviet world. This needs to change if the international community wishes to fully grasp the implications of the geopolitical turbulence generated as nations in the post-Soviet region shake off generations of russification and embrace independent identities. An appreciation of this post-imperial process is key to understanding the crisis in todays Belarus and deciphering the dramatic shifts taking place within Ukrainian society. It also offers the best chance of predicting how the region will develop in the years ahead.

Far from representing anti-Russian extremism, the nation-building processes in countries like Belarus and Ukraine are a natural and necessary response to an epoch of Russian domination that stretches back hundreds of years. Across the former USSR, the non-Russian republics are now asserting national identities that inevitably diverge from the imposed visions of the imperial past. This is creating novel perspectives for international audiences previously accustomed to viewing the region exclusively through a Russian lens.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Ukraine. As the largest of the non-Russian Soviet republics in terms of population and the country with the longest experience of Russian imperial rule, post-Soviet Ukraines nation-building journey has been particularly challenging. Nevertheless, the scale of Ukraines progress since 1991 towards an independent national identity makes a mockery of Kremlin attempts to dismiss this historic development as the work of extremists and outsiders.

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Moscows ongoing information war against Ukrainian identity ignores the broad societal changes taking place in the country while exaggerating the influence of radical elements. This includes amplifying small-scale events and marginal figures in order to create the illusion of national significance. As part of this agenda, the Kremlin has frequently been accused of orchestrating far-right rallies and staging extremist incidents in Ukraine. Indeed, during a recent prisoner exchange between Kyiv and Moscow in early 2020, one particularly notorious Ukrainian neo-Nazi was even handed over to Russia at the Kremlins request. The case of Edward Kovalenko illustrates Russias long history of nurturing fake fascists for propaganda purposes and raises questions over the credibility of other fringe groups in Ukraine whose primary function seems to be serving as bogeymen for Kremlin TV and credulous international correspondents.

In reality, despite the polarizing influence of the ongoing war with Russia, far-right political parties have failed to make any electoral impact at the national level in Ukraine. During Ukraines wartime presidential and parliamentary elections of 2014 and 2019, support for nationalist parties remained firmly rooted in the low single digits. This is far lower than the backing received by similar parties during recent elections in numerous EU member states.

Meanwhile, the landslide victory of Russian-speaking Jewish candidate Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the April 2019 Ukrainian presidential election illustrated a side of Ukraines nation-building journey the Kremlin prefers not to acknowledge. Zelenskyys election was the most emphatic evidence to date of an emerging civic identity in independent Ukraine that moves beyond the traditionally narrow confines of language and ethnicity to reflect the realities of the modern Ukrainian nation.

This civic national identity has been evolving organically since the dawn of Ukrainian independence in 1991, but the process has accelerated dramatically following the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014. The Russian-Ukrainian War, which is how two-thirds to three-quarters of Ukrainians view the conflict in the Donbas, is being fought on the Ukrainian side predominantly by Russian-speaking Ukrainians. While Ukrainian is also widely spoken on the front lines, it is the Russian-speaking contingent that dominated many of the leading volunteer battalions in 2014, before being integrated into Ukraines military and security forces.

This linguistic pluralism is mirrored in the ethnic makeup of Ukraines defenders. Significant numbers of Georgians, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Belarusians, and Russians have fought for Ukraine since 2014, while the various branches of the Orthodox faith have been joined by other Christian denominations along with Jewish and Muslim contingents.

The conflict has exposed the shortcomings of traditional Russian efforts to divide Ukraine geographically into nationalist and pro-Kremlin camps. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which is firmly within the predominantly Russian-speaking heartlands of eastern Ukraine, has suffered the highest military casualties in all Ukraine. It treats large numbers of the Ukrainian militarys wounded and is home to the countrys first memorial museum documenting the conflict. Meanwhile, western Ukraine has the highest incidence of draft-dodging, despite being routinely depicted by the Kremlin as the source of all nationalistic sentiment in modern Ukraine.

The evolving nature of national identity in independent Ukraine can also be seen in changing attitudes towards language. While language issues are still often exploited in the Ukrainian political arena, opinion surveys indicate surprisingly high levels of consensus and a growing mood of tolerance across Ukraine on key aspects of the language debate.

A comprehensive nationwide survey conducted by the Razumkov Center and Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation in late 2019 found widespread acceptance of Russian-speaking Ukrainian patriotism. At the same time, there was broad agreement over the role of the Ukrainian language as an important marker of independence, with acceptance levels ranging from 95% in the west and 86% in the center of the country to between 64-71% in the east and south. Strong majorities of Ukrainians in all regions also agreed that at least half of national media should be in Ukrainian. In other words, a more nuanced picture is emerging where language no longer defines identity but is recognized as an important national symbol.

The growing number of Ukrainian citizens who self-identify as ethnic Ukrainians is a further indication of Ukraines strengthening post-imperial national identity. According to data from 1989, ethnic Russians made up 22% of the Ukrainian population. By the time of the 2001 Ukrainian census, this figure had dropped to 17%. More recent data from a 2017 poll conducted by the Gorshenin Institute and Germanys Friedrich Ebert Foundation indicated that the number of people in Ukraine who identified as ethnic Russian had fallen to below 6%. While this decline may be partially due to migration flows since the fall of the USSR and the temporary exclusion of ethnic Russian Ukrainians in occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine, it also suggests a growing readiness of Ukrainian citizens from different backgrounds to see themselves as Ukrainian.

Taken together, these developments indicate that Ukraine has achieved significant success in its civic nation-building efforts. The increasingly civic nature of modern Ukrainian identity is evident in the tendency of Ukrainians to direct any feelings of war-related animosity towards Russias political leaders rather than the Russian people. A Pew Research Center survey of Ukrainian public opinion conducted last year found that approval of Vladimir Putin had plummeted between 2007 and 2019 from 56% to just 11%. Meanwhile, February 2019 research by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 77% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude towards Russians in general. This diverges strongly from Kremlin propaganda narratives of Russophobic Ukraine and suggests that greater Russian respect for Ukrainian sovereignty could lead to rapid improvements in bilateral ties.

The biggest barrier to better relations between Russia and other former Soviet republics may well be Russias own reluctance to treat its former vassals as equals. The Kremlin demonizes nation-building elsewhere in the former Russian Empire, but the most toxic post-Soviet national identity is arguably that of Russia itself. During the two decades of Putins reign, revanchist sentiments and openly imperialistic rhetoric have become everyday features of the Russian national discourse. Nor are these merely words. The ongoing Russian occupation of whole regions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova reflects the Kremlins willingness to back up its revisionist world view with military might.

Recent experience strongly suggests that Russias uncompromising approach towards the countrys former imperial possessions is counter-productive. Moscows six-year war in Ukraine has had a catastrophic impact on Russian influence. The Kremlins increasingly open intervention in Belarus could soon have a similarly negative effect on Belarusian attitudes towards Russia. Putins bid to prop up the Lukashenka regime in Minsk may prove successful in the short term, but it is likely to profoundly damage Russias standing among a new generation of Belarusians who are experiencing a national awakening but who might otherwise have been ready to maintain friendly relations with Moscow.

Russias aggressive reaction to nation-building in Belarus and Ukraine reflects Moscows failure to come to terms with the loss of empire. Modern Russia still bristles at the new reality of former colonies asserting their statehood in ways that challenge long-established imperial dogmas. Until this changes, the post-Soviet region will remain a source of geopolitical instability. Meanwhile, Putins Russian World will continue to shrink as Moscows outdated imperialism alienates the countrys natural allies.

Taras Kuzio is a non-resident fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins-SAIS and a professor at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy. He is also author of Putins War Against Ukraine and co-author of The Sources of Russias Great Power Politics: Ukraine and the Challenge to the European Order.

Wed, Aug 26, 2020

With the emergence of an independent Belarusian national identity, we are entering a new stage in the Soviet collapse. Thirty years after the empire officially expired, the last outpost of Soviet authoritarianism in Central Europe is finally in eclipse.

UkraineAlertbyFranak Viaorka

Tue, Sep 1, 2020

Belarusian pro-democracy protests are now in their fourth week but Russian support for beleaguered dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka has revitalized his regime. How will the crisis evolve in the coming weeks?

UkraineAlertbyPeter Dickinson

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraines politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

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Will Belarus follow Ukraine out of the Russian orbit? - Atlantic Council