She even made this truth-against-mud commercial to capitalize on his absenteeism.
Once in the studio, Tymoshenko made the best of her one-upwomanship. Enjoy these three videos!
Video 1
Tymoshenko does not rule out the possibility of Yanukovych joining her and discusses the benefits of staring at a vacant spot.
It’s just important that the vacant spot would not then occupy the presidential post in this country. That would be very unfortunate and wrong.
Video 2
Tymoshenko talks about 2 Yanukovychs: the airbrushed Yanukovych in commercials, billboards, teleprompter speeches v. the real Yanukovych in terms of IQ, values and policies.
And believe me, all this huge false advertising, all these huge false billboards — it’s just falsehood, as is any advertising.
She also trashes the real Yanukovych for failing to disclose his detailed vision, his team and his PM of choice. She grills him for being a vacant spot, a coward.
Video 3
Tymoshenko draws the line between the honest hardworking ordinary people of Donetsk and their bloody thuggish mafia government, as she puts it.
To illustrate, she portrays the late Yevhen Kushnaryov as a maverick-martyr whose death while hunting three years ago must have been a murder. She doesn't mention Kushnaryov's Ukrainophobic and separatist credentials.
See the guy in the right corner 1:43-1:45? That's Oleksandr Feldman, one of Yanukovych's trusted allies in Kharkiv in the '04 election.
Since '06, he's been under Tymoshenko's wing. Speaking both in Ukraine and abroad, MP Oleksandr Feldman (BYuT) routinely equates the UPA with the Nazis and has sponsored related legislation.
As Jewish organizations denounce the UPA while praising their own freedom fighters, Feldman sides with them but strikes a middle ground on the Holodomor.
However, MP Feldman argues that it was a genocide of the Ukrainian people, not of ethnic Ukrainians per se. He also insists that the Bolsheviks behind the Holodomor and, by extension, behind the October Revolution and the Gulag “have no ethnicity.”
Back to Tymoshenko. When she said the word “explosions,” she probably wanted to cite another example, but got lost in her talking points.
The love-bombing air assault continues. They need every vote they can get.
Tymoshenko goes after Tihipko-Yatsenyuk-Yushchenko voters. Yanukovych stands little chance of winning over Yatsenyuk-Yushchenko voters, but he does have some chance with Tihipko voters.
Channel 1+1 follows both candidates on their campaign trails.
Same rallies, same concerts, same receptions, same promises, same interviews, same endorsements.
Yanukovych in Mykolayiv: I don't get much sleep at night, but I think everything will be alright.
Your powerful voice has been heard all over Ukraine.
Tymoshenko in Lviv: I want to ask you to help me not to lose this main, important battle of this particular presidential election.
More updates. In Kyiv, where people break bones on icier-than-ever sidewalks or burn themselves by falling into negligently open manholes, Yanukovych scored 16%. This prompted Deputy Mayor Irena Kilchytska to declare herself a Yanukovych supporter.
Speaking at a rally in Lviv, Tymoshenko also said this: “Had I lived in 1918-1919, I would have definitely been among the Sich Riflemen. Because it was a real struggle for the freedom and glory of Ukraine.”
In this Channel 1+1 report, Volodymyr Chermoshentsev, an ethnic Russian, recalls his past: He fought in the UPA.
After the Bolsheviks killed his father, amid the man-made famine in his native Povolzhye village in 1933, he and his mother and aunt found the situation even worse in Ukraine, settling in Crimea.
Captured by the Germans in 1942, he escaped captivity only to be captured again and then freed by the UPA, which he joined.
Because, naturally, he spoke Russian, the UPA initially treated him with suspicion but finally appointed him an aide to a UPA commanding officer.
The UPA mainly fought the NKVD, not the Red Army, Chermoshentsev says. Captured and tortured by the NKVD, he managed to escape to the Crimea, to his mother, and later got 10 years for stealing grapes and dodging the draft. Had the Soviet authorities learned about his UPA involvement, they would have probably executed him.
After Ukraine became independent, Chermoshentsev’s story became the plot of a UPA book of memoirs.
Volodymyr Chermoshentsev: I took an oath to love Ukraine, the Ukrainian people. I’m even proud of being called a Banderite — yes I am — a Banderite, not a nobody, not a somebody-for-somebody, but for Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) that fought both Hitler and Stalin during WW II turned 67 yesterday.
As always, the UPA vets who gathered in downtown Kyiv drew catcalls from the Communists protesting nearby.
In this Channel 1+1 footage, the first UPA vet decries being a “second-class citizen,” under-recognized and under-compensated by the state of Ukraine, for which he fought. The second one, a bit more cheerful, touts a German-made MP-40 submachine gun, also widely used by Soviet partisans.
On the other side of the barricade, the first Communist lady refuses to calls them humans and the second one calls them “up to elbows in blood.” A Red Army vet emphasizes that it was he, not the UPA, who defended and liberated Ukraine. Toward the end of the first footage, a Ukrainian Navy officer calls for reconciliation between Red Army vets and UPA vets, citing civil war-ravaged Spain as an example: “They fought for Ukraine, and it’s important.”
The footage ends with the rallying call of Ukrainian nationalists: “Glory to the nation! Death to the enemies!”
Turbulent, violent and divisive, history doesn’t heal easily. Elderly people cannot be reconciled against their will. But they certainly do deserve recognition and respect from current and future generations.
The thousands of UPA Ukrainians who fought for their native land deserve it no less than the millions of Red Army Ukrainians who fought for theirs.
Today, the UPA — the Ukrainian Insurgent Army that fought both Hitler and Stalin — marks its 66th anniversary.
Last year, I went to a UPA rally. This year, I went to a commie counter-rally. My improved memory capacity allowed me to capture some of the high moments of that event.
As expected, I found myself in the Jurassic Park of communism, progressive socialism, pan-Slavism, Russian monarchism, imperialism, Eurasianism and whatnot.
The event gathered a few hundred people. Aside from attempts to break the police cordon and "reach across the the aisle," the event went without much incident.
"The bandits of the OUN-UPA are Nazi scum." Oops, looks like somebody forgot to put a T in there! The correct Russian word is нацистская, not нациская, as written on the above sign.
"OUN + UPA = 卐. Get out of Ukraine!"
Debates: anti-UPA vs. pro-UPA
"No to the descendants of collaborators and Banderites!Heil NATO!"
Ukraine’s Underrecognized Insurgent Army Marks 65th Anniversary Last year, Ukraine’s parliament finally recognized the Holodomor as genocide. For the few thousand octogenarian UPA veterans, some of whom gathered at Kyiv’s Sofiyivska Ploshcha (Square) on Sunday, October 14, the struggle for recognition continues.
Joining them in the chilly and humid weather were a few thousand young activists, many of them members of Oleh Tiahnybok’s Svoboda (Ukr. freedom), a nationalist party that has failed to gain seats in parliament. (I do not support Svoboda due to its right-wing slant. However, I do support the idea of recognizing the UPA as an army that fought for Ukraine’s independence.)
Having held a warmup rally at the Shevchenko Monument, they marched in column for a mile through downtown Kyiv to the beat of drums. At some point, an adventurous faction split from the column to “say hello” to Symonenko’s Communists and Vitrenko's Progressive Socialists just a few blocks away, down at Bessarabska Square. These pro-Kremlin folks camped around the Lenin Monument, where they celebrated “Ukraine’s liberation from fascism.” (By fascism, they obviously referred to the UPA.)
Provoked by this false-flag profiling, some Svoboda dumbasses engaged in self-sabotage, trying to break through the police cordon separating them from the Red crowd. Police intervened, busted a few guys, and quickly ended the brawl, with no significant bodily harm reported.
Little did these young men seem to realize that their uncivil behavior played into the hands of those whom they tried to disprove. Meanwhile, the rest of the column proceeded peacefully to Sofiyivska Ploshcha.
This year, at President Yushchenko’s behest, the event has gained an official status of sorts. For the first time in the history of independent Ukraine, the military dispatched a parade orchestra to the UPA remembrance ceremony.
History Recap The UPA remains a divisive issue in Ukrainian society, and reflects its post-Soviet identity crisis, one amplified by poverty in terms of income and information. Ukrainians’ grasp of history varies with geography and across generations. Understanding the UPA requires a set of contextual tools with which to disentangle it from the clutter of Soviet mythology.
Under the Soviet rule, the Red Army and Soviet partisans held a historiographic monopoly on every act of freedom fighting by Ukrainians in WW II. The only role reserved for non-Red Ukrainian combatants was that of cutthroat “bourgeois nationalists” who collaborated with the Nazis and committed atrocities. (Certainly, no credit was given to the thousands of Ukrainian Americans and Ukrainian Canadians who fought for the Allies across the globe.)
In the 20th century, much of the human tragedy took place in Ukraine, a jigsaw puzzle of a country governed by Austria-Hungary, tsarist Russia, Poland, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. A cesspool of civil war in the aftermath of WW I and a genocide lab in the 1930s, Ukraine became one of the bloodiest WW II battlegrounds — a graveyard for up to ten million people who perished in the clash of evil empires and embittered ethnic groups.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — an inconvenient truth for Soviet sympathizers — paved the way for the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine in 1939. Stalin’s reign of terror thrived on mass deportations and executions of Ukrainians and Poles, nations with each other’s blood on their hands. (The war path of Polish-Ukrainian relations, evident since the 17th century, culminated in the Volyn massacre and Operation Wisla.)
More perspectives on the anatomy of the Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian conflict:
No wonder, in 1941 the local population often greeted the Germans with open arms, viewing them as liberators. Pogroms erupted. Many blamed the mass executions of the Ukrainian intelligentsia on a “Jewish conspiracy” perpetrated by the retreating NKVD troops. (One could find persons of Jewish origin among NKVD top brass.)
On the eve of the German invasion, Stalin may very well have toyed with illusions of his own. Russian historian and former GRU officer Viktor Suvorov believes that Stalin relied on Hitler as “the Icebreaker” of the Communist Revolution in Europe. Stalin’s strategy according to Suvorov: The war in Europe would weaken Nazi Germany and European democracies, at which point the Soviet Union, in a surprise strike, would overtake both, thus exporting Communism to Europe. To this end, Stalin had deployed the Red Army on standby alongside the border, in a clear-cut strike position that proved disastrous once the strike came from the other side.
Suvorov’s theory offers a no-nonsense explanation of the close ties between the Third Reich and the Kremlin. How close were those ties? Closer than they taught in Soviet schools.
Many Red Army vets would be loathe to learn that Heinz Guderian had honed his blitzkrieg genius at Panzerschule Kama, a training facility near the Russian town of Kazan.Nor would they be delighted to discover that, upon partitioning Poland in 1939, the Red Army and the Wehrmacht held a joint parade in Brest-Litvosk, as shown in the above video fragment, featuring Krivoshein and Guderian. Accounts of Lenin’s liaison with German intelligence via Parvus fall in the same category.
Hitler proved the OUN and Stalin wrong. He had no plans for Ukraine’s independence, and it was Stalin who ended up dealing with a surprise strike. The short-lived collaboration between the OUN and the Wehrmacht supplied the Soviet propaganda machine with the ammunition that nailed Bandera and Shukhevych, leaders of the Ukrainian resistance movement, as Hitler’s stooges. Soviet history textbooks wax eloquent on the collaboration issue, yet keep mum on the protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
In narrating the tragedy at Babyn Yar, where the Nazis machine-gunned more than 100,000 people — most of them Jews — nowhere do Soviet history textbooks mention the fate of some 621 OUN members killed there, including Ukrainian poet and activist Olena Teliha.
Ukraine has a hell of a history, complete with genocides and wars of all kinds. What’s missing in most of Ukraine’s history is independence.
Ironically, people who have lived through 16 years of Ukraine’s independence still find themselves on the wrong side of history. They who fought for Ukraine’s independence are now fighting for recognition, a mission next to impossible for people in their eighties and nineties.
UPA vets are the same age as their Red Army counterparts. Their beliefs put them worlds apart, but the blood they shed for their loved ones leads them back to this land. As Sting put in one of his songs, “We share the same biology regardless of ideology.”
Nationwide, UPA memorial ceremonies were held in Kharkiv and in Simferopol, where UPA vets were harassed and assaulted by pro-Kremlin activists, who waved Soviet flags and Russian tricolors.
What best practices are there in post-Soviet countries that had non-Red resistance movements? In full respect of the Nuremberg Trials, Latvia does not recognize members of the Latvian Legion. However, Latvia does recognize theForest Brothers.
If Ukraine aims to be a part of Europe, the Verkhovna Rada should recognize UPA members as WW II combatants, and should put them on the same legal footing as Red Army vets.
Attempts at re-educating and reconciling elderly people contrary to their beliefs should be abandoned. But revisiting Ukrainian history and recognizing, for future generations, the people and events misrepresented in Soviet textbooks makes perfect sense.
