The National University “Lviv Polytechnic” recently presented a diploma of doctor honoris causa to the president of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) when he visited the school. The university’s senate unanimously voted to bestow that degree on Czolij a few months earlier at the initiative of the International Institute of Education, Culture and Relations with Diaspora (IECRD), its constituent college.
“I take this honor for a sign of appreciation for the UWC’s work on international coordination of Ukrainian communities abroad, the work which has seen us representing over 20 million-strong Ukrainian diaspora internationally, including at the UN, for almost 50 years already. The top priority for the Ukrainian diaspora was, is and always will be a sovereign and territorially intact Ukraine,” Czolij said while speaking to community leaders of Lviv. “Why was the meeting held here, in the Lviv Polytechnic? Because we have the unique experience of effective cooperation with the UWC. Because our university was the only school in Ukraine to keep cooperating with the UWC even when it was politically risky,” the IECRD’s director Iryna Kliuchkovska told us. At the meeting, Czolij discussed the UWC’s projects, its efforts to lobby interests of Ukraine in the world, the myth of Russia’s invincibility which has been dispelled by the Euromaidan, the Russian gas blackmail of Europe, and show trials of Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia...
“Today, when Ukraine is courageously confronting the Russian armed aggression, the global Ukrainian community focuses its work on supporting Ukraine and Ukrainian people. On behalf of the entire global diaspora, I want to assure you that your ongoing great pain is our pain as well... While visiting with the UWC delegation wounded Ukrainian soldiers who are being treated in the Main Military Clinical Hospital in Kyiv, I saw two young men in the corridor. They looked like twins, but there was something unusual about them. Looking closer, I realized that one young soldier had lost his right leg, while another – his left. I will never forget the tragic human stories I learned during my trips across Ukraine,” Czolij said.
The UWC currently defines its chief mission as convincing the international community that the events in the east of Ukraine are not only a Ukrainian crisis, but a global one, and it strives to do everything it can to help the world realize the global threat posed by the Russian aggression.
