Oleksandr Palii

The leadership has at last ventured to pardon Yurii Lutsenko. The Lutsenko case was ample proof of selective justice in Ukraine. For if the measures applied to Lutsenko were applied to the current government, none of the officials would be likely to remain at large.Yet if the government had not...

What is Taras Shevchenko for the present-day government? He is probably the only figure in Ukrainian culture whose existence it had to know about before becoming government. This only figure, by the way, appealed to rise against the tsar and called Russians “Muscovites.”With such set of...

February 14 marks the 24th anniversary of the end of the almost 10-year-long Soviet military presence in Afghanistan (1979-89).The war claimed the lives of about 1.5 million Afghans (almost a tenth of the country’s population at the time) and, according to official Soviet sources, 15,000...

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s opera Jesus Christ Superstar was banned in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. The Day wrote about it (No. 58, October 4, “Russia’s Eastern Orthodox zealots vs. North American rock opera”). This happened because a group of religious activists appealed to the...

Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged his Ukrainian counterpart Mykola Azarov to include Russia’s ruble in the first group of currencies (according to the Ukrainian National Bank’s classification). As a reminder: according to the ruling of the National Bank of Ukraine, the first group...

Recently the young Russian writer Zakhar Prilepin wrote Letter to Comrade Stalin, which was supposedly composed by the liberal community, and contains satire on this community. The letter received a colossal amount of comments and reviews in Russian information space.In this letter Prilepin draws a...

Ukraine’s strongest Opposition forces, Yatseniuk’s Front zmin (Front for Change) and Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), have made an alliance, as evidenced by their leaders’ statements, considering that any other option at this stage would spell political death for both.The Opposition’s...

The refusal of the Crimean Tatar People’s Mejlis to participate in a meeting with President Viktor Yanukovych has upset not only the head of the Presidential Administration (PA) but also the president himself. And things were just looking so splendid for the Ukrainian “elite”: the majority bowed...