August 1991: the short chronicle of events

Ukraine World met some veterans of the war in Donbas and talked about their memories. Their stories are a mosaic of danger, difficulties, heroism, friendship, and work. Here are some.

The U.S. capital’s city council plans to rename the street in front of the Russian Embassy after slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, a move that Moscow has complained about.

The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission observer was killed after the car he was traveling in hit a mine near the village of Pryshyb in the Luhansk region

Twelve-year-old Roma Saveliyev is one of the most captivating interviewees in Evgeny Afineevsky’s documentary Winter On Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, which has just been nominated for an Oscar.

The Ukrainian-language TSN new channel, a partner of Ukraine Today, on October 27 aired video footageof a man identified as Maksim Udovichenko revealing his past as a Russian military officer and giving locals his opinion on the situation in Ukraine.

In its just published annual report, Freedom House cites Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the outright seizure and formal annexation of Crimea, as a prime example of “the open disdain for democratic standards that coloured the words and actions of autocratic governments during the year.”

The ruling comes15 months after a memorial plaque to renowned and falsely maligned Slavist Yury Shevelyov was senselessly destroyed by ‘unidentified individuals’ half an hour after Kharkiv’s Mayor Gennady Kernes had ordered its removal, with the police seeing nothing

The number of people wanting union of the two countries has fallen in both Ukraine and Russia, and was not high to begin with. In Ukraine it fell from 8% in May to 5% in September; in Russia from 12% to 7%

The percentage of Ukrainians supporting independence has risen from 83% to a record 90%.

We join the International Committee for Crimea in extending very best wishes to Mustafa Dzhemilev , the renowned Crimean Tatar leader and former Soviet dissident.

The Vinnytsa Regional Police believe they have identified three young people - two 14-year olds and one 18-year-old - responsible for smashing 66 graves in the old Jewish cemetery

Freedom House’s 2013 Freedom in the World Report speaks of “noteworthy declines” in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. Some of Ukraine’s other post-Soviet neighbours presumably didn’t have far to fall.

One of the two young heroes of the harrowing film about illegal mines or “kopanki” in the Donbas region, “Pit No. 8, Yura Sykanov” is in urgent need of an operation

Many Happy Returns to Yevhen Zakharov who turned 60 on Monday and to the Kharkiv Human Rights Group which he co-founded 20 years ago.

During the night from 15 to 16 September, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust was desecrated. Those responsible daubed foul anti-Semitic words on the memorial stone.

In Dnipropetrovsk almost 2 million UAH of city funding has been spent on an artistic composition including bronze sculptures of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and former Ukrainain President Leonid Kuchma.

In the early hours of 1 July the Monument outside the town of Novomoskovsk 40 kilometres from Dnipropetrovsk was daubed with various symbols including a swastika

Sosonki Clearing near Rivne which holds the mass grave of seventeen and a half thousand Jews murdered by the Nazis has been vandalized

Maxim Shcherbatyuk, UHHRU lawyer, relates his travel (or otherwise) experiences following the statements Ukrzaliznytsya [Ukrainian Railways] made throughout the country on 10 February asserting unheard of progress in electronic ticket sales