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Classy politician o' the day - the Mayor of Kiev

Wednesday, September 23, 2009
From Ha'aretz:

"No monument stands over Babi Yar" - may once again be an accurate reflection of reality if Kiev's municipality carries out its plan to build a hotel on the memorial site of one of the most notorious massacres of Jews during the Holocaust. On September 29 and 30, 1941, German SS troops, supported by other German units and local collaborators, gathered 33,771 Jewish civilians at the ravine outside Kiev and murdered them with machine guns....Last week, however, the Kiev municipality approved a plan to build 28 hotels to accommodate the tens of thousands of visitors expected for soccer's 2012 European Championships. One of these hotels is planned to be set up on the Babi Yar site, now in a residential area of Kiev. Kiev Mayor Leonid Chernovetskyi has reportedly been interested in turning his city's remaining green space into real estate and is taking advantage of Euro 2012 to implement his plan, city sources said". 
Babi Yar is probably best known from its reference in D.M.Thomas's 'The White Hotel', a well-received novel from 1981, which - shall we say - was quite free in its use of material from Kuznetzov's memoir 'Babi Yar'. Both merit reading.

I would hope that people would not wish to work above an ossuary or to stay in a hotel built on a foundation of human bones.

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posted by Croydonian

NATO - "an aggressive imperialist bloc"?

Friday, January 25, 2008
That, apparently is what 51.9% of Ukrainians think. Not that they were asked a question pre-supposing the answer 'yes', I am sure.

I discovered this from a report at Novosti on a demo by all of 1,000 people in the streets of Kiev, opposing NATO membership. They chanted the snappy 'NATO is slavery for Slavs', inter alia.

The organisers look to be Communists and members of the imaginatively named 'Party of Regions'. The latter is more a party of region, singular, given that its support looks to be entirely in the eastern, Russified, part of Ukraine. Said party has a website available in Russian and English, if not in the nation's official language.

I am not entirely sure that the English language site has been written by folk with any great fluency in my language, but it does have a certain surreal poetry:

"We will not allow the thousand year common history with Russia was destroyed by some beekeeper. That’s why NATO membership consequences will be worsening the relations with Russia".

Perhaps one of those leading the demo will do a Solana, and end up leading it.

Meanwhile, some 731 miles from Kiev as the Mig-29 flies, the Macedonians seem oblivious to the prospect of helotry under NATO, as Nikola Gruevski, Macedonian PM (and a chap, by the way) is all for taking his country into the organisation, joining fellow Slavs both next door and those nestled in the Carpathians and further north.

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posted by Croydonian