Kyiv Must Create an International Day in Memory of Victims of Russian Aggression, Ukrainian Commentator Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 14 – The current conflict between Russia and the West provide an opportunity to create an International Day of Memory of the Victims of Russian Aggression in order to be “an eternal reminder to Russians both now and future generations that they must take responsibility before history for themselves and their leaders,” a Kyiv commentator says.

            The conflict between Russia, on the one hand, and Ukraine and the rest of the world, on the other, is not simply a military one but rather is about symbols.  Moscow has understood this with its “hybrid” war approach; it is time, the Ukrainian commentator writing under the name Setovoy Orakul turn the tables on it.

            “The establishment of [such a day],” he writes in today’s Delovaya Stolitsa, “would have enormous symbolic meaning both as a day for grieving and as opportunity to remind the world that Putin has not ended the war against our country” (dsnews.ua/politics/kleymo-na-russkih-kogda-ustanovyat-den-pamyati-zhertv-rossiyskoy-14042018100000).

            Ukraine should establish this day as a national one immediately, the commentator continues, and then work to secure its recognition at the international level much as it has done with the Holodomor. At present, “about 20 countries” recognize that this was an act of genocide “by the totalitarian Stalinist regime;” and more will in the future.