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She became the mother of a healthy baby boy in January at a private clinic in Kiev using a process called pronuclear transfer that inserts the couple's genes into a donor's egg.

The procedure had been previously used to treat serious genetic diseases.

But doctor Valeriy Zukin become the first to use it to help two separate infertile couples have children in this way.

"There are patients whom we cannot help to have their own genetically-related baby unless we use this method," the 60-year-old told AFP at his Nadiya clinic.

Some two million women across the globe use in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to get pregnant every year.

But Zukin's treatment targets a tiny percentage of women whose embryos suffer from a disorder called embryo arrest that can either stunt development or kill them.

The difference in the method Zukin uses is that a woman's egg is first fertilised with her partner's sperm.

Then its nucleus is transferred to a donor's egg that has been stripped of its own nucleus.

The egg is thus almost entirely made up of genetic material from the couple -- plus a tiny amount (about 0.15 percent) from the female donor's DNA.

Need for caution

Not everyone however shares Zukin's enthusiasm.

Ukraine's conservative clerics argue that the technique breaches ethical norms.

"A child can only have two parents and the presence of a third person -- and especially the DNA of a third person -- is morally unacceptable," Father Feodosiy of the dominant Ukrainian Orthodox Church told AFP.

"It violates the sanctity of the marriage between woman and man."

Other religions have also weighed in on the issue with the Roman Catholic Church opposing the move because it would involve the destruction of human embryos as part of the process. The Church of England has said ethical concerns have not been sufficiently addressed.

Even some scientists have reservations.

They warn against jumping to early conclusions about how successful the method would be if it were to be applied to the general population.

"We cannot talk about its wide use yet," Larysa Tumanova, a professor at Kiev's Institute of Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, told AFP.

"First, we have to monitor the newborns' health until they turn at least three," she said.

Other experts point out that the "three-parent" technique -- a different form of which has also produced a baby in Mexico -- was initially being developed for those at very high risk of passing on serious genetic diseases.

Line of hopeful mums

Zukin strongly defends the work at his clinic.

"We explain the essence of the method to each patient," he says. "We report possible risks."

And there is currently a line of hopeful mothers ready to pay the 12,000 euros ($13,100) it takes to undergo the pronuclear transfer procedure.

"We have patients from Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Israel, Portugal and Brazil," he says.

Zukin thinks between 10,000 and 20,000 women a year could potentially be candidates for using the method to conceive -- a figure large enough to seek out a foreign partnership that could study how best to use this technique.

His health centre is now working with China's Shanghai University to determine the genetic causes of abnormalities in embryo development at an early stage.

"I hope that through joint efforts, we will be able to find in a more targeted way those whom this method will help," Zukin says.

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Ukraine doctor pioneering 'three-parent' babies | CTV News - CTV News

How does it happen that a child growing up in eastern Galicia among Ukrainians, Poles, Moldovans, Germans, Austrians, Jews, Roma, and Armenians dodges Nazi death squads and the Red Army, learns first-hand what it means to be a displaced person in occupied Austria, emigrates to the United States, completes university and seminary studies before being ordained a priest, writes a pioneering doctoral dissertation on ecumenism, joins a monastic order, is clandestinely ordained a bishop, has his episcopal ordination recognized by St. John Paul II, is created a cardinal by the same pope and at an age when many men begin to contemplate retirement, returns to his newly self-liberated homeland for the first time in a half-century and over the next two decades becomes the most widely respected and deeply beloved figure in the country?

To comprehend the extraordinary life of Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, who died on May 31 at age 84, is to trace the arc of the slow-motion martyrdom of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the mid 20th century and its resurrection in the 21st.

As the Catholic Church in Poland was the safe deposit box of national memory and identity during the 123 years when Poland disappeared from the map of Europe (having been vivisected by Russia, Austria, and Prussia in the Third Polish Partition of 1795), so the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) was one of the principal repositories of Ukrainian national identity and aspiration in the hard decades when Stalin first tried to starve Ukraine into submission and later used every tool at the disposal of a totalitarian state to destroy Ukraines language, culture, and self-awareness a project continued for more than four decades by Stalins successors. But an argument can be made that the achievement of the UGCC in Ukraine was even more remarkable than that of the Latin-rite Catholic Church in Poland.

For Polish Catholicism was very much a visible presence in Polands national life, both during the partitions that eradicated the country and, later, under both Nazi and Communist tyranny. The UGCC, however, did its most impressive work of preserving and developing national identity, culture, and morale during the four and a half decades when it was the worlds largest underground religious body a Church with no public presence whatsoever, thanks to a canonically illegal and coerced reunion with Russian Orthodoxy engineered in 1946 by the Soviet secret police and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. And while the UGCC hung on by its collective fingernails between 1946 and 1991, conducting clandestine worship and education in the Ukrainian forests, Ukrainian Greek Catholic leaders like Lubomyr Husar, living in the West in Husars case, in New York, Washington, and other American locales, before redeploying to Rome laid the foundations for a revival of Greek Catholic life at a time that, for most of Husars adult life, seemed unimaginable: the time of a free Ukraine unshackled from the Soviet Union and freed to create its own destiny.

That hoped-for miracle of liberation took place in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, and since then, Greek Catholic life in Ukraine has flourished. Lubomyr Husar, a man of deep faith, would be the first to insist that that miraculous resurrection was a work of divine providence and grace. But as Cardinal Husar is laid to rest today in St. Georges Cathedral in Lviv, hundreds of thousands of his countrymen having paid him their last respects in the days since his death, credit should be given to this visionary man of wisdom who bridged numerous worlds Byzantine and Latin, Catholic and Orthodox, religious and secular, pre-modern and post-modern in a unique way.

It was Husar who staunchly supported the development of the Ukrainian Catholic University, the only Catholic institution of higher learning in the former Soviet space, which has become one of the premier universities in Ukraine in a mere two decades and a model for higher education unburdened by the intellectual corruptions of Homo Sovieticus. It was Husar who oversaw, as major-archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head of the UGCC, an extraordinary expansion of the Greek Catholic priesthood, and saw to the reform of seminaries so that the clergy of an independent Ukraine would be better equipped to minister in a post-underground religious environment. It was Husar who welcomed John Paul II to Ukraine in 2001 in what was the first papal visit to a former Soviet republic a week-long pilgrimage that, against all odds and expectations, became a moment of ecumenical encounter between Greek Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox.

And it was Husar who, in retirement, became a moral reference point for a society still deeply wounded by its Soviet past. In a country struggling to shed the bad habits of duplicity engrained during its Communist period, and in a political community whose debates are often more characterized by heat than by light, Lubomyr Husar became a kind of national patriarch: the voice of reason, moderation, and wise counsel amidst the cacophony of post-Communist politics. And during the Maidan revolution of dignity in 201314, a now-blind Cardinal Husar could be found on Kyivs Independence Square, in solidarity with his peoples hopes for a future beyond corruption, a future in which Ukraine would take its rightful place as an integral part of the West, bringing with it the riches of Byzantine spirituality and culture.

The UGCC is now led by Husars dynamic young successor, Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk which is another testimony to Husars leadership, for he raised up a generation of polyglot, intellectually well-prepared, and politically shrewd leaders such as Shevchuk and the president of the Ukrainian Catholic University, Bishop Borys Gudziak. Like Cardinal Husar, whom they revered, Shevchuk and Gudziak are men of God who are also playing an indispensable public role, now in a 21st-century Ukraine struggling to realize the bright promise of the Maidan Revolution while suffering under a Russian invasion that has cost over 10,000 lives and created more than a million and a half internally displaced persons. It was likely a sadness to Husar that the Vatican has never brought itself to use the words invasion and illegal annexation to describe the Russian occupation of Crimea, or the word war to describe what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine. And it remains incomprehensible to many why Major-Archbishop Shevchuk, the leader of the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, has not received the cardinals red hat to which Lumomyr Husar brought such distinction.

Perhaps the great cardinals death will cause some rethinking in Rome of its latest Ostpolitik; that would be a fitting tribute to Cardinal Husar. But whatever happens along the Tiber, the remarkable life of Lubomyr Husar helped make it possible for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to thrive in an independent Ukraine. Freedom, Husar insisted, is the opportunity to do good. That, he did. May his memory be eternal.

READ MORE: A Ukrainian Christmas Bitter Harvest the Bitter Present in Ukraine Ukraine, 25 Years from Now

George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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The Remarkable Life of Lubomyr Husar . . . - National Review

ORONOGO, Mo. When Sofiya Bezpala beat out thousands of other Ukrainian students to spend a school year in the United States, she faced not one but two culture shocks.

The first, of course, was leaving behind her eastern European roots to live as a stranger in a strange land.

The second was moving from a city of nearly 2 million people to a town with fewer than 2,500.

Sixteen-year-old Bezpala hails from Kharkiv. Her city, established more than 100 years before the United States was born, is home to 80 libraries, seven theaters and a half-dozen museums. Not to mention skyscrapers.

So when she came to spend nine months with her new host family Amy and Kurt Krtek and their children Eva and Adrian and they were driving home from the Joplin Regional Airport, they motored past a field of grazing cattle. Surprisingly, Bezpala wasnt shocked by their appearance.

Though Kharkiv is (a) big city, I live on the very edge, in the country, so Im used to seeing cows and farms, she said.

She was also a bit surprised and relieved to discover that Oronogo wasnt an isolated community.

The Joplin metro area, she realized, was one gigantic city with a daily population of nearly 210,000 people.

It felt more like home, Bezpala said.

Coming to America

Amy Krtek had always been interested in opening her home to a foreign exchange student. One of her good friends, Jill Hartgrave, had hosted students for the past four years.

When Krtek mentioned in passing how neat it would be to do something like that, Hartgrave turned to her and said, Well, how about now?

It was through this simple exchange of words that Bezpala and Krteks paths separated by 5,700 miles would eventually intertwine.

There are two types of foreign exchange students. A majority of them are traditional students their parents pay for them to travel to the U.S. But there are also scholarship students. A U.S.-funded program Future Leaders Exchange pays for these elite foreign students to spend an academic year inside a U.S. high school.

Half the world away, Bezpala was hoping to become a scholarship student. But competition for these spots can be mind-numbingly intense. Only one of 50 vying students are selected, graded in part by their knowledge of spoken and written English. They must also be paired with a host family in America. Without a willing host family, scholarship students stay put.

When Krtek found out through Hartgrave that 30 scholarship students had yet to find host families, she and her family decided to make the leap.

This just spoke to my heart, Krtek said. I saw Sofiyas name and felt she would fit perfectly with our family. (And) if it hadnt been for (Jill Hartgrave) telling me about this, we wouldnt have gotten Sofiya.

Inside the classroom of her small school in Kharkiv, Bezpala couldnt sit still, fidgeting with nervousness. Calls from Flex program officials to winning scholarship students in her hometown had begun the day before, on April 28. It was now the morning of April 29, 2016, and her phone remained silent.

I was shaking, she said, lifting her arms and rattling them around.

When her phone finally buzzed, and she saw the Flex number on the screen, she nearly swooned. I was like, Holy moly!

After the phone conversation, she burst into tears. Her classmates surrounded her, congratulating her.

I still have on my jeans a red dot where the (classroom) floor was just painted, Bezpala said. It was kind of awesome.

When she got home and told her parents the news, her mom also began crying, giving her hugs.

My dad didnt cry, but he was really happy, she said.

By mid-August, Bezpala had learned where she would be spending her year in America Southwest Missouri. She jumped online and absorbed everything she could about the area and her new school, Webb City High School. She looked up her host familys house via Google Maps, read up about her schools rich tradition in football, studied the mining history of Joplin, watched YouTube videos of the Joplin tornados destructive aftermath. She became a Jasper County expert overnight.

The night she found out who her host family would be, she waited anxiously for them to contact her.

I waited; waited for them for hours. I emailed them. I was so nervous. I was thinking, Why are they not responding to me? You have a new host daughter and youre not responding?

Mother Nature was to blame. While Bezpala worried inside her bedroom, the Krteks were sound asleep thousands of miles away. Bezpala had forgotten about the eight-hour time difference between the two countries.

We talked the very first time at 5:30 (that) morning, Krtek said with a laugh. It was very heartwarming. I could hear the excitement in her voice. She thanked me 1,000 times for opening our home to her.

One happy family

Sept. 8, 2016, was the day Bezpala arrived in Joplin following a 16-hour flight from Kiev.

That was the day, Krtek said, that our lives forever changed for the better.

There was no fear on Bezpalas part about her journey to Joplin.

I an 16 years old, she said. What would I be afraid of?

It didnt take long for Bezpala to adjust to life in Americas heartland, though some of the sights here took her by surprise. Her jaw dropped open the first time she stepped inside Joplins Target store. She discovered that the U.S. has a dizzying amount of great-tasting candy, almost too much to fully comprehend. She wanted pictures taken of her inside Mercy Hospital Joplin because nothing quite like it exists back home. She melted when she dined inside Joplins Del Rio Bordertown Cafe, falling in love with the cheesy spinach enchilada; Ukrainian food, she said, can be a bit bland by comparison. She also learned to love cold drinks; America loves iced teas and cola and coffees, something thats not common in Eurasian countries.

She immediately took to her new school in Webb City, she said.

Oh my gosh, I read all about it (before coming here) 12 championships, the Cardinals. Webb City is the best. I do love football. I still dont understand it I just know to cheer when I hear the word touchdown.

Her school back home is small, roughly 400 students, and it houses students kindergarten through 11th grade (there is no 12th grade in Ukraine). At WCHS, she was thrilled to find herself surrounded by students all her age.

There are no little kids walking around, she said.

During her first day of school, she was a bit worried about how she would be accepted. After all, shed seen the American movie Mean Girls. But none of the Webb City girls were mean to her. By her second day, she was surrounded by nearly a dozen girls at the lunch table. Friends for life is how she described them.

Bezpala finished her American school year with a 3.8 grade-point average; she had also volunteered 100 hours of service to her adopted community, including helping out the survivors of the Goodman tornado in McDonald County. She also gave eight presentations about her native land throughout the school year, including a demonstration on how to prepare her countrys native dish: borscht.

She was surprised by the lack of public transportation (Here in America, everybody has a car), and the only thing she truly feared during her time here was the weather tornados.

Everybody here says they are used to tornadoes. How can you be used to tornadoes? Im not really worried about thunderstorms, the thunder and lightning, but on TV, when the (tornado) warning, the sounds, the sirens ... Bezpala stopped and shivered.

Unlike most students, Bezpala does not intend to move and live in the States. She loves her land, and she wants to stay close to her parents she is an only child. She will likely go to college in neighboring Poland and wants to become a journalist. But she plans to visit America every chance she gets. Shes visited 11 states during her nine months (I still have 39 more to go!). She has already promised to attend the graduations of her new brother and sister, the siblings shes never had before Eva and Adrian.

Heading Home

Bezpala is headed back to her parents home in Kharkiv on Thursday.

She will never forget the opportunity given to her by the United States, she said:Your country gives money so we can come here, with (Americans) opening up their houses to us. What other country in the world does this but (the U.S.)? I really appreciate everything here. People are nice here. We are welcomed here.

A going-away celebration was held on May 28 by members of Krteks church, The Sanctuary of Joplin. There was a map of the world, and linking the USA to Ukraine was a chain of red hearts and the message: Together forever. Never apart. Maybe in distance but never at heart.

Since weve become connected, she definitely has become a part of our family, Krtek said. In fact, on her Facebook page, the dominant photo is a family picture that includes a smiling Bezpala. I think she hasnt just impacted us as a family, shes impacted all of our church members. Even though she is going home, there will always be a connection between us.

When asked by her Ukrainian friends if the experience was worth it, she throws up her hands.

Are you even asking me this? I got to spend an entire year in the U.S., and youre asking me if it was worth it? Bezpala said. Weird question. If you ask any person in the Ukraine, they would say yes!

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From Ukraine, with love: Eurasian teen spends a year studying at Webb City High School - Joplin Globe

Quartz

A Simpson's-themed Twitter feud is Russia's latest attempt to steamroll the Ukraine Quartz While the back-and-forth amused internet-goers and even sparked mainstream news coverage, it is important to understand how a fight over the nationality of a historical figure signifies a greater battle over Ukraine's national character and sovereignty. Russia's Yandex: Stock Underperforms After Ukraine Cyber CrackdownBarron's The G-7, Russia and UkraineThe Ukrainian Weekly (press release) (subscription) Russia's Yandex to close offices in Ukraine's Odessa and KievThe Star Online UPI.com -Ukrinform. Ukraine and world news all 8 news articles »

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A Simpson's-themed Twitter feud is Russia's latest attempt to steamroll the Ukraine - Quartz

Sometimes the importance, import and context of a story is only revealed by subsequent events. The Michael Cohen peace plan story from early February is one of those cases. As Allegra Kirkland explains here, back in early February, Cohen and mafia-linked Trump Organization associate Felix Sater met at the Loews Regency hotel in Manhattan with Andrii Artemenko, a Trumpish, pro-Russian Ukrainian parliamentarian to discuss a peace plan for Ukraine. Thestory emerged in mid Februaryand received a decent amount of attention. But key facts look quite different after what we learned during the consequential month of May.

Artemenko allegedly gave Cohen a package of paper documents to hand deliver to Michael Flynn. Cohen said he did so, though he later denied doing so and ran through several contradictory storiesabout what he did with the dossier before refusing to discuss it anymore. Almost certainly he hand delivered it just as Artemenko asked and as he said he did in the initial interviews.

The headlines referred to these documents as a peace plan for Ukraine. But getting a bit less attention in the original reporting was the fact that the dossier also purportedly included damaging information about the leaders of the government of Ukraine. All the cloak and dagger activity over the peace plan never made a great deal of sense since the plan was essentially this: Russia gets out of eastern Ukraine and the US lifts all sanctions, a message simple enough to be delivered ina Fortune Cookie, and about as obvious. Itsbeen the obvious plan for pro-Russian advocates since 2014. It doesnt require a packet of papers or a personal meeting.

Now, heres the key. Artemenko brought these physical documents from Ukraine to New York, arranged a meeting with Cohen and asked him to hand deliver them to Mike Flynn, the Presidents top foreign policy advisor. In the early 21st century there are manyeasier ways to send information. Theres email. There are phones. Theres old fashioned mail. Theres FedEx. There are of course also conventional diplomatic channels. Hand delivery of physical documents is certainly the most cumbersome option. But it is also extremely secure.

What does this tell us?

Well, we now have very strong indications that members of Trumps team, including Flynn himself, were trying in the weeks just before this meeting to set up extremely secure modes of communication with people in Moscow. The main aim appears to have been to hide the contents of those communications from the US government. In that context, the peace plan story looks very different and possibly much more significant than it appeared to be in March. We dont know this incident involved people in Moscow or the Russian government but it was explicitly about the situation in Ukraine and the sanctions regime, which were central issues in the attempted rapprochement with Russia. We are also under no obligation to be willfully dense.

Now, at the time this whole Cohen/Sater/Artemenko interlude was treated as just another of the bizarre eruptionsserved up bythe Trump worlds endless and weird connections with the former Soviet Union. Perhaps Artemenko was just a crank. But he managed to get a meeting with one of Trumps top business associates and his purported personal lawyer. Cohen, the personal lawyer, agreed to hand deliver hispackage to the White House.

And theres more.

According to Artemenko, this wasnt his first meeting with Cohen. He told Ukrainian press shortly after the initial reports of the meeting that hed first met Cohen years earlier when Cohen was setting up an ethanol business in Ukraine. Cohenstarted that businesswith hisbrothers father-in-law (bear with me here), a Ukrainian emigre with extensive business interests in the Ukraine agricultural sector, who supposedly help set up the meeting at the Loews Regency and died about a month after the meeting. More notably, Artemenkosaid hed first started discussing his peace deal with Cohen during the Republican primaries. In other words, in the early months of 2016.

So heres my question. We now know with what seems to be a fairly high degreeof confidence that the Trump Team was trying to find ways to communicate with people in Russia by secure channels around this time. We also learned last night from Yahoos Mike Isikoff that the Trump Team rolled into town in late January eager to deliver basically the full package to Russiamore or less immediately. Amixture of bureaucratic resistance and not having their own act together blocked the effort during the critical weeks before Mike Flynn was fired on February 13th.

What was in that dossier? Perhaps it was just flotsam and nonsense. But remember this was a set of physical documents which Cohen said he delivered to the White House, specifically to Mike Flynn. What was in them? Wheres the dossier now? Was it thrown away? Does Flynn still have it? Is it still at the White House?

With all weve learned over the last four weeks aboutthe Trump teams efforts to conduct covert communications about a rapprochement with Russia, I think we need to know.

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What Happened to the Michael Cohen Ukraine Dossier? - TPM (blog)