New Women World Chess Champion Mariya Muzychuk returns to Ukraine
Friends family and fans waited in the Lviv airport on Tuesday afternoon to greet the women #39;s world champion in chess. On Sunday at the Chess World Championships in Russia, 22-year-old Mariya...
By: UKRAINE TODAY
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New Women World Chess Champion Mariya Muzychuk returns to Ukraine - Video
Story highlights Reigning world heavyweight champion discusses Ukraine crisis Klitschko faces American challenger Bryant Jennings in New York on April 25 "Ukraine is looking forward to becoming a democratic country," Klitschko says Klitschko's older brother Vitali a prominent figure in Ukraine democracy movement
Speaking to CNN from his Miami training base ahead of the April 25 showdown with American challenger Bryant Jennings in New York, Klitschko said the crisis in his homeland has left him shocked and upset.
"My country is unfortunately suffering in the war with Russia -- not that Ukraine tried to give any aggression to any other nation, in this particular case Russia, unfortunately it's the other way around," Klitschko told CNN.
"I never thought that our brother folk is going to have war with us, so that Ukrainians and Russians are going to be divided with blood," he added.
"Unfortunately, we don't know how far it's going to go and how worse it's going to get. The aggression, in the military presence of (Russian) soldiers and military equipment in my country, Ukraine, is upsetting."
Klitschko is the reigning IBF, WBA, WBO and IBO champion and has, alongside older brother Vitali, dominated the heavyweight division in the 21st century.
Vitali, who retired from boxing in 2013, is a prominent figure in Ukrainian politics. The 43-year-old has led the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform since 2010 and was elected mayor of Kiev in May last year.
Tensions in the former Soviet state remain high despite a ceasefire agreed in February as Europe, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of France Francois Hollande, tries to broker a peace deal between the two sides.
The crisis in Ukraine began in November 2013 when former President Victor Yanukovych scuttled a trade deal with the European Union in favor of forging closer economic ties with Russia.
MORE: What next for Ukraine?
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Ukraine's Klitschko shocked by 'war with brother folk'
Series: Europes Squares - Kyiv, Ukraine: Maidan | Focus on Europe
It all started on Maidan square. In fall 2013, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets of Kyiv to topple the government and drive President Viktor Yanukovych from power. Many...
By: DW (English)
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Series: Europes Squares - Kyiv, Ukraine: Maidan | Focus on Europe - Video
Larry Towell/Magnum Photos Luhansk, East Ukraine, November 28, 2014
Some Ukrainians have been angry about my recent report in this space, especially about the title, Ukraine: Divided and Bitter. It is wrong to say that Ukrainians are divided, someone curtly retorted on Twitter, because in fact they have never been as united as they are now. In general terms, most Ukrainians are more united than ever and many say that Vladimir Putin and the war have done more to strengthen Ukrainian patriotism than anything since independence in 1991. But it is impossible to ignore that the conflict is by now not only a matter of aggression by Russia but also a civil war in the east. It is no good citing old opinion polls of what Ukrainians thought before the war and assuming that their views havent changed.
Take the poets Olena and Anna. Before Ukraines recent upheavals, Olena Maksymenko, a tall twenty-nine-year-old from Kiev, loved to write and visit other countries. I traveled a lot, in the Caucasus, Georgia, Mongolia, Baikal. I was also interested in ancient history, archaeology and mythology. Not many Ukrainians are travel journalists and poets, but Olena was carving out a nice career and name for herself as both.
But something changed for Olena with the Maidan revolution, which began in November 2013. Like so many other middle-class and educated Ukrainians, all she wanted was for Ukraine to be a normal European country. Since 1991, it had continued to linger in the twilight zone between Russia and the rest of Europe, all the while crushed under a culture of economic and political corruption that had impoverished a country that should be rich. So when president Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign long-negotiated agreements with the EU, Olena joined the protests. Her poems became political and she read them from the stage on the Maidan in Kiev.
Then, in March, 2014, soon after the fall of Yanukovych, she went to Crimea, which one week later would hold a referendum on joining Russia. Close to the border between Crimea and the mainland of Ukraine she was detained by men she described as just guys with guns. They were, she said, Cossacks, Berkut (the name of the former Ukrainian riot police, many of whom had been called up from regions loyal to Yanukovych to try to control the protesters at the Maidan), and Russian soldiers. They threatened to kill her. They pointed a gun at her and pulled the trigger, though it was not loaded, hit her, and chopped some of her hair off. They said I was an agent of the USA and they tried to get information from me about other journalists. Three days later, I was released, she told me.
When she came back from Crimea she discovered that one of her best friends, also closely involved in the Maidan, had committed suicide. By chance this moment in her life coincided with a writers residency she had won, organized before the revolution, in Latvia. While she was there, a whole novel about her friend and about the Maidan events just poured out. Then she trained to use a gun and fight but discovered that only women with the right connections were being allowed to go into combat on the Ukrainian side. If there is a choice between a woman who has military training and a man who doesnt they will choose the man, she said. Women like her, she complained, were being shunted into cooking or paper-shuffling jobs. This made her an angry woman, she told me.
We travelled together to the Pervomaiske, a small government-held town cum suburb of Donetsk, close to its airport. (This is not the same place as the rebel-held Pervomaysk I described in my last piece here.) She was attached to a group of volunteer medics who have set up a first aid center for Ukrainian soldiers injured on the front in a former hotel. Standing behind the hotel reception desk was Oleksiy Reznikov, aged twenty-two, who had a shelf of small bottles of different colored inks behind him and above his Kalashnikov. He was the frontline tattooist. This is a war we need to fight and everyone needs to find their niche, he told me. Soldiers and medics were having him tattoo them with their blood groups and nicknames, and some with patriotic Ukrainian themes and symbols. It raises morale, he said.
We could hear fighting, but for the time being hostilities have significantly tapered off as a result of the February 15 ceasefire. Bored, Olena was filing stories and collecting more that might appear in another novel. From her childhood she told me she had thought that it would be amazing to be a war correspondent and go cover conflicts in other countries. But unfortunately the war came to me.
A few days later, in Donetsk, I met Anna Iureva, another poet, aged eighty-seven, whose now abandoned house was only a few minutes walk from the hotel-cum-field hospital in Pervomaiske. Donetsk is the capital of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic, and together with neighboring Lugansk, makes up the would-be state of Novorossiya, or New Russia. Without support from Russia, which many people here look to as a savior, the region would almost certainly be retaken by Ukrainian forces.
Anna is a tiny, sprightly grey-haired lady. She told me that as a schoolgirl she had written poems, but that because she had been the youngest of eleven, her parents could not afford to give her much of an education. For the last eight months she and her family have lived in a dingy nuclear bomb shelter. Since the ceasefire, most of the people who stayed here have gone home but some, like Anna and her family, have not.
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Ukraine: Two Poets in the War
Ukraine One Year After Euromaidan Revolution: Ukraine Today reports from Tiger Conference
Ukraine One Year After Euromaidan Revolution: Ukraine Today reports from Tiger Conference in Kyiv Ukraine #39;s pro-democracy Euromaidan protests began in November last year; and one year on, ...
By: Shalanda Goines
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Ukraine One Year After Euromaidan Revolution: Ukraine Today reports from Tiger Conference - Video