Ukrainian Death Quotes

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean. We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.

Ukrainian proverb: The fear of death takes away the joy of living

Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles).

One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU’s tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these

We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant creates false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, and Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with such lying stories. Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play, narratives that privilege the majority and oppress minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed. This, now, is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and what, if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them. Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.

THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in 1862, so it is quite clear who influenced whom. But why such pessimism? In both cases, Polish and Ukrainian, the idea of the death of the nation stemmed from the experience of the late eighteenth century

It is the same kind of deep internal disgust that takes hold of me when I see a rich eighty-two-year-old man surrounded with “babes,” twentysomething mistresses (often Russian or Ukrainian). I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components—and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books—my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.

March 1953 saw a surge in arrests and convictions of people charged with “anti-Soviet agitation” for expressing satisfaction with Stalin’s death or otherwise denigrating him. A forty-four-year-old Muscovite named S. M. Telenkov, who worked at a scientific institute, drunkenly proclaimed in a commuter train, “What a fine day it is today; today we buried Stalin. There’ll be one less scoundrel around and now we can get back to living.” R. S. Rybalko, a twenty-eight-year-old working-class woman from Rostov Oblast, was convicted of using profanity in regard to Stalin. Ya. I. Peit, who had been forcibly resettled in Kazakhstan, was sentenced for destroying and stomping on a portrait of Stalin after an official mourning ceremony. Upon hearing of Stalin’s death, P. K. Karpets, a thirty-two-year-old railroad worker from the Ukrainian city of Rovno, swore and exclaimed, “Smell that? The corpse is already stinking.” Ye. G. Gridneva, a forty-eight-year-old female railroad worker from Transcaucasia, was not able to contain herself and commented to a coworker, “A dog dies a dog’s death. It’s good that he died. There won’t be any kolkhozes and life will be a little easier.”7

Dear Ukrainians,” Zelensky said in his inauguration address. “After my election win, my six-year-old son said: ‘Dad, they say on TV that Zelensky is the president…. So, it means that I am the President too?!’ At the time, it sounded funny, but later I realized that it was true. Because each of us is the president. “From now on, each of us is responsible for the country that we leave to our children,” Zelensky said. “Each of us, in his place, can do everything for the prosperity of Ukraine.” He raised his first priority: a cease-fire in the Donbas where Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces had been fighting since Putin’s 2014 invasion. “I have been often asked: What price are you ready to pay for the cease-fire? It’s a strange question,” Zelensky said. “What price are you ready to pay for the lives of your loved ones? I can assure that I’m ready to pay any price to stop the deaths of our heroes. I’m definitely not afraid to make difficult decisions and I’m ready to lose my fame, my ratings, and if need be without any hesitation, my position to bring peace, as long as we do not give up our territories. “History is unfair,” Zelensky added. “We are not the ones who have started this war. But we are the ones who have to finish it. “I really do not want you to hang my portraits on your office walls. Because a president is not an icon and not an idol. A president is not a portrait. Hang pictures of your children. And before you make any decision, look into their eyes,” he said. “And finally,” Zelensky concluded, “all my life I tried to do all I could so that Ukrainians laughed. That was my mission. Now I will do all I can so that Ukrainians at least do not cry anymore.

in the case of The Last Green Valley, I can tell you that Joseph Stalin did indeed starve more than four million Ukrainians to death during the Holodomor of 1932–33. Stalin also imprisoned and enslaved millions of people in

Ukraine war = Evil.

The Ukrainian and Russian death and injured tolls are high in the Ukraine war due to western supplied weaponry.

It is common for governments to report fake war death and wounded tolls that are far lower than reality.

It’s like this: Russian and Ukrainian people hate Polish and Lithuanian people. Eastern Europe peoples hate Indian people. Everybody hates the black people. Whites hate everyone . . . That’s just the way it is.

all human life is sacred, I wonder why the mass killings of Africans is not publicized and taught in schools like the death of Jews in Germany and Ukrainians by Stalin. Why are Africans not teaching, building museums, having archives, or providing degree programs in their various universities for students who would like to specialize in the African slave trade, colonialism, and the like that would remind this generation and the one to come about the injustice the black race went through and is still going through? Why is there no indignation even among the biblical scholars and Christian leaders about the situation of Africa, past and present?

The ship had already played a short-lived but memorable part in the early days of the conflict. On February 24, during the initial invasion, the crew of the Moskva famously demanded that a garrison of thirteen border guards on the Ukrainian-owned Snake Island—right at a crucial military and shipping access point to the Black Sea—lay down their arms and surrender. Their response, roughly translated as “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” went viral. Barely six weeks later, the ship was aflame in the same sea it was protecting, hit by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles. The photographs that followed were yet another embarrassment to Putin: There was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, christened after its capital city, burning brightly. In state media, the Russian government claimed the ship had caught fire and sunk in bad weather—an excuse that even some of its own state TV hosts didn’t buy. The death toll remained unknown. The successful attack became the first of many stories about Ukrainian inventiveness and pluck. “People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” observed Ben Hodges, the former United States Army commander for Europe, referring to the popular 1980s TV show in which the lead character constantly improvised to get out of impossible jams. “With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective antiship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around.” More importantly, the war’s narrative was changing. The Russians had retreated from Kyiv. They had lost their warship. For the first time it looked like Ukraine might survive. There was even talk about Ukraine winning—if you defined winning as forcing Russia to retreat back to its own borders, the borders that existed prior to February 24, 2022.

Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus—a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism—had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1943, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn. What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

Edzia recalled being “very happy to get away from the Ukrainians” when they left for the West in late 1945, “because they had pogroms after the war. They were killing Jews.” To her mind, “they were worse than the Germans. . . . I think my family was mostly killed . . . by Ukrainians who were our friends.”16 Jacob Heiss, also born in 1930, remembered how the Germans arriving to carry out roundups would call out merrily, “Spielzeit für die Kameraden” (Playtime for the comrades), and the next day “you would get up in the morning and see hundreds of dead people every place you walked.

If the Poles described the Ukrainian insurgents as savages, and the Jews saw them as “worse than the Germans,” from their own point of view they were martyrs of a just and holy cause, the liberation of their land from foreign oppression: the goal justified the means, including massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Many of them died in battle, were executed by the NKVD, or spent long years in gulags. Others fled to the West, where they formed the nationalist hard core of the Ukrainian diaspora. Vilified by the communists as fascist collaborators, they emerged from obscurity and were celebrated as the harbingers of the nation after Ukrainian independence in 1991, especially in Western Ukraine. Two decades later, as a newly resurgent Russia sought to reassert its influence on Ukraine, the UPA again came to symbolize the country’s historical struggle against its mighty eastern neighbor: in 2016 the black-and-red banner of the insurgent army was again fluttering from the remnants of the medieval Polish castle overlooking Buczacz. History was back to its old tricks. UPA flag on top of the castle in Buczacz, 2016.

-Do you sleep well? -Yes, if I sleep, I do not wake up until after my body needs sleep, but the problem lies in reaching the stage of sleep. As soon as I put my body to bed, bouts of terror and fear begin. -Fear of what? -From losing consciousness, for my senses to stop, and I lose my sense of time, and the world around me, it becomes like I am nothing, the world around me moves, things change, and I do not know anything about them, this idea makes me crazy, to the point of crying, then I fall asleep or faint Perhaps, out of concern. He was silent for a moment, then added: I wish this world were without sleep, but my mind, my body, needs it, but I see no need for it. His last psychological evaluation session was over. The doctor approached him and began removing the polygraph sensors from his body. Now he has to wait for his final result. Until that time, many places on the island of Malta are worth a visit, especially accompanied by a beautiful Ukrainian girl like Katrina. So far from Adana, and back in time on the imaginary timeline. But for Baibars, everything happens in one moment.

arrested Ukrainian leaders, teachers, and priests. Polish veterans of WW1 were given prime land in Volhynia in a colonial attempt to strengthen the Polish grip there. In return, Ukrainian nationalists assassinated Polish leaders and attacked Polish landowners. Poland then opened what is now recognized as a concentration camp, Bereza Kartuska, where Ukrainian nationalists were imprisoned without trial and tortured and abused. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany started World War II by invading Poland and dividing the country between them. In the east, the Soviets occupied Volhynia until 1941, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union. Under German occupation, Volhynia became a part of the newly formed Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Both regimes devastated Ukraine and Poland, destroying villages and cities and arresting, deporting and murdering millions. During this upheaval, the historic tensions between the Poles and Ukrainians erupted in a series of violent clashes and brutal massacres of innocent civilians. Whole villages were decimated and the sheer brutality of these deaths—often executed with farm implements—contrasted directly with generations

In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.

We are slowly beginning to understand a disturbing feature that surfaces again and again in the way Jews collectively remember this period: a recurring observation that the 'locals' (be they Ukrainians, Lithuanians, or Poles) were 'worse than the Germans.' Jews know better than anybody that the Holocaust was a Nazi invention, one that they carried around Europe as they conquered the continent. The disturbing feature in Jewish narratives of the wartime mentioned above can be explained by pointing out that death administered by people well known to the victims evoked special suffering, as they must have also felt betrayed. But we now realize that death at the hands of neighbors must have been also, literally, very painful.

Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

I don't receive my TPI Pension because of the heavy wounds I received in the battle action on Crete. I get my TPI Pension because of the inhumane treatment I received in the Concentration Camp. It is a mistake to believe that the Germans had enough spare manpower to staff and run the concentration camps. The Germans only ever guarded the outer perimeter of the camps, we Prisoners hardly saw German soldiers, so it was not the SS or German guards that beat me up daily. No, the daily beatings that left me totally incapacitated, came from two fellow Prisoners called KAPOS. Kapos (or Camp Police) had extra privileges, such as their own room and they also had power, For example the Power to say who got to visit the Camp Sick Bay or the Camp Brothel, and because of the absence of the very disciplined Germans, these Kapos even had the Power over Life & Death. The two Kapos that beat me daily, using a heavy wooden baton they called 'Herr Doktor' (The Doctor) were both fellow Prisoners, both were Jewish, one from Hungary and the other was, I believe, a Ukrainian. I was often witness when they dragged other hapless prisoners from their cells on to the Appelplatz' and beat them to death with 'The Doctor'. So whenever I meet a ' Camp survivor' now, I look him deeply in the eyes to see what sort of a 'survivor' they are....whether they were really a Prisoner just like me, or whether they were one of the many 'Privileged' ones who survived the warbeing more inhumane to other Prisoners than the Germans ever were. As a matter of fact, it was a German SS Soldier who saved my life after the Kapos, who after beating me sent me outside the camp on a work detail, with a dangerously poisoned leg. The SS Soldier walking by, saw my mates helping me, came over and then gave me his medical kit. I now look deeply into the eyes of the 'survivors', because I know that not all Concentration Campsurvivors were innocent victims. I know that a lot of the Prisoners were brutal and inhumane criminals.The world has never been told the whole truth about what life in the Camps was like. All we ever hear or read in the media is , how bad the German guards were and how badly they treated their Prisoners. I was in more than 8 POW Camps and a Concentration Camp, so who would know the truth? Me or the Media !!

The most significant of these omissions pertains to Holodomor, a genocide of the Ukrainian people, in which millions of Ukrainian peasants starved to death after Stalin demanded draconian requisitions of grain from them, knowing full well that this would have devastating consequences.