Ukrainian Sayings And Quotes

If you don’t play, you lose. There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. "Ethnic Ukrainians" must be a group that acts in one way, and "ethnic Russians" in another. This is about as true as to say that "ethnic Americans" vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future.

Stop calling it war, for war implies faults on both sides. It's an invasion, where the state of Russia is the aggressor and the people of Ukraine are the victim. And stop saying that your prayers are with the Ukrainian people, for prayers may give you comfort, but it does nothing to alleviate their suffering. Shred all hypocritical advocacy of human rights and be involved in a meaningful way that actually helps the victims of Russian imperialism.

Albanian dogs go “ham ham.” In Catalan, dogs go “bup bup.” The Chinese dogs say “wang wang,” the Greek dogs go “gav gav,” the Slovenians “hov hov,” and the Ukrainians “haf haf.” In Iceland, it’s “voff,” in Indonesia, it’s “gong gong,” and in Italian, it’s “bau bau.

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.

The independence of Ukraine is indispensable. A Russian-Ukrainian confrontation would make Bosnia look like a Sunday-school picnic. Moscow should be made to understand that any attempt to destabilize Ukraine - to say nothing of outright aggression - would have devastating consequences for the Russian-American relationship. Ukrainian stability is in the strategic interest of the United States.

In my native valley of the middle Dniester, gentry spoke Polish, peasants — Ukrainian, officials — Russian with the Odessa accent, merchants — Jewish, carpenters and joiners — being Filippians and Old Believers — Russian with the Novogrod accent, the kabanists spoke in their own dialect. Additionally, in the same area there were also villages of Polish-speaking noblemen, and nobles who spoke Ukrainian, Moldovan villages speaking in Romanian; Gypsies speaking in Gypsy, Turks were no longer there, but in Khotyn, on the other side of the Dniester and in Kamieniec, their minarets were still standing...All these shades of nationality and languages were also in a semi-fluid state. Sons of Poles sometimes became Ukrainians, sons of Germans and French — Poles. In Odessa, unusual things happened: the Greeks became Russians, Poles were seen joining Soyuz Russkavo Naroda. Even stranger combinations arose from mixed marriages. ‘If a Pole marries a Russian woman,’ my father used to say, ‘their children are usually Ukrainians or Lithuanians’.

But I must tell you, comrade Lenin, that your assertion that the anarchists don’t understand ‘the present’ realistically, that they have no real connection with it and so forth, is fundamentally mistaken. The anarchist-communists in the Ukraine (or the ‘South of Russia’ to you communist-bolsheviks who try to avoid the word Ukraine), the anarchist-communists, I say, have already given many proofs that they are firmly pklanted in ‘the present’. The whole struggle of the revolutionary Ukrainian countryside against the Central Rada has been carried out under the ideological guidance of the anarchist-communists and also in part by the Socialist Revolutionaries (who, of course, have entirely different aims from the anarchist-communists in their struggle against the Central Rada). Your Bolsheviks have scarcely any presence in our villages. Where they have penetrated, their influence is minimal. Almost all the communes or peasant associations in the Ukraine were formed at the instigation of the anarchist-communists. The armed struggle of the working people against the counter-revolution in general and the Austro-German invasion in particular has been undertaken with the ideological and organic guidance of the anarchist-communists exclusively.

just agreed to buy some decommissioned Saudi antiaircraft missiles for twelve million dollars and is planning to kidnap a racehorse as down payment. “The chrysanthemums are beautiful,” says the woman. “Exquisite.” A kidnapped racehorse was not ideal, as far as Martin Lomax was concerned, but if both sides were happy with the arrangement he has ample stabling by the paddock. He has done business with the Ukrainians before and found them violent but trustworthy. Martin Lomax will get the local Scout troop to run a refreshment stall on one of the Open Garden days. Water and so on. People need water, he has noticed. They go crazy for the stuff.

Unit 1’s service life came to an end on November 30th 1996 after Ukraine’s government agreed to decommission it in exchange for US$300 million of foreign funds to modernise Ukraine’s power sector, including improvements to Chernobyl’s remaining reactor. Despite this, the plant struggled through its final few weeks, during which it was forced to shut down first because of weather damage to electricity infrastructure and then from a steam leak. In a televised event on December 15th, 2000, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma ordered the permanent shut down of the plant live from Unit 3’s control room, saying, “To fulfil a state decision and Ukraine’s international obligations, I hereby order the premature stoppage of the operation of reactor number 3 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.”267 With that, Chernobyl’s last reactor ceased producing power for the final time.

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.

But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves.

WHO WERE THEY—RUSSIANS OR Soviets? No, they were Soviets—and Russians, and Belorussians, and Ukrainians, and Tajiks… Yet there was such a thing as Soviet people. I don’t think such people will ever exist again, and they themselves now understand that. Even we, their children, are different. We want to be like everybody else. Not like our parents, but like the rest of the world. To say nothing of the grandchildren… But I love them. I admire them. They had Stalin and the Gulag,* 4 but they also had the Victory. And they know that.

But we were genuinely welcomed in Ukraine. Not a single time were we told, ‘You’re a Turk, but I’m a Ukrainian.’ The people of Ukraine helped us with everything!” Jasim says loudly and confidently.

In the White House, Director for Intelligence Programs Maher Bitar reviewed intel reports that Russia planned to stage an explosion in eastern Ukraine and claim Ukraine was responsible. Russia would say the Ukrainian government had killed ethnic Russians and then move into Ukraine under the false pretext of rescuing them. The Russian plot even talked about hiring actors who could play mourners at a funeral.

Principles are the first thing dictators attack. Various “Putins” around the world are undermining principles in their societies through propaganda and repression so that people cannot stand up for what they believe in. And then, when the dictatorship gains strength and resources, it tries to export its lack of principles, creating gray zones devoid of values. Europe has had to face this many times. Now we are experiencing another defining moment. Russia is trying to convince nations that it is easy to compromise principles—that they can ignore international law and turn a blind eye to injustice if it will supposedly bring stability. This is Moscow's main message - Putin invites everyone to forget about their principles, to show no resolve, to give up Ukrainian land and people, and then, he says, Russian bombing will stop. But throughout history, every time such agreements have been made, the threat has returned even stronger. Today, we have a chance to win in Eastern Europe so that we don't have to fight on the northern or other eastern fronts—in the Baltic states and Poland, or in the south—in the Balkans, where it is easy to ignite a conflict, or in African countries, whose problems are much closer to European societies than it may seem. We have to stand up for international law and the values on which our societies are built. We must be decisive. People matter. The law matters. State borders and the right of every nation to determine its own future matters. And while we know that Putin is threatening leaders and countries who can help us force Russia to peace, we must not give in. I thank you for every package of defense assistance to Ukraine. Every weapon you have provided helps to defend normal life—the kind of life you live here in Iceland or in any of your other countries, a life that no longer exists in Russia, where basic human rights have been taken away. We are now in the third year of a full-scale war, and our soldiers on the front lines need fresh strength. That is why we are working to equip our brigades. This is an urgent need. We are already cooperating with others—France has helped to equip one brigade, and we have an agreement on another. We invite you to join us in creating brigades, Scandinavian brigades, and demonstrate your continued commitment to the defense of Europe. I am grateful to Denmark and other partners who invest in arms production in Ukraine. Artillery, shells, drones—everything that allows Ukraine to defend itself despite any logistical delays on the part of partners or changing political moods in world capitals. We see that Putin is increasing weapons production, and rogue regimes like Pyongyang are helping him with this. Next year, Putin intends to catch up with the EU in munitions production. We can only prevent this now (...). - Translated from Ukrainian

She spoke in a fast rush. “Can’t talk. Meet me in forty minutes. Say where.” Forty minutes. Not half an hour or an hour. Forty. Like we were Ukrainian spies. We

The weekly news round-up show is on. The well-dressed presenter walks across the well-made set and into shot, briskly summing up the week’s events, all seemingly quite normal. Then suddenly he’ll twirl around to camera 2, and before you know it he’s talking about how the West is sunk in the slough of homosexuality, and only Holy Russia can save the world from Gay-Europa, and how among us all are the fifth columnists, the secret Western spies who dress themselves up as anti-corruption activists but are actually all CIA (for who else would dare to criticise the President?), while the West is sponsoring anti-Russian ‘fascists’ in Ukraine and all of them are out to get Russia and take away its oil, and the American-sponsored fascists are crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns because the West is organising a genocide against Us Russians and there are women crying on camera saying how they were threatened by roving gangs of Russia-haters, and of course only the President can make this right, and that’s why Russia did the right thing to annex Crimea, and is right to arm and send mercenaries to Ukraine, and that this is just the beginning of the great new conflict between Russia and the Rest. And when you go to check (through friends, through Reuters, through anyone who isn’t Ostankino) whether there really are fascists taking over Ukraine or whether there are children being crucified you find it’s all untrue, and the women who said they saw it all are actually hired extras dressed up as ‘eye-witnesses’.

The former president buzzes in. “The biggest problem we have is that America just doesn’t win anymore. Whether it’s trade deals or military actions. As your president, I’ll get America winning again. We’ll soon be back and banging beautiful broads like we used to.” “That’s uglyaphobic, and unfair to attractively challenged Americans. I go back to Thomas Jefferson, ‘All men are created equal,’ and…while you know…you know the deal.” “Even now, people stop me on the street and say what an awesome peacemaker I am. On day one, the Ukrainian war ends. I’ll get both leaders in a room. There’ll be tough negotiations, but they’ll be fair. There’ll be diplomatic sleepovers in Moscow and Kyiv, where no fighting will be tolerated except a robust pillow fight. Pretty soon I’ll be considered the greatest peacemaker of all time, bigger than Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. Maybe not as great as Christ, but a close second.

It seems certain that Drahomanov analyzed correctly the practical possibilities open to the Ukrainian movement of his time. His analysis was validated by the fact that it was only after 1905-after the introduction of a certain, though very limited, degree of constitutionalism – that the momentum of the Ukrainian national movement increased. Drahomanov's attitude toward the question of independent statehood for the Ukraine was thoroughly compatible with his attitude toward the socialist maximal program. In both cases he was sceptical of utopias; he preferred to seek a strategic plan which would point the way forward from the status quo. But there was another element, besides this pragmatic one, which figured in his rejection of separatism. As we have seen, Drahomanov had a very individualist conception of freedom. His ideal was freedom from the State rather than freedom through the State. He considered concentration of power and power politics bad in themselves. But the foundation of a new State, even of a thoroughly democratic one, is impossible without power and power, politics, without the creation of authority and of a hierarchy. It is easy to understand that Drahomanov instinctively shrank from seeing the Ukrainian movement go in this direction. He hoped that the political freedom of the Ukrainian people could come from a gradual decentralist and federalist transformation of the existing power aggregates, Russia and Austria-Hungary. We should like to say here that, at a time when there was neither a Ukrainian State, nor even a modest practical basis for a Ukrainian separatist policy, a man like Drahomanov, whose nature it was to think in terms other than those of States, was particularly fitted to render service to the Ukrainian cause.

Over the next year, a pattern emerged. Ukraine’s request for a specific type of arms would at first get a frosty reception in Washington, perhaps an outright no, a one-word answer Biden delivered himself to reporters who asked about sending the F-16s, which could strike Moscow. After saying absolutely not, the Biden White House would then say it was “studying” each request, trying to line up Ukraine’s capabilities with weapons that could do the job. Situation Room meetings would be devoted to the question of whether a specific weapon was truly “escalatory.” Leaks to the press assured that the debate played out in public, creating new pressures. And then, as Biden discovered that Russia’s “red lines” were not as bright as first feared, he would relent, noting that Ukraine’s defense demands had changed—from defending Kyiv to defending vast sections of Ukraine’s industrial east. Eventually, a commitment to deliver weapons previously off-limits would follow. At one point, Zelensky’s representatives argued that the cycle from “no” to “studying it” to “yes” was so well trod that the United States could save itself a lot of time and money by just saying yes from the get-go—or at least begin training Ukrainians on how to fly an F-16 or drive an Abrams tank months before actually agreeing to send the weapons. It would save time, the advisor said to me, “and maybe scare the shit out of the Russians.

During the day we lived in the new place, and at night we lived at home - in our dreams." "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air." "There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. 'Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!' Someone told her not to advertise that, no on will buy them. 'Don't worry!' she says. 'They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their bosses.

On September 1, Sondland made it clear to the Ukrainians that unless they made an explicit promise to pursue the Burisma investigation—into the alleged ties between Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the energy company Burisma in Ukraine—the funds would not be released. That same day, Taylor told Kent that Sondland had been as explicit in his communications with the Ukrainians as to say that Trump wanted Zelenskyy at a microphone voicing the words “investigations,” “Biden,” and “Clinton.” The Washington Post would report the shakedown attempt four days later, on September 5. Still, Sondland kept pressuring the government of Ukraine. Taylor confronted Sondland, saying: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

But other parents asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: “Mother says that we should eat her if she dies.” This was forethought and love.83

New York Post journalists Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge “slipped the DISC,” as Eric Weinstein would say. They published an explosive story on October 14, 2020: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”581 The article was substantiated by documents, images, and emails recovered from what the reporters had verified to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive. The evidence was both as overwhelming and extremely damning

My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, PanGermanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin’s empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.

An ordinary travel agency took care of the practicalities of chartering trains in exactly the same way as they dealt with such matters normally. Ordinary railway staff were deployed to organise the logistics of the transport, plotting train times into schedules, passing information on through the system. The camps were built, personnel received their orders, the industry began. Some of the soldiers must have been picked out on account of their brutality, many being obvious sadists who could find outlet and indulge themselves here, while others were ordinary and, in any context, considerate men doing a job for work. Two years later they tried to remove all traces; having demolished Teblinka’s every structure they built a farm on the site and instructed the Ukrainian family they installed in it to say they had lived there always. The same occurred in Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno, all traces gone. All around, life went on as nothing had happened.

We had a motherland, and now it's gone. What am I? My mother's Ukrainian, my father's Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? What is their nationality? We're all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says 'Russian', but we're not Russian. We're Soviet! But that country- where I was born- no longer exists.

The joyous meaning of merry was a beautiful demonstration of the element of chance in how words’ meanings move along. The earliest rendition we can get a sense of for merry is that on the Ukrainian steppes several thousand years ago, in Proto-Indo-European, it was mregh. In Greece, this word for “short” morphed not into merriment but into the word for upper arm, brakhion. The sounds in mregh and brakh match better than it looks on paper: for one thing, both m and b are produced by putting your lips together, and so it’s easy for one to change into the other. As to meaning, it was a matter of implications, this time in one of the things the word was applied to rather than the word itself. The upper arm is shorter than the lower, and hence one might start referring to the upper arm as the “shorter,” and the rest was history. Calling your upper arm your “shorter” is not appreciably odder than calling cutoff pants shorts, after all. The process never stops. It seems that in Latin this brakh ended up, among other places, in a pastry, namely, one resembling folded arms, called a brachitella. Old High German picked that up as brezitella; by Middle High German people were saying brezel. Today, brezel is pretzel—from that same word that meant short and now connotes joyousness in English. In France, that brach root drifted into a word referring to shoulder straps or, by extension, a child’s little chemise undershirt. Women can wear chemises, too, but garments, like words, have a way of changing over the centuries, and after a while the brassière had evolved into a more specific anatomical dedication than a chemise’s. The modern word bra, then, is what happens when a word for “short” drifts step by step into new realms. Merry, pretzel, and bra are, in a sense, all the same word—yet contests could be held challenging people to even use all three in a sentence (or at least one that made any sense).

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 !!

This is genius,” Trump said during an interview on a conservative radio show the next day, February 22, at Mar-a-Lago, praising Putin’s move to declare certain Ukrainian regions independent. “So Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force. We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re going to keep the peace all right. No but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy, I know him very well. Very, very well,” Trump said gleefully. “I knew that he always wanted Ukraine,” Trump said. “I used to talk to him about it. I said, ‘You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it.’ But I could see that he wanted it.