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It isn't like Ukrainians have any reason to distrust Russia:

"Ukraine's nightmare had begun in 1932. Faced by resistance to collectivization, Stalin unleashed terror upon Ukraine. Moscow dispatched 25,000 fanatical young party militants - earlier versions of Mao's `Red Guards' - to force 10 million Ukrainian peasants into collective farms. Secret police units of OGPU began selective executions of recalcitrant farmers.

When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent henchman, Lazar Kaganovitch, to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovitch, the Soviet Eichmann, made quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent of all Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. Ukrainian Nikita Khruschchev helped supervise the slaughter.

But there were simply not enough Chekists (secret police) to kill so many people, so Stalin decided to replace bullets by a much cheaper medium of death, mass starvation.

All seed stocks, grain, silage, and farm animals were confiscated from Ukraine's farms. Ethiopia's communist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, used the very same method in the 1970's to force collectivization: the resulting famine cased one million deaths.

OGPU agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and rail lines. Nothing came in or out of Ukraine. Farms were searched and looted of food and fuel. Ukrainians quickly began to die of hunger, cold, and sickness.

The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin's custom-made famine and Cheka firing squads remains unknown to this day. KGB's archives, and recent work by Russian historians, shows at least 7 million Ukrainians died. Ukrainian historians put the figure at 9 million, or higher. Twenty-five percent of Ukraine's population was exterminated."

http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/unknhol.htm

Thanks for posting this. Historical context always helps, for those who take an interest. I imagine some of the people slamming Yuschenko on this thread barely know anything about Ukraine's history.

In any case, the ignorance of many of the FReepers on this thread is appalling. They can't see past the supposed Soros connection and Putin's supposed support for the war on terror. They probably don't know the significance of Vaclav Havel supporting Yuschenko, implicitly to the point of revolution.

It is obvious to me that Yuschenko is the good guy here.

It isn't like Ukrainians have any reason to distrust Russia:

Stalin was a Georgian, not Russian. Most of his and Lenin's murderous henchmen were atheists of Jewish descent from the Pale of Settlement, which encompassed Ukraine and Belorussia, but not much of Russia proper.

That's why when the Nazi's came along and conquered Ukraine from the Communists, the Ukranians immediately turned on any Jew they could find and killed them, blaming them for 20 years of Communist opression. But they didn't turn on any Russia they could find and kill them.

The Ukranian identity as a distinct ethnicity is a construct of the Poles and Jesuits in order to discourage any feelings of loyalty among the "Ukranians" towards Russia through the several hundred years of Polish occupation, and is centered in the mainly Catholic area of L'viv and stretches east to K'yiv, which was the extent of the Orthodox Dioceses that had reunited with Rome in 1596. The Germans partially awakened these old feelings for purposes of separtism in 1917 by creating an independent Ukraine under German protection in the 1917 armistice with Russia (the Germans also created the modern states of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Georgia at the same time with the same treaty for the same purposes). Most other "Ukranians" think of themselves as just a different kind of Russian (i.e. Great Russians=Russia Proper, Little Russians=Ukraine, and White Russians=Belarus). The language difference is a matter of dialects more than anything else. Basically, Ukranian is Russian with a bit of Polish influence. The people look indistinguishable.

The Nazi's, for example, recognizing this, only admitted as Ukranian those who were from western Ukraine and were Catholic. Only Ukranians from the west were allowed into the Ukranian SS battalion. Other Ukranians were considered as Russians, and if they wished to fight with the Germans against the Communists, had to join with Gen. Vlasov's army or work as Hilfi's (grunt labor) in the Wehrmacht.

At the same time famine was being spread across the Ukraine by Stalin, he was also spreading famine across the Cossack Steppe to the east and in the large German settlement in Sartov and continuing to kill off the peasant-owner farmers known as Kulacks. The Ukraine drew the bulk of attention because it had the bulk of Russia's people at that time, and also the bulk of the independent farmers Stalin wished liquidated.

Walter Duranty, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Father to Jayson Blair, Baghdad Bob:

"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1

"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933

"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6

"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
--New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18

"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."
--New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13