States of America, Mr. Barack Obama (ENG)

20/02/2014              

To the President of the United States of America
Mr. Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President!

The 20th century brought to the Ukrainian people some extremely severe challenges: Ukrainian - Soviet War (1917-1922), Holodomor - Genocide of the Ukrainian nation (1932-1933), the Second World War (1939-1945). Tens of millions of victims (approximately a half of the current Ukraine's population) were killed for the interests of the third parties.

But still, having paid a terrible price for independence and won the long-expected statehood, Ukrainians began their path into the new century by signing the Budapest Memorandum on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1994). Having suffered from aggressors, Ukrainians refused to be aggressors for anybody.

Unfortunately, Ukraine, unlike other European countries that were part of the influence zone of the Soviet Union, because of its geopolitical location had become a target for the new, initially hidden aggression from the side of the new empire - Putin's Russia, that recently became evident.
Using anti-NATO and anti-Western propaganda, cultivated during the "Cold War", the Kremlin in 2010 has brought to the power in Ukraine a man with a dubious past, who became an obedient executor of Moscow's imperial interests.

Being in power, with the strong hand of the "Eastern Empire", President Yanukovych has not only begun to russify Ukraine, but enriched himself astronomically, making usurpation of all the branches of government, implementing corruptional system into social relations of the country. All attempts to protect human rights were immediately classified by the authorities as an extremist activities of the nationalist forces, droping an obligatory hint about subversive actions funded by the West.

The last drop of patience for Ukrainian people during the presidency of Yanukovych, who was accompanied by a prominent degradation of all indices of social and economic life in the country, was the non-signing of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU, which could have brought some anti-corruption changes. As an answer to the first peaceful protests Yanukovych used hard force, ordering the riot police to beat roughly students on the night of November 30, 2013.

During three long months Ukrainians bravely struggled for their rights on the streets of the main cities of Ukraine. Suffering from repressions, beatings, freezing temperatures, persecutions they still listened to the calls of Western politicians to support and promote peaceful solution of the crisis in the country. Prospects rather than a pragmatic approach to the shutdown of systematic humiliation of the Ukrainian people by Yanukovych regime led, unfortunately, to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injured and repressed citizens. Application of sanctions instead of simple warnings could have saved the lives of many innocent people. The policy of intolerance in respect of totalitarian regimes, for some reason wasn’t accepted in the case of Ukraine, despite constant requests of the opposition in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora.

That’s why the violent death of our fellows gives us the moral right to ask openly: will all the parties fulfill their obligations under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 or Ukrainians, as well as in the previous centuries, should rely on their own forces in defending their rights, dignity and the western borders of the world?

President of the Ukrainian Association in Portugal, Pavlo Sadokha
Director of the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre "Dyvosvit",  Volodymyrа Kiak
President of the Association "Dgerelo Svitut", Borys Kucheras
President  of the Union of Ukrainian Algarve Region Ihor Korbelyak
Director of the Ukrainian-Portuguese educational and cultural center "School. Shevchenko" in Faro, Natalia Dmitruk
President  of the Association "Slovesna  Piramida" Miroslava Martynyuk

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