President Yushchenko was in Israel recently and responded to criticism for awarding a posthumous medal to a WWII-era Ukrainian nationalist leader accused of killing Jews. He also argued that antisemitism in Ukraine is a "marginal phenomenon." He stated that people have been put on trial and "even punished" for inciting antisemitism, but I can remember only one successful hate speech prosecution in Ukraine since I started working at UCSJ in 1998 (the newspaper "Silski Visti"--whose editors Yushchenko later awarded a medal on two occasions).

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His assertion that no Ukrainian nationalist groups targeted Jews during WWII is demonstrably false, so much so that I wonder if there was a mistranslation or a misquote here. I can understand why he is defensive about this charge, especially given deceptive Soviet and now Russian attempts to paint the entire Ukrainian nationalist movement of the time as collaborators and mass murderers, but this is really going too far. But let's not forget that he cancelled earlier trips to Israel, so the fact that he even made this journey is positive.

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