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Wednesday November 21, 2007

Ukraine president defends accused murderer

It was a political whirlwind of a trip to Israel for Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, who first made several goodwill gestures last week toward the Jews, then offended them deeply.

Yushchenko defended giving his country’s top honor to a man accused of murdering thousands of Jews during World War II.

At a foreign policy forum in Jerusalem on Nov. 15, Yushchenko said Ukrainian nationalist leader Roman Shukhevych was posthumously named a Hero of Ukraine last month for his role in fighting for Ukraine’s independence.

Holocaust researchers and Jewish groups have charged that a force under the command of Shukhevych took part in pogroms in 1941 in which 4,000 Jews were killed.

However, during his three-day trip, Yushchenko repeatedly said he regretted the massacre of 1.4 million Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine and that he would work to preserve their memory. He presented Israel President Shimon Peres on Nov. 14 with documents from Soviet KGB archives detailing the location of mass graves from the Holocaust in Ukraine — many of them unknown up to now, Israeli officials said.

On a visit Nov. 13 to Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, Yushchenko donated soil and a rock from the site of the Babi Yar massacre, where 33,711 Jews were rounded up and executed at the edge of a ravine in Kyiv between Sept. 29 and 30, 1941. — ap

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