Ukrainian Quotes

The main thing is that the 'C' is silent, so it kind of starts with a 'Z.' Z-O-O-K-RIE. It's Ukrainian, on my dad's side.

The Ukrainian people should not be coerced. Make no mistake: the US stands together with the Ukrainians aspiring for democracy.

I am a strong Ukrainian girl, that is why I work a lot.

I have this typical Ukrainian face. Even people who know my music don't recognize me most of the time, thank God.

Putin imagined it would be different. So, like many Russian leaders before him, he imagined that Ukraine was basically Russia, but they speak with a funny accent. Actually, it's not Russia; it has a different identity. It has a very different language. Russians don't automatically understand Ukrainian. And, in particular, the way Ukraine has developed over the last two decades is different from the way Russia has developed.

I always lived in a multilingual society (Polish-Ukrainian, German-Ukrainian, English-Ukrainian), and was open to outside linguistic influences. I think it was within three years of coming to the US that I started writing in English, although purely for myself, not trying to get it published. Living in America, I was constantly in touch with English, and Ukrainian was for me a private language.

I have never allowed anti-Russian rhetoric in Ukrainian policy toward such a strategic partner like Russia. This is the first point. I never went against the interests of the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian people.

I do not want to return to the Ukraine of the 1990s and the time of privatization. Ninety-eight percent of Ukrainian companies obey the laws.

We do believe the current Ukrainian authorities are illegitimate. They cannot be legitimate as they do not have a national mandate for running the country, which speaks for itself. At the same time, we do not refuse to deal with them. We stay in touch at the ministerial level.

The Ukrainian opposition should adopt democratic unity as its main principle, and it also must have one leader.

The international repercussions were shattering to some extent - there is no intention to repeat operations of such kind in the future.[Viktor] Yanukovych's electoral victory clearly demonstrated that there are no pro-Russian politicians in the Ukraine, just Ukrainian politicians.

I grew up in a Ukrainian Catholic-turned-Christian household, and that is my family's faith.

Putin saw the Ukrainian revolution as a challenge to him personally, and I think that's why he, in fact, over-reacted. I think his occupation of Crimea and then annexation for him was actually a mistake from Russia's point of view. And then his invasion of Eastern Ukraine was also a mistake. He imagined that he would invade Eastern Ukraine and then eventually split the country in half, and he discovered that in fact, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not Russians, and they didn't support him.

Though there is growing division among the Ukrainian military ranks as to loyalty in this revolution, the possibility of violence looms over the entire situation.

The West appears to have decided for the Ukrainian people what their choice is. The EU does not condemn violent actions in Ukraine which are punishable in the West.

I was a Ukrainian folk dancer in my teens, and I toured the country in 1991, shortly before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

There are complicated processes going on in society in the Crimea. There are problems of the Crimean Tatars, the Ukrainian population, the Russian population, the Slavic population in general, but this is Ukraine's domestic political problem.

I will get to the truth, if not in Ukrainian courts, then in international ones. I will fight to my last breath. They want to put me in prison but that won't help. My voice will be heard even louder from prison than now, and the whole world will hear me.

The nationalists' coup in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in February 2014 has hugely scared 2.5 million Russian people living on Crimea. So what did we do? We have not gone to war, we have not fired, not a single person was killed. Our soldiers have merely prevented the Ukrainian troops on Crimea from impeding the freedom of expression of the people.

The conviction of our Ukrainian nation is embedded in the pages of its history.

Trump wants to make peace; he wants to see Ukrainian conflict resolved; he wants to see Ukraine get its territory back. It's crystal clear. With Putin, I think we see glimmers; we see a reason to think maybe they do. But they have to make the choice to do that, and they can very well choose the opposite.

The Terror-Famine of 1932-33 was a dual-purpose by product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw.

I condemn the entry of a Russian so-called humanitarian convoy into Ukrainian territory without the consent of the Ukrainian authorities and without any involvement of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The post-Soviet mafia wove a spider's web of dirty money around the world. Where better to attack it than to start with the Ukrainian criminal heavyweights - the 'family' and its closest circle?

I never complain. I chose the road of fighting with the Ukrainian oligarchy in 1996, and have paid for this with my freedom and that of my husband, my father and my close friends.

I hope that the responsible figures in the Ukrainian leadership will not hinder soldiers in the Ukrainian army from putting down their weapons, if they aren't capable of taking that decision themselves and giving that order, then I hope that they won't prosecute people who want to save their lives and the lives of others.

My mother is Ukrainian. She immigrated to the U.S. from Canada as a child.

I think everyone remembers how certain Russian bureaucrats used to work against the Ukrainian opposition; I think it is hard to drop old habits.

Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.

You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralyzing venom, while the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing.

I am sure that the Ukrainian nation deserves a better life. That is why I have voted for good changes and for stability.

In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those Churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests.

Do I observe holy days and holidays? Yeah, the ritual is very important to me. It's part of being Ukrainian Catholic. So every holy day we're baking pierogis and not eating meat.

Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.

At least Germany and France have recently criticized that the Ukrainian central government has limited certain parts of the autonomy regulations to three years. They were supposed to last permanently.

Ukrainian business must really embrace global competition. We need to understand that competition for resources and clients is not with competitors from across the street or from another city, but with millions of businesses around the world.

I hope that the responsible figures in the Ukrainian leadership will not hinder soldiers in the Ukrainian army from putting down their weapons.

I remain convinced that for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem. Such a policy is Genocide in the classic sense of the word.

I think that most people don't think in terms of an American revolution, they think in terms of a Russian revolution, or even a Ukrainian revolution. But the idea of an American revolution does not occur to most people. And when I came down to the movement milieu seventy-five years ago, the black movement was just starting, and the war in Europe had brought into being the "Double V for Victory" [campaign]: the idea was that we ought to win democracy abroad with democracy at home. And that was the beginning of an American revolution, and most people don't recognize that.

I didn't grow up watching film but as a Ukrainian-American, music and stories and dance are crucial.

I've done a lot of going back and forth with my own writing, in particular translating my English language stuff into Ukrainian - poetry as well as prose. But I actually hate doing it. It is a thankless, mind-numbing process, additionally unpleasant for me because it reminds me of my ambiguous status of not belonging anywhere.

I think that both Russia and other international actors, including those who are more actively engaged in the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis (that is the Federal Republic of Germany and France, the so-called Normandy Quartet, certainly, with close involvement of the United States, and we have intensified our dialogue on this issue), we should all be committed to the full and unconditional implementation of the agreements that were achieved in Minsk. The Minsk Agreements have to be implemented.

You can see the actions that the Russians are trying to take in eastern Ukraine. And so it's so important that we take actions to deter further Russian aggression against the Ukrainian people.

Each year, members of Canada’s Ukrainian community, Parliamentarians and others commemorate the Holodomor at gatherings across the country. In doing so, we honour the memory of those who perished and the legacy of those who survived, including many who found refuge in Canada. It is by remembering the tragedies and atrocities of the past that we can equip ourselves to prevent them from happening again. That is why this national tour, which will reach Canadians of all ages and backgrounds, is an important initiative

I was always creatively stubborn, adverse to editing by others, and wanted to use the kind of Ukrainian we spoke among ourselves rather than the more artificial prescribed literary Ukrainian. The problem was the greatest in prose, where editors would change my language because "it sounded better this way." My poetry they left alone probably out of deference to that hallowed genre.

My first passion was running: I excelled at that starting till the end of the high school. I pretty much cover about 20 miles a night on stage. I basically rechanneled all the athleticism and adrenaline, and everything that's exciting about sports into music. That was my secret weapon, because in Ukrainian punk rock scene - where everything was very gloomy - being athletic was not cool. I didn't publicize anything about my sport past, but I rolled in onstage with a background nobody had, and I became instantly recognized as the wildest performer in the punk-rock scene.

Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence.

I went to elementary school in Goodeve, Saskatchewan, a small Ukrainian town. I played a lot of hockey, a lot of ball. Because of that I fit in - everyone wanted me on their team. The guys knew I was a hunter, and they were farmers. They just accepted that. I have lifelong friends from Goodeve.

Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn't want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.

I am the first prime minister of this country of neither English nor French origin. So I determined to bring about a Canadian citizenship that knew no hyphenated consideration....I'm very happy to be able to say that in the House of Commons today in my party we have members of Italian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Chinese and Ukrainian origin and they are all Canadians.