Ukraine and Russia: facts and fancies

March 14, 2014 / Posted in  Church history, Russia, Ukraine

Russophiles and those terrified of alienating the Big Russian Bear in 2013, after the heart of the former Soviet Empire survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and later dismemberment, claim that the nation known as the Ukraine has always been a part of Russia. This is a lie.

The Ukraine has been inhabited for at least forty four thousand years.¹ The horse was first domesticated in the Ukraine.²

All evidence points to the Ukraine as the primer site of the origins of the Proto-Indo-European language family,³ and it was the birthplace of what became, later, the medieval state of Kievan Rus (was known as the “land of the Rus'” (Old East Slavic: Рѹ́сьскаѧ землѧ, from the ethnonym Рѹ́сь; Greek: Ῥώς; Arabic: الروس or ar-Rws), in Greek as Ῥωσία) composed of a loose federation of East Slavs established by the Varangians or Varyags (Old Norse: Væringjar; Greek: Βάραγγοι, Βαριάγοι, Varangoi, Variagoi) was the name given by Greeks and East Slavs to Vikings in the 9th century (882-912, beginning with Prince Oleg who ruled by conquest, moved his capital to Kiev and conquered Byzantium) as the first historically recorded East Slavic state.

What this settlement means is that it was an embryonic feeding ground for what would become Russia patterned after the Norse where the Latin Rut(h)enia was known as Garðaríki as the Ukrainians not only gave birth to the Norsemen (Fins, Swedes and Norwegians) but also to Russia.

While early Ukraine and the territories that would become the home of the Rus (red-beards): Russia did experience some Christian proselytization before the Council of Nicaea (325 CE), it was not universally hailed, adopted or encouraged until later. The formal governmental imposition of Christianity, a faith for centuries hated and despised, in Rus’ occurred at in 988 and then only after numerous genocide wars and tortures of forced conversions. The major cause of the Christianization of Kievan Rus’ was the Grand-Duke, Vladimir the Great (Volodymyr) who ruled 980-1015 and issued a decree that all inhabitants of Kiev “and beyond” were to convert or die.

Vladimir Sviatoslavich the Great (Old East Slavic: Володимѣръ Свѧтославичь, Old Norse as Valdamarr Sveinaldsson, Russian: Влади́мир, Vladimir, Ukrainian: Володимир, Volodymyr, Belarusian: Уладзiмiр, Uladzimir as he is celebrated in each culture; c. 958 – 15 July 1015 was known in his life time as Vladimir of Kiev), was the bastard son of Sviatoslav I of Kiev by his housekeeper Malusha. He was later canonized as a saint who was known more for blood-letting than prayer, rapine and pillage than helping the poor and who had none of the qualities of the New Testament Jesus, as was his grandmother Princess Olga who was not pious until old age, yet Vladimir found the gold and promises of power and land proffered by princes of the churches and monks too great not to convert to Christianity.  Ruthlessly he suppressed dissent and rebellion, confiscating land and cattle for those who did not follow his lead.

Vladimir’s interest in Christianity was midwifed by his grandmother, Princess Olga, who saw in Christianity the façade required to gain more wealth and power. The principles of the religion meant nothing to the princess who was obsessed with gold and fine clothes and found emotional strength in the priests and prelates who were apologists for enriching the noble family, through the Rus’ Justice. Later, an enduring part of the East-Slavic legal tradition was set down by the Kievan ruler, Yaroslav I, who promulgated the Russkaya Pravda (the Ukrainian: Руська Правда, Rus’ka Pravda or Truth of Rus’) that was patterned after Norse thought and government and endured through the Lithuanian period of Rus’. The Rus’skaya Pravda bore no similarity to the laws and rules of the Byzantine Empire: it did not include capital or corporal punishment, for example. It was aimed against major wealth by denying lenders the assumed right of charging usurious rates for loans regardless of purpose. It separated responsibility and recognized gender, unlike the transmogrification of human equality envisioned in the mincing words of the redactors of Paul’s epistles written between the late first and fifth centuries yet passed off later as being contemporary with the message of the New Testament Jesus that the letters countered and diminished dramatically in thought and context.  The problem with the use and employment of the Rus’skaya Pravda by Russian authorities is it was allowed to stray away from intent and be transmogrified into a document that elevated the wealth and power of the aristocracy and royalty at the expense of the people it was to protect.

Uniquely, the text of the Rus’skaya was the very nail that was nailed into the unity of Russia and made criminals of the poor while allowing the predatory priests and monks to run over the poor and excuse the excesses of the boars and cossacks who trampled the meager gardens of the poor and to rape with impunity the children of those subjected to the strong hand of the Russian Orthodox Inquisition.  While the Christians since 1800 followed the ideas and messages preached by the various Christian priests and prelates in Kiev and outside of the general center for Slavs from 892 to 1860 about the value of the Pravda Rus’skaya, the self-congratulation over the possession of such a document to be used in determining justice for crimes against people and also against property, and to preserve the integrity and purpose of the community based on the value of each as was determined in the ninth century claiming the tract to trace its roots to ancient Israel and through the sentences written by Christian apologists, the document has little to none of that history or indebtedness.  For example, the third code of the Rus’skaya reads: “If anyone murders a man in a rampage, and the villain is not being sought, then the community where the victim’s head lies pays a vera (fee to the knyaz) of 80 grivnas; or be he a commoner, then 40 grivnas (note: this was a fortune; a horse cost two grivnas, and a serf 1/2 grivna).” The value of a person in work is also clearly stated in the seventh code: “And such is the law for Yaroslav’s vera collector: the vera collector takes 7 buckets of hops per week, also sheep or a meat carcass or 2 nogata (1 nogata = 1/20th of grivna); and on a Wednesday cheese and a marten pelt; and the same on Friday; and give him two chickens per day; and seven breads per week; and seven measures of grain; and seven measures of peas; and seven measures of salt; this for a vera collector with a man; and for him 4 horses, which be given a measure of oats; for vera collector 8 grivnas and 10 kunas in fees, and for the pageboy 12 squirrel pelts; and a grivna when he goes away, and for each victim 3 grivnas.” Code 57 addresses the issue of theft: “If a debtor steals something, the master is in his right; when the debtor is caught the master may reimburse the victim for his horse or whatever else, and makes the debtor his serf; or if the master does not want to reimburse, then he may sell his debtor into serfdom, and reimburse the victim from that, and keep the rest.”  Whose word would be accepted as a witness is the base for number 59: “A serf may not be a witness; but if there are no free witnesses, then a serf caretaker may bear witness, but any others may not. And for minor cases a debtor may be a witness.”  Far from the Rus’skaya Pravda being framed around Biblical injunction–in an age considered pagan–instead, the Rus’skaya Pravda had its antecedent going back to the Code of Hammurabi valuing and evaluating the worth of a labor, a woman, and so forth.

A grivna (Russian),: гривьна), grzywna (Proto-Polish) or hryvnia (Ukrainian: гри́вня ) was a measure of weight, mainly for gold and silver.  It was commonly used throughout medieval central Europe, and was popular particularly in Poland, Bohemia and the Rus lands. Fines were costly and could bankrupt most people.⁴

Religions in general and Christianity specifically led to numerous blood baths of holy wars to capture not only the hearts and minds of the unaffiliated and the poor to be subjected to the rich and powerful who liberally interpreted the words of St. Paul who was a trumpet blast for all who followed the teachings of Paul would submit themselves to their rulers (Hebrews 13:1, 17), but brought about a bastardization of any message of hope except in the world to come (1 Corinthians 3:22).  The problem with this that few knew, or if they did they did not waste time explaining it to those without a basic education, is that both verses were later additions.  Papyrus 126, designated by siglum ¹²⁶, is a copy of the papyrus manuscript of the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is dated to the fourth century–long after Paul and any of his contemporaries had died and has no autograph.  1 Corinthians 3 is not even written before 450 CE, and then it is haphazard and incomplete; it is Papyrus 14 and designated by siglum ¹⁴. The evolving Russian patriarchy and Orthodox congregations leagued ultimately behind Moscow worked strenuously to counter any egalitarianism that existed in the early days of chrestianos to emphasize the brutality of later tactics of the christianos that the Emperor Constantine I depended on and that the future Tsars of Rus would expect to be their model.

Religion was, as it always has been, the portal through which the rich would achieve profit and plenty and the poor be pushed into abject poverty. Few (if any, as I argue elsewhere) leaders were truly religious and their canonizations after death (and a few before they died) were but a copy of the deification of ancient Roman emperors as part of a state program. This idea that nobility and noble born was a criteria for sainthood pulsed through Slavic Christianity and remains a part of the Russian Orthodox sphere of influence as seen in the canonization of the pathetic family of Romanovs who were contemptuous of the poor and did nothing to stop the Boars and their gaggles of goons from overriding peasant gardens and schools with wanton butchery,⁵ and yet were deified by former KGB agent turned patriarch Kirill I of Our Savior’s cathedral (Moscow) by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad on 1 November 1981 with strong ant-Semitic references, and on August 20, 2000,⁶ the declaration raising the Romanovs to the altar of Orthodox Christianity, coming after prolonged and heated debate openly laced with broad anti-Semitic vitriol and denunciation of the weak attempts of the Romanovs to stop the brutality against the poor in Russia was aired with Romanov apologists defending the family for its lackluster interest in the poor and struggling people, the elevation to sainthood was confirmed.

The Romanov family was canonized as passion bearers by the Moscow Patriarchate. Moscow justified the absurdity of their canonization by declaring the family accepted their execution with resignation in the manner of Jesus facing his death and even portrayed them wearing costumes of antiquity and sporting the crowns of martyrs in keeping with the thrust of Russian Orthodoxy.⁷ The Tsar had become, and was officially proclaimed, to be the embodiment of Christian values, and Moscow was hailed as the Third Rome⁸—giving later pretenders from Putin to Kirill I who jointly marshaled their forces to reestablish rule over Russia equal to that of the Tsars and received the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church the anointing required to conquer the world for Christ and Mother Russia.⁹ Even though the dead Tsar Nicholas II was anything but a holy man, and those he persecuted openly remembered him and bestowed on the Tsar the nickname Bloody Nicholas because of the Khodynka Tragedy, the ever-intensifying and increasing anti-Semitic pogroms with displacing Jews to slaughtering them in their gardens and homes, Bloody Sunday, his violent suppression of the 1905 Revolution, his execution of political opponents, and his pursuit of military campaigns on an unprecedented scale, Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church with the strong arm of Putin and his KGB, erased dissension among Russians by incarcerating anyone who spoke out against the newly created saints or the rule of Putin and Kirill by imprisoning and torturing those who would not be silent, as with Pussy Riot and other groups who exposed the duplicity and corruption of the Putin-Kirill alliance. Putin and Kirill even attempted to erase the late Tsar’s open slander of Russian and world Jews as Christ-killers that had won the adulation of Old Believers, evangelical extremists and racists, but used the image of the Tsar as a man for all Russia: another lie used regularly by Russophiles against the Ukraine and in favor of Russia once more incorporating the province of Crimea.

The Old Believers, many of whom were deported to the Crimea and forcefully entered into the Ukraine retained their beliefs, especially on messianic battles and hatred for all that is not the Russia they remembered, all the while blessing themselves with two fingers as their icon portray Jesus, but was damned by the modern Russian Orthodox Church. The fact that Putin and Kirill I are part of the End Time Messianic movement and believe in global conflict to usher in the reign of the Messiah after a costly battle must be considered when reviewing current status in the Ukraine that is seen as a longtime battleground in Russian mythology and religious exercises. Old Believers take their religious practices not from books or letters or gospels or any written work  but are lavishly devoted to the iconography of the old church that spelled out religion simply without modern glorification of novel ideas. To the Old Believers, as with evangelical extremists everywhere, they took the message preached from a Bible they understood to build their life on–and with that came the promise of a Final Battle and the return of a blood-soaked Jesus riding out of the heavens on a horse. He would be joined by the Romanovs, regardless of how inept the Russian imperial family was, as the crown was considered to be that which Jesus would place on his own head after the Great Battle in keeping with the purloined passages in Revelation 19.

The Romanov family has been designated as new martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.  The organization is heavily funded by the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA, and with the power of patronage and passion rising in those who saw themselves as displaced from Mother Russia because of the Revolution, were determined to have the Romanovs declared passion bearers throughout the Russian Orthodox Church.

The family, under the psychological control by the insane monk Rasputin of the Russian Orthodox Church, was executed on 17 July 1918 following their conviction of corruption and attacks on the poor of Russia by the Bolsheviks at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia.  Rasputin had a firm grip on the Romanovs, preaching an End Time horror scenario equal that of Tom and Beverly LeHaye, and from their terror he amassed control over women and even men, making several princes plot his death.

To those who believed in the Last Days, Rasputin was a god-send, sent to earth to prepare for cataclysmic conflicts and “great pain and bloodshed”–that to various degrees did affect the mentality of the Romanov so that they walked meekly to their own fate and death. It is reported that the Romanovs were confident that they would issue in a final time when Jesus would come at last after 2000 years–they had grown tired of waiting. To ignore the millennial beliefs and expectations of the Russians ignores a significant part of the psychology of those standing for Russia in the Crimea–and actually welcoming conflict and nuclear holocaust so as to awaken a sleeping Jesus and introduce the End Times. The Apocalyptic vision of the mentally tormented John of Patmos graphically preached by the insane monk Rasputin found its way not only into the private drawing rooms of the Tsarina and the chambers of her children, but branched out swiftly like a virus among the nobility, except for a few who plotted to assassinate Rasputin and save the monarchy and Mother Russia.  A feigned mystic and former peasant Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (baptized on January 22, O.S. January 10, 1869) who preached hate identical to the rants of Scott Lively of California and Massachusetts, was murdered on December 30, O.S. 17 December 17, 1916, by 29-years-old Felix Yusupov (Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov, Count Sumarokov-Elston: Князь Фéликс Фéликсович Юсýпов, Граф Сумароков-Эльстон; born March 23, 1887 at St Petersburg, – died September 27, 1967 at Paris, France; he married Irina Aleksandrovna Romanova, the only niece of the Tsar) and 47-years old Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich (Владимир Митрофанович Пуришкевич was born August 12, 1870 at Kishinev – died February 1, 1920, in Novorossiysk, Russia), a Russian conservative politician, noted for his monarchist, ultra-nationalist and antisemitic views, after others failed at their attempts to free Russia from a man who was never a monk nor a saint, and whose wife and daughter left him (the daughter eventually traveled to the USA where she became an animal trainer for a circus).

To make the odious family seem more like ancient Christians, who were seldom spiritual people, the site of their execution is now beneath the altar of The Church of Blood.  Where the Romanovs died is today considered sacred ground and fit for the Messiah to engage in battle with the forces of darkness.¹⁰

The various principalities of Rus’ devolved into conflict among themselves as the princes claimed superiority over their counterparts and none having any interest in the laborer. This decline was in spite of the efforts of Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh who sought unity among the smaller states.

The decline of the confederation of Rus began in the 12th century. In Rus’ propria, the Kiev region, the nascent Rus’ principalities of Halych and Volynia extended their rule. In the north, the name of Moscow appears in the historical record in the principality of Suzdal, which gave rise to the nation of Russia. In the north-west, the principality of Polotsk increasingly asserted the autonomy of Belarus’. Kiev was sacked by Vladimir principality (1169) in the power struggle between princes and later by Cumans and Mongol raiders in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, respectively.¹¹

The territory that today is known as the Ukraine emerged as a powerful nation in the early Middle Ages but disintegrated in the twelfth century because of numerous baronial conflicts and wars over religion especially between Old Believers and the novel invention of Christianity. By the middle of the 14th century, present Ukrainian territories were under the rule of three external powers: the Golden Horde which was composed of Tatars: Алтын Урда Altın Urda; Mongolians: Зүчийн улс, Züchii-in Uls; and a few wild Rus tribes: Золотая Орда;¹² the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Lithuanians were one of the polytheistic Baltic tribes from Aukštaitija) that was the largest nation in Europe in the fifteenth century,¹³ The pagan state was targeted for extinction by the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches that employed the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order in hope of reigning in the Lithuanian expansion—an effort doomed to failure under Algirdas who supported paganism that was sustained until his successor Jogaila agreed to the Union of Krewo in 1386 that brought with it a bloody conversion into Catholicism with women, babies, and elderly slaughtered by monks in the name and praise of their god: Kiaupa, Z. (2003). “Algirdas ir LDK rytų politika.” Gimtoji istorija 2: Nuo 7 iki 12 klasės (Lietuvos istorijos vadovėlis). CD. Elektroninės leidybos namai: Vilnius. Cf. Jučas, Mečislovas (2000), Lietuvos ir Lenkijos unija, Aidai.] and the Kingdom of Poland (Królestwo Polskie) that came into being with the hated Union of Krewo (based on Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania wedding the underage reigning Queen Jadwiga of Poland and accepting Christianity) that originally had an elected monarchy but with Lithuanian the monarch was from the same family¹⁴—none of these being Russia in any contemporary or historical sense. In this era the Russians were known as Ruthenians who inspired hatred for the slavish devotion to religious Orthodoxy and its accompanying cruelty.

Various wars were fought in the name of converting by force the Lithuanians to Christianity that the pagans saw as a “vile and worthless sect for murderers.”  Even when Jogaila converted to Orthodoxy the Catholics were furious at such an affront to their god and pushed the Teutonic knights to attack with greater fury.  Ultimately, Jogaila, all Lithuanian nobles and “other pagans” were forced to accept Roman Catholicism in exchange for attaching Ruthenian lands (Russia) to the Crown of Poland.  The Rus were not always great warriors based on conquest, but did lose battles like other nations–it was not until later these loses were poorly covered up and young people taught that the Rus were invincible. ¹⁵

During the fifteenth century these lands came under the rule of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth (since 1569), and Crimean Khanate. There was a seething and growing discontent with what was considered the apostasy of Roman Catholicism and against its overlords in the Slavic lands by the Polish conglomerated monarchy and aristocracy that pushed ideas that did not reflect back on the pagan and far-more-authentic past ontologies than the new theologies trucked in by Roman sycophants. The Roman Catholic Church continued to interfere to the point of launching several crusades against Lithuanians who refused to accept the theology of Rome that Lithuanians rejected for centuries.

In 1653 the greater portion of the population rebelled against dominantly Polish Catholic rule, throwing out not only Polish priests and prelates but Roman ritual and belief. In January 1654 an assembly of the people (rada) voted at Pereyaslav to turn to Moscow, effectively joining the southeastern portion of the Polish-Lithuanian empire east of the Dnieper River to Russia. After the Partitions of Poland (1772–1795) and conquest of Crimean Khanate, Ukraine was divided between Russia and Austria, thus the largest part of Ukraine was integrated into the Russian Empire, with the rest under Austrian (known as Austro-Hungarian since 1849) control.

After the Russian Revolution, the Ukraine was internationally recognized as an independent Ukrainian People’s Republic that was emerging from its own civil war. With the rise of the Soviets, the battled the Soviets that resulted in the Soviet Army establishing control in late 1919. The new Russian Bear created the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that on December 30, 1922 became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union but with little autonomy and no direct decision making rights and the Ukraine quickly became an unwanted and hated stepchild.

The Soviet government was hostile to Ukrainian language and culture. The Soviets quickly began mass repressions of Ukrainian poets, historians and linguists before launching one of the greatest Russian genocide campaigns in its blood-soaked history. Millions of Ukrainian people were deliberately, diabolically and draconian starved to death in 1932 and 1933 in the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, “Extermination by hunger” that was gleaned from the phrase ‘Морити голодом’, “Killing by Starvation”) that was a man-made famine that claimed the lives of 7.5 million Ukrainians.¹⁶

After NAZI Germany invaded Poland in 1939 the Soviets invaded the Ukrainian Soviet Social Republic (SSR) territory and enlarged it westward. During World War II the Ukrainian Insurgent Army tried to reestablish Ukrainian independence and fought against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, while its detractors were wrongfully claiming that Ukrainians were both NAZI and Soviet. The Nazis demanded a deadly cost and deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who had fought Storm Troopers of the Third Reich and their henchmen who had commandeered command posts in Ukraine. Those who had sided with the Soviets against the Third Reich were automatically executed when found.  However, the Putin propaganda machine that is belched on the Internet by Russophiles in the USA military and civilian population continues the Nazi lie today, even gaining space in a once-time objective media AlterNet.com.

The perceived need for military intervention against a free Ukraine comes from USA military and evangelical extremists in the military. It finds its strongest apologist for Putin and Putin’s putsch among the USA military and neoconservatives (neocons) within the evangelical community and militant arm of its churches that are straining to force their Jesus to ride out on a horse with his white robes covered with human blood of his enemies and carrying an AR-15 Assault Rifle to kill all who question his military authority, according to Three Star USA General Jerry Boykin who sees Jesus as “a tough guy and real “man’s man”.¹⁷

Boykin has gone on the lecture circuit to radical right religious groups that crave a cataclysmic war.  Each step he takes he makes the miscreant message that Jesus is coming soon and will be drenched in the blood of those he slays who oppose him. He is received with hosannas and praise especially at USA military installations and schools with a far right group of chaplains in control of the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

In 1941 Ukraine was occupied by Nazi Germany. It was not liberated until 1944 and that liberation pushed it into deeper slaver within the Soviet Union.

In 1945, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations. In 1954, Ukraine expanded to the south with the transfer of the Crimea from a weakened Soviet Union that relinquished its claim to the lands that had been Ukrainian in the past.

In 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine again became independent in fact as well as in name. This dissolution started a period of transition to a market economy, in which Ukraine suffered an eight-year recession.  Following the recession and change over to a market economy, the Ukrainian economy experienced a high increase in GDP growth and continued through 2007 to be an economic miracle.

In 2008, with the war in Iraq draining USA, UK, and other treasuries and no victory appeared in sight, the Ukraine was caught up in the worldwide economic crisis in 2008.  Its economy plunged along with most of the rest of the world. Ukraine’s GDP fell 20% from spring 2008 to spring 2009, and then leveled off as analysts compared the magnitude of the downturn to the worst years of economic depression during the early 1990s. This led to a new force and a new government that was increasingly more oriented towards Moscow while its people were turning to the European Union (EU) as its kleptomaniac president Viktor Yanukovych, who had originally called for the Ukraine to join the EU.

Yanukovych abandoned his Kiev offices to protestors and fled what he described as a coup after a week of fighting in the streets of the capital where he had assigned assassins to kill those who rejected his rule and reign while Ukrainians were counting their dead that equaled 100 slain and many hurt. Vladimir Putin had counted on Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych (Ві́ктор Фе́дорович Януко́вич) to deliver the Ukraine to him and force it to become a part of what he saw would be a counter to the EU—his own Eurasian Union that would leave him in charge of the eastern world’s economy.¹⁸

Yanukovych had become autocratic as early as 2000.  He had toyed with dissolving the Verkhovna Rada (Верховна Рада України; literally Supreme Council (of Ukraine): a unicameral parliament composed of 450 deputies to increase his power and wealth at the expense of the people of the Ukraine through the Rada.¹⁹ He was denounced by his own party who removed him from office.²⁰

Viktor Yanukovych was never Ukrainian: he was of Russian, Polish and Belarusian origin: his mother was a Russian nurse who died when he was two years old, and his father was a Polish-Belarusian locomotive driver from Yanuki: he died by the time Yanukovych was a teenager. His grandfather and great-grandparents were Polish-Belarusian. He was educated to be an automobile mechanic, but found theft to be more agreeable. He was sentenced to three years in prison on December 15, 1967, at the age of 17, for participating in a robbery and committing an assault.

On June 8, 1970, Viktor Yanukovych was convicted for a second time on charges of assault and sentenced to another two years in prison. On July 11, 2004, he was charged by the Donetsk Oblast Prosecutor with fraud from alleged irregularities in the way his convictions were expunged twenty years earlier. In 2006, the deposed President of the Ukraine was charged with falsifying documentation including forging the signature of the judge overseeing his criminal case.  Viktor Yanukovych even forged the signature on his indictment for battery.

While Viktor Yanukovych claims to have sterling sets of academic credentials, Yanukovych fabricated these claims as well. Viktor Yanukovych was never a professor at the Academy of Economic Sciences of the Ukraine, does not have a Doctor of Economic Sciences, and claims the honorary title from the nonexistent Faculty of Automobile Transport at the Donetsk State Academy of Administration.  The Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine claims to have a list of 23 publications, text books and monographs that Yanukovych listed with his name as author. There are no copies in any library. No one has even seen them.²¹

Like many fundadors of universities in Perú and other poor and backward nations who claim the same for themselves, the sterling academic record, the inflated from nothing list of publications, etc., that Viktor Yanukovych boasts is as weak as the air filtering from his nose.  Yanukovych can barely write, must less create a scholarly article.

Yanukovych even claims the military rank of major, but there is no record of him serving in any military force. No one can remember the deposed president at any school, at any time, as student or lecturer, or receiving any degree.²²  The deposed president had no inheritance, had no record of money earned in a nonexistent military or educational career but lived more grand than even the Romanovs or the current Patriarch Kirill I of Moscow.²³

Both Kirill and Viktor Yanukovych have fine yachts, cars, and houses, but neither has the income to support their luxurious lifestyle–except the poor whom they trample underfoot.²⁴ That such great wealth as Vikto Yanukovych used to build a palace greater than national buildings, and his ties with Ukrainian billionaires leagued with Russia came as a surprise since Yanukovych had come from poverty. When the opulence was met with additional information on Yanukovych’s son becoming equally despotic, the Ukraine mobilized and its parliament deposed the would be emperor of the Ukraine who had won his post in a narrowly contest election.