It's been a good week for Moscow vis-a-vis ties with their Slavic brethren in Ukraine. First, the Kremlin secured a 25-year extension to the lease for its Black Sea fleet. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin smirked smugly as Ukrainian lawmakers rocked and socked amid the a haze from smoke bombs to ratify the extension, which opposition gadflies blasted as a sellout of Ukraine's sovereignty. For Russia, Yanukovich was paying immediate dividends. But he wasn't finished. Now, Yanukovich has had a rethink on the Holodomor, the Stalin-era 1930s famine that Ukrainian patriots, as well as more than a dozen countries, have classified as a genocide.Yanukovich said that Holodomor was “a consequence of Stalin’s totalitarian regime,” but cannot be called genocide against any particular nation, since mass famine was a tragedy for all countries in the Soviet Union.
They are some of the gorier allegations to come out of the Kosovo conflict. In the summer of 1999 as the war was entering its final days it's alleged Kosovo Albanians first kidnapped then transported some 300 people, namely Serbs, to Albania where their organs were "harvested" for sale abroad.
The chilling allegations briefly grabbed headlines in 2008 when former chief UN prosecutor Carla Del Ponte published lots of circumstantial evidence in her book, "The Hunt." Now, Serb investigators say they have witnesses to some of the gruesome deeds and further information on who some of the victims may have been.
