What did Kyiv's parliament commemorate on 8 November 2018?
A look back at a parliamentary resolution on the deportation of Ukrainians from Poland, and an agreement signed days earlier.
What did Ukraine's parliament decide on 8 November 2018? The Verkhovna Rada adopted a resolution on marking at state level the 75th anniversary of the start of the deportation of Ukrainians from Poland, which took place in 1944–1951.
The resolution placed the remembrance of those deportations on the state's official calendar of commemorations. It concerned a specific historical episode: the deportation of Ukrainians from Poland across the years 1944 to 1951.
A few days earlier, on 3 November 2018, President Petro Poroshenko signed an agreement on cooperation with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. The two developments were separate, and nothing in the reporting from those days links one to the other.
Taken together, they show public life in Ukraine in early November 2018 engaging with both historical memory and relations with a major figure in the Orthodox world. The parliamentary decision of 8 November was an act of official commemoration, adopted by the legislature as a formal resolution.
