In his latest report, UCSJ's Kiev monitor Vyacheslav Likhachyov presents a mixed picture of racist violence in Ukraine. On the one hand, Ukrainian courts have finally begun to convict suspects under hate crimes and hate speech statutes that were, until this year, essentially moribund. However, the fact that the vast majority of the attacks reported did not result in the detention and prosecution of any suspects demonstrates that serious flaws remain in the way law enforcement agencies respond to attacks on minorities.

Nevertheless, the number of reported attacks has decreased since the record number of assaults reported by Mr. Likhachyov in his previous report. It is too early to tell whether or not this is a statistical anomaly, the result of better police practices, or some other factors.

On April 2, police, SBU (the KGB's heir), and foreign ministry officials held a roundtable in Kiev with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on "Problems of Fighting Racism in Ukraine." Ministry of Interior (MVD) officials announced that they will soon create special units to investigate racist violence in Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, Lviv, and Lugansk. An SBU official, Nikolai Kalashkin, said that there were about 100 incidents of xenophobia in Ukraine last year, 20% of them directed against Jews.

In contrast to this news of positive action and official recognition of the scale of the problem after years of denials from various branches of government, Aleksandr Gorin, a foreign ministry official in charge of racism issues, denied that there is racism as a social tendency in Ukraine, even though there are individual incidents that need to be combated.

On April 3 in Ternopil, a group of youths attacked a dormitory for foreign students at the local medical school. The students were able to find safety inside the building after an alert watchman locked the door in time to stop the rampaging youths. He suffered a blow to the head. That same day, a group of youths attacked an Indian student outside the El Dorado store, sending him to the hospital. The dean of foreign students at the university said that this is not the first such attack too have taken place recently. The local SBU responded by opening a hot line for victims of hate crimes, but at the same time denied that any such incident had taken place in the region, despite a series of attacks on Arab students last year.

On April 10, SBU officials detained a suspect in a February 19 attack on a citizen of Turkmenistan in Kiev. The suspect faces "hooliganism" charges and was released after signing a pledge not to leave the city. There is no information in the report indicating that other suspects in the attack, which resulted in the victim's hospitalization, have been detained. Vasily Gritsak, head of Kiev's SBU, announced that the SBU is conducting a review of several cases involving assaults on foreigners.

On April 11, vandals destroyed 39 gravestones at a Muslim cemetery in the village of Chistenkoe, Republic of Crimea. The vandals painted racist slogans and drawings on the fence. On April 17, top police officials in Crimea ordered police units to organize the protection of Muslim religious sites.

On April 15 in Zhitomir, for the second time in two years, vandals attacked a memorial over the grave of a famous local disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Aaron. On November 2007, vandals painted antisemitic graffiti on the grave memorial, but police refused to open an investigation, arguing that there was "an absence of a crime." A few days later, police reported that they had "solved the case." According to investigators, the fire was an accident rather than arson. Three teenagers were playing soccer near the cemetery and lit a fire on the cemetery grounds in order to warm up. The fire got out of a control and burned down the memorial.

On April 17, two potentially ground-backing cases ended in guilty verdicts in separate court rooms in Kiev. In both trials, defendants were convicted of actions aimed at inciting ethnic hatred under Article 161 of the criminal code, only the second and third time in all of Ukraine's post-Soviet history that an Article 161 prosecution was successfully applied in relation to a hate crime.

In the Podolsky District Court, Vyacheslav Dmitruk, 18, was sentenced to three years in prison under Article 161 for attacking a Japanese tourist. The same day, the Darnitsky District Court ended the trial of four suspects accused of murdering a Nigerian citizen last October. Kunon Mievi Godi, 44, who lived for many years in Ukraine, was killed on the evening of October 25, 2006. Eyewitnesses reported that the attackers shouted racist slogans. Mievi, who is survived by a Ukrainian wife and a son, died of knife wounds before police arrived. He had a Ph.D. and worked for an oil company in the city.

The judge found one suspect guilty of first degree murder and incitement of ethnic hatred and sentenced him to 11 years in prison. A second defendant, a young woman, was convicted solely of ethnic incitement and got four and a half years. A third defendant avoided prison through and an amnesty, while another was treated as a witness.

Despite a rising number of attacks on ethnic minorities in Ukraine, until April 17, there had been only one successful hate crimes prosecution in Ukraine, and even in that case (the trial of several neo-Nazis who attacked a synagogue in Kiev while screaming "Death to the Yids!"), the chief organizer of the assault, Dmitry Volkov, was let out of prison early.

Also on April 17 in Kiev, five youths assaulted a dark-skinned academic who works at the Eastern European Institute of Development.

On April 22, a Kirovograd court convicted and then immediately amnestied a high school teacher who incited his pupils to murder Jews. This case represents the first successful hate speech conviction in Ukrainian legal history (a previous verdict against the newspaper "Silski Visti" was overturned after the Orange Revolution). Nikolai Yakimchuk was convicted of violating Article 161 of the Criminal Code for telling his pupils: "Jews, children, are bad, arrogant people… They should be eliminated, they have no place amongst people." (Not included in Likhachyov's report is that Valid Arfush, head of the NGO SOS Racism, reported in an interview published on July 1 in the Kiev newspaper "Stolichnye Novosti" that Mr. Yakimchuk continues to teach at the same school.)

On April 24, an act of vandalism was discovered at a Jewish cemetery in Bolgrad, Odessa Region. Vandals damaged 11 gravestones some time after Hitler's birthday, April 20.

On April 25, a Nigerian student was attacked in Nikolaev. The victim was found unconscious near his dormitory at the Nikolaev Ship-Building University. Local media characterized the victim as a troublemaker and denied that the attack was motivated by racism. On April 28, Nigerian businessman Zumex Innocent was attacked in Donetsk. Late in April, a group of five boys and four girls attacked an Iranian medical student in Kiev.

On May 1, a group of youths attacked an Afghan refugee in Kiev.

On May 5-7, UCSJ and its partner organizations in Ukraine held a training session and a public meeting to discuss the growing problem of racist violence.

On May 6, a Kiev court convicted four youths on charges of murder motivated by ethnic hatred on hate crimes. This latest sentence—only the fourth time a Ukrainian court has convicted anyone on hate crimes charges—was the third such conviction in two months (the first took place four years ago), perhaps showing that the criminal justice system is finally taking the problem of neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine seriously. The defendants were sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Details of the case that were not mentioned in Mr. Likhachyov's report emerged in an article by the local newspaper "Fakty i Kommentarii" dated May 16. The defendants were found guilty of the April 23, 2007 murder of a 31 year old Korean man, Kang Jong Von. The victim reportedly came to Ukraine out of love for the local culture and a desire to perfect his command of the Ukrainian language. He succumbed to his injuries.

The defendants, aged between 17 and 20, come for the most part from broken homes. One of the defendants sports a swastika tattoo, which he got after serving in the army, an experience that his mother said changed an already troubled youth for the worse. Multiple witnesses testified that the defendants screamed racist abuse while attacking their victim and that the defendant with the swastika tattoo jumped on his head with heavy boots as he lay prone on the ground. A police official was quoted in the article saying that the "surprising level of cruelty" the victim suffered, along with the language the defendants used during the attack ("slant eyes," "this is Slavic land and we are the masters here," etc.) pointed to ethnic hatred as the motive for the killing.

The defendants reportedly showed no regret during the trial and laughed at a witness from the Korean embassy. Only one of their parents reportedly bothered to apologize to the victim's family, though she did so privately, saying that she couldn't come to the trial out of shame for what her son had done. Another mother, however, was spotted wearing the typical boots that neo-Nazis favor, and some parents and other supporters of the defendants reportedly attacked journalists trying to cover the trial. A group of young people stood up in the courtroom and made the fascist salute after the sentence was read.

On May 9, eight youths aged 15-16 dressed like neo-Nazis savagely beat a 12 year old Armenian boy. The assailants knocked Zhan Asatryan to the ground and then kicked him repeatedly, all the while filming the attack. The victim was hospitalized.

On May 18 in Lviv, four youths attacked an Indian man walking in a park with a young woman. On May 20, a half dozen youths in Kiev attacked the 17-year-old son of an Indian diplomat.

On May 29, two young men stabbed a Nigerian man to death in Kiev. The victim lived for many years in Kiev and worked at the Shulyavsky market. Police denied that the motivation for the killing was racism.

On June 6 three young men, one of them with a shaven head, surrounded an Uzbek man in Kiev, shot tear gas into his face, and then beat him to the ground and kicked him multiple times. The victim was hospitalized with broken ribs and damage to his lungs and kidneys.

On June 10, a citizen of Israel wearing the traditional clothing of Chassidic Jews was kidnapped and beaten by antisemites n Odessa. Avi Chazan was on his way back from a pilgrimage to Uman where the founder of Chasidism is buried when he hailed a taxi. Two young men who sat in the car took him outside the city and beat him. He was not robbed, making the likelihood of the attack being motivated by antisemitism likely. Chazan left Ukraine the next day and did not file a report with the police.

On June 19, a Palestinian medical student was found dead on near his dormitory in Kiev. Two drunken businessmen were detained; they reportedly saw the victim walking with a young woman and asked him "what are you doing here?" before beating him to death. Police denied that the killing was motivated by racism.

On June 25, the media reported that a vandal who painted swastikas and neo-Nazi slogans on a mausoleum over the grave of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak, a famous Berdichev rabbi who died in 1810, was sentenced to one and a half years in prison. The 20-year-old defendant was charged under Article 297 of the Criminal Code (desecrating graves), but not a hate crime.

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