the crime had been committed, she was roughed up by Kyiv police. Some members of the
Katelnytsky family were arrested. The murders are considered to have been politically
motivated. Volodymyr Katelnytsky's funeral was attended by some two thousand mourners.
The life of Volodymyr Katelnytsky
Volodymyr Katelnytsky was a professional journalist. He was active in the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church, Kyiv Patriarchate, was head of the Brotherhood of St. Andrej
Pervozvanyi in Kyiv, and supervised the tour of the chief cities of Ukraine by
Metropolitan Wasyl in May 1993. He was also active politically, serving as Deputy Head
of the Ukrainian Christian Democratic Party. In Canada and the United States, he may be
best remembered for the role he played as President of the Committee for the Defense of
John Demjanjuk.
Also prominent among Volodymyr Katelnytsky's activities was the dissemination of a
Ukrainian version of what happened at Babyn Yar, similar, I believe, to the version
advocated on the Ukrainian Archive. One result of Volodymyr Katelnytsky's Babyn Yar
activities is that he was sued for them by Jewish organizations in Ukrainian court, that
in his defense he brought forward historical aerial reconnaissance photographs showing
that none of the activities said to have taken place at Babyn Yar was visible from the
air - not visible, that is, were signs of the execution and burial of 33,771 Jews, or
the later disinterment and burning of their bodies. As a result of his convincing
defense, the court acquitted Volodymyr Katelnytsky of the charges brought against him.
Who murdered Volodymyr Katelnytsky?
As we have no direct evidence of who murdered Volodymyr Katelnytsky, we can only perform
a Cui bono? analysis which will at least tell us where to start looking. That is, if it
is the case that the three most prominent events in Volodymyr Katelnytsky's life were:
(1) that he defended John Demjanjuk, (2) that he contradicted the Soviet-inspired
Holocaust version of the Babyn Yar story, and (3) that he was tortured to death along
with his mother, then it would take a mental paralysis with which I have not as yet been
seized to refuse to consider the first two of these events as possibly having caused the
third.
I don't accuse you of having failed to cover the Katelnytsky assassination.
As you broadcast the Ugly Face of Freedom on 23 October 1994 and Volodymyr Katelnytsky's
assassination did not take place until 7-8 July 1997, I obviously do not accuse you of
having failed to cover the Katelnytsky assassination in your broadcast.
But I do accuse you of having missed the big story of which Katelnytsky's
assassination is but one piece.
However, the persecution and assassination of Ukrainians did not begin in 1997. It
began hundreds of years earlier, carried right up until your broadcast in 1994, and
continued through 1997 to this day. What I do accuse you of, then, is ignoring a
centuries-long stream of evidence attesting to the persecution of Ukrainians, and of
broadcasting instead the story of the persecution of Russians and Jews even in the
absence of evidence. Your investigations in Ukraine failed to turn up anything like a
story of a prominent Russian activist being tortured to death in his apartment, whether
along with his mother or alone. And your investigations in Ukraine failed to turn up
anything like a story of a prominent Jewish activist being tortured to death in his
apartment, whether along with his mother or alone. The story that you would have been
able to document, but that you chose to ignore, is that Ukraine is a nation which is
ruled by Russians and Jews, and in which Ukrainians are routinely persecuted and
murdered.
And I do accuse you of having helped cause Katelnytsky's assassination.