Is this smart?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew444rk49FI

In the capital city where no less than five avowed racist anti-Russian nationalists hold senior key posts in the new government.

Can you name the five racists and explain why you consider them racists? Their being nationalists doesn't count. "Nationalist" is just a synonym for what Americans would call "a patriot".

Personally, I think preaching in Russian in the Ukraine is as insensitive as preaching in German in Russia in 1945...

I think we're learning what dicks Russians are. They've always treated Mormons badly. You'd think that Mormons would have this figured out by now.

I am a dick then, because I'm a Russian from Moscow, and I don't believe in Mormon BS anymore. Yup, you're right. People over here are not stupid, the Church is dying, even though they have a couple of stakes now.

Nationalism doesn't equate to racism ... BUT it can certainly fuel racism like jet propellant.

Israeli "nationalism" makes one wonder just how we have forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust ... and for Israel itself to be the one's who seem to have forgotten ... it is just appalling.

Hey if they racists then the Mormons will be welcomed with open arms.

It is absolute stupidity.

I know very little about this part of the world except that my father's maternal family (ethnic Germans/Jews, imported into the area by Catherine the Great) lived in that general area for several generations. (I have family photos from the late 1800s.) So I have no special knowledge or expertise at all, but...

This seems to me like a REALLY stupidly dumb thing to do!!!

Who could POSSIBLY think that sending LDS missionaries to a place which is in the midst of a civil war (the roots of which go back centuries!!!) is a good idea?

And if the missionary gets hurt or killed, I guess that's
an expression of God's will, right?

BTW...I hear that Mosul is an area which is ripe for LDS conversions. Maybe opening Iraq ought to be put on the missionary itinerary next?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2014 05:17PM by tevai.

I found a couple of interesting data points. One is the percent of people that use Russian as their language of communication (52% per a 2009 poll of 1,000 respondents).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine

Also, people seem to get along speaking either language to each other.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0315/Ukrainian-vs.-Russian-language-two-tongues-divide-former-Soviet-republic

One thing is for certain. I would be very concerned about one of my family members going to that region of the world right now. They're in a state of civil war and tensions are obviously higher than ever.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2014 05:32PM by Keith Vaught.

Bingo. A lot of Ukrainians speak Russian. The civil war is a long way from Kiev. I was in Brazil during a military dictatorship and a fair amount of civil unrest. Same thing has happened in Argentina, Chile, Ireland, and Quebec, where there were bombings by Quebec Separatists in the 1970s. There has been plenty of civil unrest in various Central American countries over the years.

Basically, going to a place where there is civil unrest or even a low level civil war is not all that dangerous if you are in a different part of the country and/or you use your head to stay away from the hot spots.

My wife is Ukrainian, from Donetsk. (She's almost totally assimilated to American culture, nevermo, but still extremely grateful to be living in Davis county Utah now!) It doesn't make me an expert by any means, but we do talk with her relatives over there when we can via Skype. Things are bad to put it mildly, in Eastern Ukraine but in the rest of the country it's fairly calm, according to them. All that said, I wouldn't want to be an eighteen year old kid set down in the middle of all that. The country is truly sliding into civil war. Russians are NOT popular in Kiev at the moment.

The majority of Kiev population speak Russian. Most people in Ukraine speak Russian as their native language. And nationalism was never patriotism, but fascism. And by the way the native language of people in Ukraine was Russian before bolsheviks in the 20's decided to force them to speak Ukrainian, that was spoken only in a small western territory of Ukraine. The bolsheviks also joined a few Russian territories to make a modern Ukraine so they would get enough support for themselves in the region. Most people speak and think in Russian, it is their native language, including people in Kiev. And ain't got no name yet, you are a real jerk.

You are misinformed about the Ukraine. There were and still ARE plenty of Ukrainian speakers. Its nonsense to say that the Bolsheviks encouraged people to speak Ukrainian. There are parts of the country with majority Russian speakers but the proportion declines further west. No one in my family or my husbands family spoke Russian. All of my family members and in-laws migrated from 1893 to 1929. NONE of them spoke Russian. There was NO Russian spoken in the two Ukrainian Catholic parishes I attended. You would be hard pressed to find a Ukrainian Canadian who was part of the wave of immigration who spoke Russian.

My friend's kids are Ukrainian. They spoke Ukrainian, not Russian, when they were little. She tried to have them keep up with their language studies for a few years, but they only speak English now.

It is possible to request that the kid be sent elsewhere.

My daughter's friend spoke Russian in the *Latvia* mission. (Latvian != slavic language like Ukranian.) Any of the former Soviet republics that allow missionaries do the same.

And yes, Russians are, or were in 1986, openly racist to an extent that would discomfit most educated Westerners. My Russian teacher at Leningrad State University, a Russian trained to teach foreigners their language, fairly often ridiculed Siberian and other "Asian" students who would try for a uni slot at LGU, but somehow were never found capable. She would make slity eye mimes for emphasis.

Latvian isn't a Slavic language. It is one of two Baltic languages, namely Lithuanian and Latvian. Both are parts of the Indo-European language family. In fact, both have retained a number of features of Proto-Indo-European. Estonian isn't a Baltic language. It is, like Finnish and Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language.

I'm unclear what prompted this reply, as I had already made the point.

For the first responder to the OP

This set of symbols or signs, the exclamation point and equals sign placed together != in the original comment means "negate equal" or "does not equal"; it's math.

This set of symbols or signs, =/= can mean the same.

I think you saw the = sign and proceeded erroneously thru simple misunderstanding, from there.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/26/2014 03:49PM by bookratt.

I was in the Baltic States Mission (Lithuania Vilnius Mission back then) and assigned Russian as my language. I later switched to Lithuanian.

In the main cities in the Baltics there are large populations of "Russian" speakers, who may or may not be Russian(Ukrainians, Armenians, Poles, etc), but don't speak the local languages. When I was there, Tallinn was about 50% Russian, the same or more with Riga, and Vilnius was about 20-30%. There are entire neighborhoods where Russian is the primary spoken language. Russians insisted on separate (but equal?) primary and secondary schools that are conducted in Russian to avoid polluting their culture and language with the local one. One of the branch presidents in Klaipeda was a director at one of those schools back then. There are entire small cities like Narve in Estonia or Daugavpils Latvia, where Russian is the language of the majority of the population. If you look up radio and tv stations in these countries you will also find large numbers of them in Russian.

So in a country like the Ukraine there are large populations that need to hear the mighty..cough...gag...trumpet of the Lord in their native tongue!

that comments have now been disabled for this video. Wonder why? (snerk)

There are lots of really nice 'ethnic Russian', Russian-speaking people in all the former Soviet republics. Yes, there is often more racism in the former USSR than you would get in Western Europe - most people even in Kiev would not have the chance to talk to a black or Asian person very often.

Shame that they have to be bothered by religious salesmen though.

My grandson is currently a missionary in Kiev, speaking the Russian language. He has been out just over a year. I worry and want him home, in college, dating nice girls and enjoying the California life. In his emails home, the most used word in "Awesome." No mention of the plane disaster of course.