Euro 2012: 'A Complicated Adventure'

KIEV, Ukraine -- If the pre-vote predictions had been accurate, football heavyweights Italy would be preparing to host the 2012 European Championship. It wasn't a shock on the scale of Qatar's swoop for the 2022 World Cup, but the joint bid from Poland and Ukraine was at one stage considered third favorite to host Euro 2012 -- out of three candidates. But taking advantage of the hooliganism and match-fixing allegations making ugly headlines in Italy back in 2007, Poland and Ukraine stole up on the outside to pip both the 1968 champions and another joint bid from Hungary and Croatia to the honor. Fulfilling UEFA chief Michel Platini's ambition of balancing the power in European football, this will be the first major football tournament in the former Iron Curtain. But as early as 2008, Platini was telling Ukraine to "get going" as the building of new stadiums and improvements in the transport network slipped behind schedule. At one stage, there was even talk of Scotland stepping in as emergency host. By the end of 2011, Platini was diplomatically describing the buildup as a "complicated adventure." "Difficult births often lead to beautiful babies," the French football great concluded in March as Poland and Ukraine finally declared they would be ready for the June 8 kickoff when an estimated worldwide audience of at least 150 million is expected to be watching. Only time will tell whether Platini will return to UEFA's headquarters in Switzerland a proud father. Most major sporting tournaments experience a rocky buildup, Poland and Ukraine's has been at the turbulent end of the scale -- understandably so, given the countries' lack of major event experience coupled with ambitious improvement plans that are reported to have cost $38 billion combined. The stadia are breathtaking. Five of the eight on show during the tournament are brand new, and the existing venues in Kiev, Donetsk and Kharkiv have undergone major developments. The 50,000-capacity, newly-constructed National Stadium in Warsaw will host the opening game between Poland and Greece. Kiev's 60,000-capacity Olympic Stadium, which began life in 1923 as the Red Stadium of Lev Trotsky and hosted games during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, has been completely renovated with a new transparent roof and will host the final on July 1. While the venues have been tested, the transport network will come under scrutiny for the first time when an estimated one million fans descend on the two countries. Ukraine faces a race against time to complete the planned 1,750 kilometers of new roads in time for the start of the tournament. It has also shipped in high-speed trains from South Korea to ease travel between the two host countries. Poland has already accepted that some of its transport improvements -- including the construction of 750 km of new motorways -- may not be ready. "We know not everything will be completed in time for Euro 2012," Poland 2012 communications director Mikolaj Piotrowski told CNN late last year. "But today we can say that a lot of important investment projects will be completed three to five years sooner than without the Euros scenario, so I think it was worth it to see Michel Platini opening the envelope in Cardiff in 2007." If getting around should be manageable for fans, finding somewhere affordable to stay once they get to their destination is an altogether trickier task. England -- traditionally one of the best-supported European teams -- failed to sell out its original allocation of tickets for its group games in Kiev and Donetsk, with many fans opting to stay at home as Ukrainian hotel owners seek to make hay from the tournament by ramping up prices. In April the Football Supporters' Federation said fans were being quoted as much as $1,000 a night for a three-star room. The England team avoided that problem by choosing a base in Krakow, Poland -- even though it will mean thousands of miles of travel between the two countries. If it isn't financial concerns putting off fans, it is the fear of the kind of reception they'll get. The English Foreign Office warns that there has been a recent "increase in hostility" toward gay people in Ukraine and that "travelers of Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent and individuals belonging to religious minorities should take extra care." The families of black England players Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain have already decided against traveling to Ukraine -- and that was before a BBC documentary highlighting racism and violence in the host countries was screened. "It's a major concern," said Oxlade-Chamberlain's father Mark, himself a former England player. "I think your safety is more important than a game of football." Poland, too, has suffered serious problems with racism. "Monkey chanting, banana throwing, that has happened in Polish matches unfortunately," Rafal Pankowski from the campaign group Never Again told CNN. "We want to use the Championships to highlight some of the issues and make a difference in a positive way in terms of anti-racism education." A series of bomb blasts in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine's fourth largest city, in late April only added to the pervading nervousness over traveling to the country, while several EU leaders will boycott the tournament over Ukraine's treatment of imprisoned opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko. Amnesty International, meanwhile, has warned of "widespread police criminality" in Ukraine, leading to concerns that any crowd trouble could be met with a particularly brutal response. UEFA has always accepted that giving Euro 2012 to Poland and Ukraine was a risk. "From the beginning, it was a big challenge to go to Poland and Ukraine," Platini told CNN last month. "Four years ago when all the signs were red, red, red -- stadium, roads, accommodation -- it was not easy. "But I say it was a good risk." And Kiev could witness a historic moment if Spain can follow up 2008's victory and become the first team to successfully defend the title since the tournament began 52 years ago. On a lighter note, we await the predictions of Ukraine's "Psychic Pig" and Poland's "Citta" the elephant with interest. They follow in the footsteps of 2010 World Cup soothsayer Paul the Octopus in what seems to be becoming a curious tradition at major football tournaments. For most pundits, the Spanish are favorites for the title, but they have their problems. Record scorer David Villa and veteran defender Carles Puyol have been ruled out of the tournament, while striker Fernando Torres -- who netted the only goal of the 2008 final -- has endured another torrid season for Chelsea. Their competition looks set to come from Joachim Low's youthful Germany side, 2010 World Cup finalists Netherlands, and perhaps a France team that appears to be back on an even keel under the calming influence of Laurent Blanc. Italy, six years on from the scandal that so seriously damaged the country's chances of hosting the tournament, is embroiled in another match-fixing crisis that led defender Domenico Criscito to be cut from the squad. The English are even less fancied, particularly so among their own pessimistic supporters. Roy Hodgson took up his coaching job just 29 days before the first game against France and has to get the best out of a squad that must survive the first two games without the suspended Wayne Rooney, one of the team's few world-class players. As for the hosts, Poland looks to have the easier group with Czech Republic, Greece and Russia. Ukraine must contend with France, England and Sweden. For 35-year-old national icon Andriy Shevchenko, the tournament is a chance to put the perfect full stop on a 17-year international career. "Ukrainians, our time has come!" declares the team's slogan. UEFA might be hoping it also applies to the country as a whole.

Minister: No EU Deal Before Rada Election

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine must hold free and fair parliamentary elections in October as a condition for signing a comprehensive political and trade deal with the European Union, Economy Minister Petro Poroshenko said Wednesday. The deal - the most comprehensive agreement Brussels has ever prepared with a third country - was initialed on March 30. Its signing, however, was postponed indefinitely amid complaints that Ukraine’s record with democracy has worsened dramatically under President Viktor Yanukovych over the past year. “I’m 100% convinced there will be no deal before the elections,” Poroshenko said at a press conference. “The EU’s consensus position is holding the fair elections, free vote by the people. This is a necessary condition for signing the deal.” Relations between Ukraine and the EU deteriorated after the jailing of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, 51, to seven years in October 2011 on abuse of power charges. She claimed the jailing was a vendetta by Yanukovych. EU leaders have rallied to Tymoshenko's cause, and some have already vowed to skip all Euro-2012 soccer tournament events hosted by Ukraine. The spat has halted Ukraine's progress toward possible EU membership and nudged it further into Russia's orbit amid attempts by Moscow to build closer economic and military alliances with former Soviet republics. Yanukovych said repeatedly he took EU concerns over Tymoshenko seriously and rejected the idea that Kiev's relations with the 27-nation bloc could be irreparably harmed. Foreign ministers of Britain, Sweden, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, in a joint letter published by The New York Times in March, said the relations may further deteriorate if the government blocks opposition leaders from running for seats in Parliament. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy last week that the EU-Ukraine deal may be signed only after Brussels convinced that Kiev respects the rule of law. "The EU and I personally have given a clear message that we will not be ready to sign that agreement until we are confident that Ukraine is living within the spirit of the political association we have conceived, and that of course means active and visible respect for core EU values such as the rule of law," Van Rompuy told Interfax. Not only international leaders, but also the people have noticed the Yanukovych government has been facing problems with democracy in Ukraine. At least 64.4% of Ukrainians are not happy with the level of democracy in the country, compared with 23.1% of those that were happy, according to an opinion poll released Wednesday by Democratic Initiatives and by the Razumkov Center, an independent think tank. At least 50.9% of respondents said democracy is the best political system for Ukraine, compared with 19.6% of those that believe authoritarian regime would probably be better and 18.3% said it did not matter. The companies polled 2,009 respondents with the margin of error at 2.3%.

Ukraine's Prostitutes Hope To Cash In On Euro 2012

KIEV, Ukraine -- Yulia, a 20-year-old call girl, is awaiting Euro 2012 with a mix of excitement and dread. She's upped her fare in the hope of earning enough to go to college next year, but ''every girl is afraid,'' she admits. ''Anything can happen.'' Ukraine has a booming prostitution industry - and the already high number of women scouting the streets, bars and hotels of the country's four host cities for clients is expected to spike even further this month as hundreds of thousands of football fans converge on the country. Experts are warning about the high risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases: Some 1.1 percent of the adult population and nearly one out of 10 prostitutes are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the United Nations AIDS agency. ''They will be playing Ukrainian roulette,'' said Kostiantyn Pertsovskyi, spokesman for the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine, which will be handing out nearly 1 million condoms to fans and prostitutes during the tournament. ''If a fan is not using a condom, he has a very good chance of getting infected.'' La Strada, a Ukrainian women's rights group, is particularly concerned about an increase of underage prostitution, with scores of orphaned or destitute teenagers lured - and often forced - to service clients. Yulia, who declined to give her last name for fear of being prosecuted, has been studying basic English words, communicating with prospective clients online and assembling a new wardrobe of flashy dresses and high-heeled shoes. She's also been learning what she calls ''European manners.'' She plans to raise her hourly rate of 600 hryvna ($75) to 900 hryvna ($115) and hopes to save enough money to go to college next year to study music and fulfill her life dream of becoming a singer. Yulia came to Kiev to escape poverty in her provincial hometown in southern Ukraine where both of her parents are unemployed. With no college education, few skills, no jobs around and a family to support, she became a prostitute at 18. She now earns about 10,000 hryvna ($1,250) per month - averaging about 2-3 clients a day - at hotels, apartments and in cars. For many that's an enviable income compared with the national monthly average of 3,000 hryvna ($375). But the money has a price. ''Physically, morally, psychologically it's very hard. Each client needs a special approach, you need to please everyone,'' Yulia said as she came to a support center on the outskirts of Kiev to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases, load up on free condoms and take a class in art therapy. ''It's not easy, there is always fear. Every girl is afraid because she doesn't know what she is about to see, what will happen to her, what to expect. Anything can happen.'' Once, she recalled, she came to a Kiev flat, expecting one client, but instead found two who violently raped her. ''I couldn't get out of the apartment, I couldn't convince them, so I just closed my eyes and that was it.'' In Ukraine, underage sexual workers are rarely treated as victims of child molestation or forced labor, but instead are often punished and harassed for engaging in prostitution. Providing sexual services constitutes a misdemeanor here punishable by fines of about $20, but in practice prostitutes have to buy police protection with money and sex.'In our country, children providing sexual services are not regarded as victims but as culprits,'' said Mariana Yevsyukova, a legal expert with La Strada, adding that no measures have been taken to protect such teenagers ahead of the football tournament. ''My heart is very angry over this. Our government did not react to this in time.'' Officials are playing down the threat, saying fans will be too busy enjoying soccer games to look for adventure on the streets. Euro 2008 co-hosts Austria and Switzerland ''also expected sex tourism, but fans didn't have time for this: it was either football or beer,'' said Oleh Matveitsov, an Interior Ministry official charged with security measures during the Euros. While some measures have been taken to get the call girls off the streets, experts say many of those women will simply go online to look for clients. The country's leaders have done little to alter the image of Ukraine as a top destination for sex tourists and men shopping for mail-order brides. President Viktor Yanukovych last year invited foreign investors to Ukraine to see blooming chestnut trees and observe ''how women begin to take their clothes off when it gets warm in Ukrainian cities.'' FEMEN, Ukraine's controversial women's rights movement which stages topless protests, has vowed to disrupt the championship with rallies, pranks and disturbances to protest the prostitution spike. ''Today Ukraine has turned into a huge brothel, Europe's center for sex tourism, and Ukrainian women will suffer from that, Ukrainian women will become sex slaves during Euro 2012,'' said Inna Shevchenko, a top activist with the group. Critics say FEMEN is itself fueling the perception of Ukrainian women as sex objects. The group protests against prostitution with half-naked activists posing in front of television cameras in erotic poses. Yulia Tsarevska, whose advocacy group provides moral, educational and medical support to Yulia and other call girls in Kiev and around the country, says the girls have been translating their ads into English in recent weeks. ''They are waiting, they are getting ready, they are going to beauty parlors, they are raising their prices,'' she said. Yulia admits to harboring faint hopes that one of her clients may fall in love with her and take her away from Ukraine, as happened to Julia Roberts' heroine in ''Pretty Woman,'' a movie she loves. ''It would be great to live in other countries, but I don't think that people would come and would choose a wife here in Ukraine among call girls,'' she says. ''Although everything can happen.''

Poland, Ukraine Suffer As Euro Soccer Hosts

WARSAW, Poland -- Even as the Euro 2012 soccer championships kick off Friday, it’s already clear there will be big losers in host countries Poland and Ukraine. he first former Soviet-bloc nations to host the quadrennial tournament have spent almost $39 billion getting ready, including $25 billion in Poland and $14 billion in Ukraine. Besides accommodating an expected 1 million soccer fans, the two countries are betting that new stadiums, roads, and other infrastructure will help give a nice boost to their economies and local companies. So far, it hasn’t worked out that way. Three of Poland’s biggest construction companies have declared bankruptcy in recent weeks after running up hundreds of millions in losses on Euro 2012 projects. Engineering group PBG (PBG), which built three of four new Polish stadiums for the tournament, on June 4 asked to restructure $427 million in debt, much of it held by Polish banks. “Who’s going to pay for this? PBG’s example shows it will be banks,” Piotr Czarnecki, chief executive of Raiffeisen International’s (RBI) Polish unit, said on the TVN CNBC channel on June 5. Problems of racism and politics also dog the games. Polish and Ukrainian fans have been the subject of TV coverage showing racist behavior toward nonwhite fans. Other press stories have related assaults on Africans living in Kiev. Officials in both countries say the coverage exaggerates the extent of the problem. Ukraine also has a political issue. Former Premier Yulia Tymoshenko is in prison on corruption charges, which many in the West say are highly questionable. The French as a result refuse to send an official delegation to the Ukrainian part of the tournament. Polish builders got in trouble because they competed fiercely for contracts, submitting bids as much as 40 percent below what the government had expected to spend. Rising costs, including a spike in oil prices over the past four years, wiped out their profits and sent them deeply into debt. PBG had ventured out of its traditional oil and gas engineering business to build roads and stadiums including the National Stadium in Warsaw where the opening game will be played. The two other bankrupt Polish contractors are DSS (DSS), which built part of a highway from Berlin to Warsaw for the tournament, and Poldim, which worked on a road project in Ukraine. Ukraine, meanwhile, is saddled with $6 billion to $8 billion in debt from the championships—more than the $4 billion Greece lost on its financially ruinous 2004 Olympics, says Anatolii Baronin, an analyst at Kiev-based research group Da Vinci. In contrast to Poland, where European Union aid and loans covered more than half of Euro 2012 costs, national and local governments in Ukraine footed the bill for almost two-thirds of expenditures. The added debt is manageable, Baronin says, “but it is a dangerous trend that soaks up financial resources” from the country’s private sector. Ukrainian officials have predicted that public-works improvements connected to the tournament will help attract foreign investment. But, says Baronin, the biggest obstacle to investment isn’t lack of infrastructure—it’s a business climate marred by corruption and excessive government regulation. Ukraine’s spending on Euro 2012 suggests how serious the financial problem is. An analysis by Bloomberg News shows that, on a per-seat basis, Ukraine spent twice as much as Poland did on building and renovating stadiums for the tournament. Per-seat costs in Ukraine were also far higher than those for stadiums for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Ukrainian officials did not respond to repeated requests for an explanation of the higher costs. Many of the contracts in Ukraine were awarded without competitive bidding. Was there corruption? “Of course, yes,” says Erik Nayman, a managing director of Capital Times Investment in Kiev. Since 2010, Ukraine has slipped to 152nd from 134th in Transparency International’s ranking of the perception of corruption in 182 countries around the world. “The government doesn’t have real political will to act against corruption,” says Olga Savran, manager of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe. Poland, which ranks 41st on the Transparency International index, is far more likely than Ukraine to see an influx of new investment, says Petr Bittner, a Prague-based analyst at Erste Group. Poland poured more than 90 percent of its Euro 2012 spending into transportation improvements, including the addition of hundreds of miles of new highways. Poor roads and outmoded rail and airport facilities have long been a deterrent to foreign investment, Bittner says. “This will have an impact on the profitability of Polish companies and the entire economy.”

Ukraine Faces Growing Boycott Over Jailed Ex-PM

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's hopes that the Euro 2012 soccer finals will speed its integration with Europe's democracies were fading on Friday because of a growing boycott over its treatment of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko. Britain joined the unofficial boycott on Thursday by saying government ministers would not attend the first batch of matches in the former Soviet republic, which is co-hosting the tournament with Poland, because of human rights concerns. Germany and France are among other countries to have announced similar moves and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said he had no plans to attend. A May summit was scrapped in Ukraine when nine European leaders refused to come. President Viktor Yanukovich still hopes the tournament, starting on Friday, will show the world how far Ukraine has come since it broke free of the Soviet Union in 1991 but the risk of it backfiring after a deluge of bad publicity is increasing. "Europe 2012 has provided a unique opportunity to present our country to the world and to achieve European standards, not only in organising the tournament but in the life of our citizens," said Deputy Prime Minister Borys Kolesnikov. "If Ukraine does not cope well with the organisation of the tournament and show it's a hospitable host, it will reflect on its reputation," said Kolesnikov, who was in charge of preparations for the finals. The month-long tournament was starting in Poland on Friday and the final will be held in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on July 1. Despite opposition by its former Soviet masters in Moscow, the country of 46 million people, sandwiched between Russia and Western Europe, hopes eventually to join the 27-member European Union. But European leaders have been increasingly upset by the treatment of Yanukovich's rival Tymoshenko, a former premier sentenced to seven years in prison last October for abuse of office after a trial the West says was politically motivated. She alleged from jail in the city of Kharkiv in late April that she had been physically manhandled by prison guards and is now being treated for chronic back problems in the same city, a Euro 2012 venue. The prison authorities deny she was assaulted. "No ministers will be attending group games at Euro 2012," a British Foreign Office spokesman said in London, which will soon host the Olympic Games. "We are keeping attendance at later stages of the tournament under review in the light of ministers' busy schedules ahead of the Olympics and widespread concerns about selective justice and the rule of law in Ukraine." Prince William and Prince Harry had never planned to go, a spokesman said, although both are sport lovers. The Daily Mirror newspaper expressed concern the boycott would whip up anti-British sentiment and put British fans in danger. German Chancellor Angela Merkel described Ukraine last month as a dictatorship where people were suffering under repression. Barroso's spokeswoman said in April that he had no intention of going to Ukraine "the way things stand now" and EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding was also staying away. Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko of the Penta think-tank in Kiev accused European politicians of grandstanding. "Ukraine is becoming one of the themes that interest European opinion and some politicians want to score points by bringing up Tymoshenko," he said. Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleh Voloshyn said this week that Ukraine's leaders would not be influenced by the boycott. "Coming to a match or not will not change anything in the Tymoshenko case and will only give the tournament a negative image and create troubles that could be avoided," he said. Ukraine has said concerns about racism - particularly in the British media following a BBC documentary that showed racist violence in a Ukrainian soccer stadium - are exaggerated. "There is no racism in Ukraine. Many coloured footballers play in our teams. Tens of thousands of students from Africa study here and no one has ever complained about being badly treated," the government press office quoted Prime Minister Mykola Azarov as saying. He added: "Ukraine is an extremely tolerant and democratic country." Racism has also caused concern in co-host Poland. Dutch players said they heard monkey chants from the crowd at a training session in Krakow, a spokeswoman for the Dutch national team said on Friday.

A Social Media Group Tries To Salvage Ukraine’s Reputation

A Social Media Group Tries To Salvage Ukraine’s Reputation KIEV, Ukraine -- For months, Ukraine has been under fire over its preparations to co-host the European soccer championship. Critics accused hoteliers of price gouging, claimed the government was directing cash for infrastructure developments to insider firms and warned fans to stay at home over fears of racist attacks. Now, as fans begin to pour into the country ahead of the first game on Saturday, Ukrainians are fighting back to rescue their country’s reputation. A group of Ukrainians has linked up via social networks to form “Friendly Ukraine” — a nongovernmental initiative that offers free accommodation, guided tours and interpreting services to foreign fans. “An image has been formed of Ukraine as a frightening and barbaric nation where wild people live,” says Viktoria Svitlova, the groups’ coordinator. “We don’t deny that there are lots of problems, but we want to show that ordinary citizens are civilized and have European views. That’s why we created the initiative.” When Ukraine was selected as tournament co-host with Poland in 2007, officials touted it as the former Soviet Republic’s chance to show it was ready to join Europe‘s mainstream. Three years earlier, the Orange Revolution had brought a pro-Western president to power, bringing hope that Ukraine could cast off its Soviet past. But preparations were marred by slow progress. A new president, Viktor Yanukovych, came to power in 2010 and sped up work, but this was accompanied by corruption allegations connected with key infrastructure projects, such as new airports and stadiums. Officials denied any wrongdoing. At the center of criticism has been Yanukovych, who stands accused of rolling back the democratic freedoms that the Orange Revolution brought. Some European leaders have said they will boycott the tournament in protest at the jailing of his main political rival, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, on abuse-of-office charges. Western officials say she has been jailed in order to sideline her from politics, and the EU has shelved an agreement that had been aimed at integrating Ukraine economically and politically into the union. As the tournament approached, Michel Platini, the chief of tournament organizer UEFA, called hotel owners “bandits and crooks” for raising prices as much as tenfold. Reports in the British media highlighted an assault on Indian fans at a soccer stadium as evidence that Ukraine shouldn’t have been allowed to host the championship. “Everyone was sure it was a good thing to popularize the country, to improve its image. But the closer we got to the Euro, the more the tournament became a projector for all the problems that exist in the country,” Svitlova says. “These things exist,” she adds, referring to the issues of racism and the mass killing of street dogs that have come up ahead of the championship, “but there are other people who are offended that the whole country is being judged by these bad people.” Ukraine’s government has reacted angrily to the criticism. In a televised address Thursday, Yanukovych hailed the new roads, airports and stadiums and called on Ukrainians to show “our Ukrainian hospitality, sincerity and friendliness.” Friendly Ukraine volunteers were well ahead of him. Maksym Prodan, 24, a human resources manager, set up a website in April called roomsforfree.org.ua, where Ukrainians can offer places to stay to foreign fans. Around 400 tourists have already found accommodation in this way from places as far away as Iceland and the U.S. “We saw on TV that very few people wanted to come here. It was sad and we decided that something had to be changed,” Prodan says. Other websites that are part of the Friendly Ukraine group are offering a variety of services. An emergency hotline for fans needing help lists cellphones numbers of volunteers offering advice in English and other languages. Three-hundred T-shirts will be printed for helpers standing in popular areas to wear and direct foreigners. Other services on offer include free pub tours and guided trips around host cities. Svitlova says she hopes the efforts of the hundreds of volunteers will prove that ordinary Ukrainians are ready to join Europe, even if the authorities are blocking integration by keeping Tymoshenko and two of her allies behind bars. “If the authorities don’t want to become part of Europe, then we’ll do it as individuals,” she says.

Before the Nazis: A Ukrainian City’s Contested Past

NEW YORK, USA -- Tucked away in the far western corner of present-day Ukraine, the city of Lviv defies expectations. Far smaller than Kiev, it was a closed city during the Soviet period from 1945 to 1991, and even today remains relatively little known. Yet it once was a capital of eastern Galicia and played a crucial part in the borderlands of central Europe for centuries. The current population of 750,000 is overwhelmingly Ukrainian, but in the early twentieth century, it was home to a roughly equal number of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews who lived alongside each other and to some extent intermixed even as they competed for influence. The often bitter struggles between these groups, combined with the city’s long intellectual and university traditions, meant that the city played a special and largely unrecognized part in shaping our modern international system of human rights. I have been spending time in Lviv, exploring its remarkable but largely unknown legal history. Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s film In Darkness, which was nominated for an Oscar last year, describes a short moment in this longer story. Drawn from Robert Marshall’s 1991 book The Sewers of Lvov and Krsytyna Chiger’s memoir The Girl in the Green Sweater (2007), the film is about a small group of Jewish residents who take refuge in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Lviv with the assistance of Leopold Socha, a city worker. His nemesis is the sinister Bortnik — he is given no first name — an unpleasant Ukrainian officer who has been enlisted by the Nazis to root out hidden Jews. Holland is a filmmaker of impeccable honesty and the story is simply and powerfully told. But above all it is the film’s setting, below the streets of Lviv, that gives it such force. Robert Marshall’s book was among the first of dozens I have read to understand what had happened in the city from 1914 to 1945, and in the neighboring areas (not far away is the small Renaissance town of Zolkiew, one of whose few Jewish survivors from that period tells a grimly restrained story of hidden childhood in Clara’s War (2009). Though Lviv is today Ukrainian, from 1918 until 1939 it was Polish Lwow, and before that, for more than a century, it was Austro-Hungarian Lemberg. The sewers that saved Leopold Socha’s Jews originated as a feat of Austro-Hungarian engineering. Accounts of the city range from the sublime to the ridiculous. And then there is Baedaker’s tourist guide to occupied Poland in 1943: while the good Pole Leopold Socha was providing guidance to hidden Jews below ground, Mr. Baedeker offered his services to visiting German tourists who were sojourning at the Hotel Bristol on the renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz just a few feet above them. This is a guide of its times, and the attentive reader will also spot the passing reference to the small town of Auschwitz, for travelers on Reichstrasse No. 391 from Vienna to Cracow, as well as the occasional slip, the reference to the Jews who used to live in a particular location. At the end of World War I, control of the city passed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a newly independent Polish state — following a three-week interlude in November 1918 during which the short-lived Western Ukrainian People’s Republic state was proclaimed, with Lviv as the capital. As the Poles wrested back control, there was a spate of killings of Jews, mostly by Polish militias. A week later a New York Times headline reported, “1,100 Jews Murdered in Lemberg Pogroms.” The figures were wildly exaggerated, but these and other killings in Poland caused President Woodrow Wilson to insist that the price of Polish independence was a formal commitment to protect minorities. In June 1919 the Versailles Treaty was adopted, including an Article 93 that committed Poland to adopt a further treaty to protect the rights of minorities. Many legal scholars now regard that treaty, drawn up by the drafters of the Versailles Treaty and signed on the same day by an unenthusiastic new Polish government, as a catalyst for modern legal protections for human rights. Around this time, other treaties formalized the transfer of Lwow into Polish hands, and in the immediate years that followed there were hopes that it would usher in a new era of social harmony. This period is idealized in Jozef Wittlin’s short elegy to the city, Mi Lviv, published in 1941 in Polish after the author had fled the city for New York and the safety of Columbia University (his daughter has recently published an elegant Spanish translation, and someone ought to publish an English version). “I won’t speak of the year 1918,” he writes, but cannot pass by in silence that moment in those fratricidal Polish-Ukrainian battles which cut not only the city into two hostile parts, when my old gymnasium friend, Zenon Rusin, at that time a Ukrainian khorunzhyi, stopped hostilities in front of the Jesuit Garden so that I could cross the front and get home. There was harmony among my friends, even though many of them belonged to various warring nations and held to different beliefs and views. National Democrats got along with Jews, socialists with conservatives, Old Ruthenians and Russophiles with Ukrainian nationalists. There were no communists at that time, but if there had been they would have certainly gotten on well even with the socialists. Let us play at this idyll. But if the city’s Jews and other minorities thought the new government would help them, or that Article 93 of the Versailles Treaty could offer real protections, they were mistaken. As early as the summer of 1919, when President Wilson’s envoy, Henry Morgenthau, traveled to Lwow to investigate the November 1918 attacks on the Jews, he found that the head of the Polish government, Marshal Pilsudski, was “most bitter” on the subject of Article 93. “Why not trust to Poland’s honor,” Morgenthau records Pilsudski as saying, “that article creates an authority … outside the laws of this country! Every faction within Poland was agreed on doing justice to the Jew, and yet the Peace Conference, at the insistence of America, insults us by telling us that we must do justice.” Pilsudski’s tirade went on for ten minutes. The treaty provided no real protections to the Jews: on paper, language, education, and other rights were fully protected, but the reality was that in the absence of proper enforcement mechanisms the treaty was largely honored in the breach. The Ukrainians, for their part, were largely excluded from public life and the numerous institutions of higher education in Lwow, despite their large numbers, a reflection of the manifest inadequacy of the new regime for the protection of minority rights in the face of overt discrimination. Polish control may have provided a degree of stability for the Jews, but it served only to inflame ethnic tensions, a pocket of urban Polish control in a largely Ukrainian land. By the mid-1930s the Polish government had renounced the Minorities Treaty and a darker story began. Long simmering resentments came to the fore as neighboring Germany embraced the Nazis, causing ever more violence. In September 1939 the Soviets took control of Lwow from Poland, an event that was not particularly welcomed by any of the communities, although the situation for Jews was significantly better than if Lwow had been a few dozen miles to the west and within Nazi control. In June 1941 the Germans launched a surprise attack, and very soon Germany took control of Galicia from the Soviets. The city and the rest of Galicia was integrated into Nazi control, under Hans Frank, the Governor General of occupied Poland. On August 1, 1942 Frank visited Lemberg and addressed a public gathering. “It is impossible to thank the Fuhrer enough for having entrusted this ancient nest of Jews, this Polish poorhouse, to strong and capable German muscle,” Frank’s son Niklas reports him as telling his audience, in In The Shadow of the Reich (1990), his excoriating account of his father’s inhumanities. Two weeks later, most of the remaining Jews were rounded-up for extermination, as Heinrich Himmler and the governor of Galicia Otto von Wachter met in Lwow. A few weeks after that Socha’s Jews took to the sewers. There is no more devastating first hand account of the period than that provided by Louis Begley in his fictionalized memoir, Wartime Lies (1991), which describes his experiences as a young boy struggling for survival in the city under Nazi control. “Jews found families to hide them so they would not have to go to the ghetto,” Begley writes of the life around him, “and after a week with their saviours they were denounced and shot.” As In Darkness’s sensitive exploration of group identity and tension suggests, there were no angels in this period, and no single group had a monopoly on terror. Leopold Socha, the man who protects the Jews in the film, was a Pole, but his actions cannot stand for the Polish population in general any more than the actions of the ruthless Nazi Hans Frank, can define every German, or those of the evil Ukrainian officer Bortzik define every Ukrainian. This is the film’s complex lesson: the good Pole saves a few Jewish victims from a bad Ukrainian who is working with ghastly Nazis. The message may or may not be accurate, or capable of being generalized, but it surely explains why the film has been well received in Poland but apparently not yet scheduled for release in Ukraine. Lviv remains a remarkable city today, although its ability to fully engage with the past is not always apparent. Many of the scholars and writers I have met while teaching at the Law Faculty of Lviv University and also at the new Ukrainian Catholic University over the past two years are eager to engage with the city’s enormously rich history. And while Lviv’s Jewish and Polish roots are now more or less completely extinguished, the signs are there if one looks closely enough, below the surfaces, behind the facades, and etched into doorways. But recovering that history is not easy. A strident nationalism has emerged across Ukraine in recent years, as the country seeks to define itself in the post-Soviet era, and in the run–up to the European Football Championship in June, which Lviv will co-host with other cities in Poland and Ukraine, the country is once again under scrutiny. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders have recently announced that they will not attend the games unless certain human rights abuses are addressed, including the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko. Lviv probably doesn’t help the situation with establishments such as The Golden Rose, a Jewish theme restaurant that seeks to recreate the life of the inter-war years in a manner that crosses that unhappy line dividing comedy and insult. It is also difficult to avoid signs in the city of continued anti-Semitism or hostility toward minorities: the not so occasional swastika or Star of David daubed on a wall or building. Yet it would be wrong to focus only on the dark side, as civic groups, universities, and NGOs — led by the city’s impressively open Mayor Andriy Sadovyy — seek to build awareness of the past. Next year, for example, Mayor Sadovyy has agreed to co-host an international conference on the city’s contribution to modern international law, and he has sought to call attention to some of the principal actors involved — Jews and Poles — by placing plaques on their former homes. The mayor is right to admonish journalists who chose only to associate the city with aspects of its past. Lviv invites repeated visits (not least for its coffee, which is as good as any in the world: I particularly recommend Svit Kavy (World of Coffee) at 6 Katedral’na Square), and because it continues to reflect the interplay of differing political perspectives. In a historical sense, homogenous it is not. The issue of group identity and how it is portrayed is always delicate, with political and commercial implications. The formulation of one of the most memorable lines of In Darkness — which comes at the end of the film, and is written not spoken – reflects choices made. Soon after the Soviets removed the Nazis, we learn of the circumstances of Leopold Socha’s accidental death. A blank screen records the following words: “At his funeral, someone said: ‘It’s God’s punishment for helping the Jews.’” Agnieska Holland takes advantage of her directorial discretion not to refer to the group to which that “someone” belonged. At least one other account, which may or may not be accurate, describes that person as a Pole.