August 31, 2005
The Ukrainian President, Viktor Yushchenko, vowed on Tuesday to wage a campaign to wipe out anti-Semitism in his former Soviet state after a Jewish student was beaten up in the capital, Kiev. In a statement posted on his website the president said "This incident has struck me right in the heart, we must make every effort to ensure that such incidents can no longer be possible." The president said he had asked Interior Minister, Yuri Lutsenko, to take control of the investigation into the 'blatant incident of brutality' on Sunday outside a shopping centre. The Interior Ministry said three unemployed men had been detained in connection with the attack on the 32-year-old seminary student. They were all found to be inebriated. Jewish groups say anti-Semitism, a feature of life and an instrument of state policy in tsarist Russia and in communist times, remains a problem throughout the former Soviet Union.
