May 21, 2009|Kyiv Post



Shakhtar Donetsk, the soccer team owned and funded by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, won the UEFA Cup on Wednesday in a spectacular 2:1 victory over Werder Bremen, of Germany.

The match, held in Istanbul, marked the first time in history that a Ukrainian team claimed a European soccer trophy. The victory also serves as a sign of the increasing international might of soccer teams in Ukraine, where soccer-crazed billionaires invest heavily into their regional teams.

Akhmetov has pump hundreds of millions of dollars into his Donetsk-based Shakhtar soccer team, purchasing top talent from abroad and building a brand new stadium scheduled to open this year.

Shakhtar is the last club to win the UEFA Cup competition before it is renamed the Europa League for next season.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and his arch political enemy from the Orange Revolution, opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich, attended the match cheering the Ukrainian team on.

May 21, 2009|Interfax-Ukraine





The Ukrainian economy should start recovering in three or four months, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said at Thursday's Cabinet meeting.

"It will take another three or four months, God willing, for us to bottom out, and for the hryvnia to stabilize. Then we can start to recover, step by step," Tymoshenko said.

"But there's work to do not everything's in order in the parliament or with the authorities," she said.

Some 20 banks in Ukraine have either stopped payments or are holding them up severely, but the government and National Bank have worked out a strategy to support the banking system, Tymoshenko said.

Industrial output in Ukraine plummeted 31.8% year-on-year in January-April after declining 3.1% in the whole of last year.

No official GDP statistics for 2009 have yet been released, but the economy shrank 8% in the fourth quarter of 2008 after averaging up 6.2%-6.4% in the preceding three quarters.

The government has not yet reviewed its 0.4% GDP growth forecast for 2000, but most experts expect the economy to shrink 8%-10%.

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Oleh Antonov - Ukrainian Contribution to Aerospace
A presentation by Prof. Ostap Hawaleshka,
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Thursday May 21, 2009 at 7:00pm
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