Yes, it's essentially.... This is the same propaganda that has been there since Soviet times.
I would just direct the committee's attention to today's National Post and to an open letter of Ukrainian Jews to Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin. I think it will explain everything, answer all of the questions you have raised. It really is a Who's Who of the Jewish community in Ukraine.
In terms of the right-wing extremists, etc., there's a lot of speculation about what rights.... Svoboda actually shows the strength of allowing people to decide: they elected them. They were radical; they actually exceeded whatever expectations they had in western Ukraine. They were very anti-Yanukovych, and that resonated with Russian-speaking people in the country. They were horrible at running Lviv, they were horrible at running Ternopil, and they're now running at 2%, so it's unlikely that they're going to be in the next parliament.
Everybody is talking about this shadowy Right Sector. They have never made an anti-Semitic statement. The only issue people have with them is that they don't want NATO or the EU. The head of Right Sector has met with the Israeli ambassador to Ukraine. They have said not only that they are opposed to anti-Semitism but that they will actively seek to root it out. They've done a great job on PR. If there is a people that the government—which has done an abysmal job on communications, by the way....
In fact, if there's one area in which I would heavily criticize them, it's that they have not been very robust in countering this machine. We have to give it to Putin; he's been planning this a long, long time. But essentially, it seeps; it's the big lie, the Joseph Goebbels school of information: the bigger the lie and the more often you repeat it, the more people will start to believe it.
But please read today's National Post.