UPDATE: Possible Hate Crimes in Kiev
According information from the African Ukrainian Council, on the night of April 7-8 in Kyiv a Guinea citizen and young, black, male student of Kiev University was attacked by five young men. The student was hospitalized. He still couldn't speak after that attack. It is unclear if it was a hate crime.
Also:
April 9, 2012
(JTA) -- A Jewish man was attacked after he left a seder at a synagogue in Kiev.
The man, 25, was found on Sunday night, nearly a full day after the attack, with serious head injuries believed to have been inflicted by glass bottles, Ynet reported. He is in critical condition in a Kiev hospital
After a day of searching he was found in an area near the synagogue, where attacks by neo-Nazi groups have occurred in the past, Yaakov Zilberman, director of the Jewish community in Kiev, told Ynet.
The Kiev Jewish community is working to have the injured man flown to Israel for treatment.
Local police are reluctant to investigate the attack as an anti-Semitic hate crime, Zilberman told Ynet.
Zilberman says he believes the man was targeted because he was wearing a yarmulke when he left the synagogue.
UPDATE:
In the early morning of April 8, 2012, an unconscious man was found near Bessarabsky Market in downtown Kyiv. The young man had brain trauma that resulted from being hit in the head with a bottle. A Jew, he was at the celebratuion of the second Seder in the Brodsky synagogue and was on his way home. On April 11, still in critical condition, he was moved by air to Israel for intensive medical treatment. The Kiev Jewish community officially asked police to investigate the case. Yesterday Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich issued a special statement asking the Interior Ministry to find the criminals and bring them to justice. He wrote that tolerance to people of different religions was the biggest achievement of Ukrainian society. We need to do the best for saving it, we need to stop radical intolerance and hate crimes on the base of religion, language, ethnic origin. We will absolutely stop all such provocations."