Ukrainian

MOSCOW - A Russian passenger plane flying from Tel Aviv, Israel, exploded over the Black Sea yesterday, apparently killing all 77 people on board and sparking a furious effort by Russia to determine whether it had been the act of a terrorist. U.S. defense officials said they believe the plane was shot down accidentally by a missile during a Ukrainian military exercise. But Ukrainian and Russian officials vigorously denied last night that that could have happened. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, echoing the arguments of Ukrainian officials and those of his navy, said the plane was out of range of the Ukrainian exercise.

CITRUS HEIGHTS, Calif. - After a 10-day, coast-to-coast manhunt, authorities found murder suspect Nikolay Soltys hiding in his mother's back yard yesterday, capturing him moments after his breakfasting relatives fled the home in terror to call for help. Barefoot, disheveled and carrying a potato peeler and a map, Soltys was arrested without incident by undercover officers who had kept his family under surveillance since the bloody killings of his wife, son and four other relatives. Sacramento County Sheriff Lou Blanas said the unshaven Soltys may have been hiding for several days in a wooded ravine behind his mother's home.

CANNELTON, W.Va. - From his front-porch perch atop Mount Olive at the Blue Skies Home for the Elderly, Paul Wilshire recalled laboring down in the coal mines the old way, the antique way, with a low-tech mule named Susie. "If I didn't work, Susie didn't work that day," said Wilshire, who, at the age of 87, thought he had heard every crazy twist there was on the subject of mining. But then word came up from the valley about the coal company managers' latest idea: They want to import miners all the way from Ukraine to work down in the mines of Appalachia.

OTINIYA, Ukraine - In the awful days of the war, the Germans took Maria Kolybabjuk away, but they didn't kill her. They made her work. It was her neighbors who did the murder, just last winter. Yet a thread leads from one to the other, across the decades. Half a century after more than 7 million people were forced to leave their homes in Eastern and Central Europe and labor without pay in the factories and fields of the Third Reich, the Germans have begun making reparations to those still alive.

MOSCOW - A worn-out old survey ship, pressed into service to carry small-time traders back and forth across the Black Sea, foundered with its load of overcoats and leather goods Friday night and left its survivors to drift two days before their rescue. It was a vessel whose passengers, so-called "shuttle traders" who pick up goods at Turkish markets for resale in Ukraine and Russia, made a habit of living and working in the shadows. And when it faltered and sank, nearly 48 hours were to pass before anyone ashore began to wonder what might have happened to it. At least 14 people are dead and five more are missing.

Their parents and grandparents narrowly escaped labor camps and famine in their native Ukraine. Grateful for their good fortune in America, they marked Thanksgiving Day with tightly held traditions: borscht, pirogi and football in Patterson Park. For more than 30 years, a group of Ukrainian-Americans has celebrated the holiday by tossing a pigskin around in the East Baltimore park. There, with the gold onion domes of St. Michael's Ukrainian Catholic Church in sight, they play an American game and toast the last touchdown with medivka, a homemade liqueur with honey and spices.

RUSSIA HAS worked out leasing agreements with some of the former Soviet states that enables it to keep its military assets on their territory. Why couldn't it be possible between Israel and the Palestinians? The way it would work: Israel would recognize Palestinian sovereignty over all of what were the Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Then, Palestine would rent back specific areas to the Israeli military. This leasing arrangement should be extended to the hard-line Jewish settlements blocking a peace deal.

WASHINGTON -- Through more than seven decades of Soviet oppression, freedom-loving Ukrainians never lost their will to achieve an independent Motherland. They finally achieved that goal in 1991 -- months after the fall of the Berlin Wall -- when Russian troops departed for points east. Now, nine years later, a Ukrainian tall ship appropriately named Bat'kivschchyna -- The Motherland, in English -- is about to leave its berth in the upper reaches of the Dneipper River. As crowds lining the Dniepper's banks cheer it on, the Bat'kivschchyna will emerge into the Black Sea, sail through the Bosporus, negotiate the myriad islands of the Aegean Sea, race through the Mediterranean and slip through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic.

After surviving the rough-and-tumble real estate market of Ukraine, Ruslan Naida wondered if he had the nerve to plunge into the free and hazardous world of Baltimore's rehab trade. With money from the sale of his grandfather's house in Kiev, he sank $15,000 in 1997 in a beleaguered fixer-upper on Portugal Street, an obscure corner of Fells Point. He rehabbed it and sold it and made a little money. He bought another house and did the same. Today, he lives in his third home since coming to America -- a house in the 400 block of Durham Street in Upper Fells Point.