If they call just say, "In Soviet Russia, package deliver you. Now saying good bye" and hang up. It'll get there.

 Manbird wrote:

Probably for dealing with customs, and I'd be pretty helpless with that.

I just use my own phone number half the time. I figure they're not really going to call anybody. But that's shipping within the US - maybe they do need to call for some reason outside the US.

Does the recipient have a computer or access to one?  Can't you create a unique and new phone number for them via Skype or Google Voice - and have that serve as the contact point for the courier, via voicemail?

I need to ship a couple of boxes of books to the Ukraine, but my old standby method (international mailbag) has become prohibitively expensive. Fedex and UPS require a phone number for the recipient, and the recipient has no phone. Anybody got a reliable (hopefully inexpensive) way to ship into the country?

Hello, my name is Nikita and I'm from Ukraine too!
(Lviv, Western Ukraine)
I love this radio station. The best online radio I've ever heard. No, wait! Possibly  the best radio I have heard ever!

Hi to all guys from Ukraine! I live in Kiev, the capital in Ukraine. I am an avid RP listener. I wonder how many other Ukrainians listen to this beautiful Internet radio?

Hi to all guys from Ukraine! I live in Kiev, the capital in Ukraine. I am an avid RP listener. I wonder how many other Ukrainians listen to this beautiful Internet radio?

Hi to all guys from Ukraine! I live in Kiev, the capital in Ukraine. I am an avid RP listener. I wonder how many other Ukrainians listen to this beautiful Internet radio?

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych resigned Friday, making a grudging admission that he was unlikely to reverse the presidential election victory of his opposition rival. Celebrating opposition supporters got a boost, meanwhile, with a visit from one of their inspirations, Georgia's president.

Vanukovych announced his move in a televised New Year's Eve address, saying he would push ahead with his appeal to the Supreme Court against the election results but that he held out little hope.

He said he could not work under the apparent president-elect, Viktor Yushchenko, who won this week's vote. "I believe it is impossible to have any position in a state that is ruled by such officials,'' Yanukovych said. "This is my personal position.''

"I have made the decision to submit my formal resignation,'' he said. It appeared his resignation was effective immediately.

As European leaders hailed the apparent victory of Ukraine opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko as a triumph for democracy worldwide, The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Russia might refuse to recognize Mr. Yushchenko as the new president of his country. A statement issued by Moscow Wednesday said that electoral observers from the West were "not objective" when they said the election process was free of tampering.

Meanwhile, the Herald reports an observer mission from the Russia-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) alleged that it had "found" huge electoral fraud that favored Yushchenko. Among the possible violations, reports Ukrainska Pravda, was "election propaganda, which is prohibited during the voting day, in the form of numerous orange marks in the streets."

Tuesday, the Ukraine Central Election Comission announced that Yushchenko, known for his pro-Western stance, had won the election by 2.8 million votes. "In principle, we have the result," said Yaroslav Davydovych, the head of the commission. "I don't know who can doubt it."

Moscow had originally pledged it would honor the outcome of the election even if its favored candidate, current Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, did not win. And in a gesture towards Moscow, Yushchenko had told the Russian newspaper, Izvestia, that one of his first priorities as the new leader of Ukraine would be to "set straight his countries's 'deformed ties' with Russia."

But the Turkish news website Zaman Online reports that members of the CIS, especially Russia, see the Ukraine's election results – brought about by the "Orange Revolution" – as a "revolution threat" and "indicated that this was the most serious foreign policy test for Russia since 1991."

Zaman Online also reports that Dmitri Trenin, the Deputy Head of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace's Moscow office, says the election results have different, but "extremely critical" meanings for Russia, the European Union (EU), and the US.

"Russia joined the game and supported the presidential candidate too late. Ukraine will remain the same as it was in the old days. The most significant question is with whom Ukraine will integrate and cooperate. Yushchenko wants to integrate with the West. This will take a long time. Will the enlarged EU ship be able to carry anyone else?" Trenin says the key lies beyond the suggestions of Russia and EU. He also disclosed that Ukraine, which might be the US' most powerful regional ally along with Poland in the future, is also very significant for the EU because of the tension it raises in Russian relations.

The Daily Telegraph reports that the new allegation from Moscow may "derail attempts to bring a swift end to Ukraine's protracted political crisis and may usher in a new crisis in already strained relations between the West and Moscow."

Mr. Yanukovich has refused to resign and vowed never to acknowledge Yushchenko's victory. He has also accused the United States of "interferring" in the election, and Tuesday night appealed to Ukraine's Supreme Court to overturn the election results, just as Yushchenko was able to do after the initial election.

On Wednesday, however, Yanukovich was prevented from holding a cabinet meeting on Wednesday when hundreds of Yushchenko supporters surrounded a government building and refused to allow cabinet ministers to enter.

KIEV, Ukraine (Reuters) - Liberal challenger Viktor Yushchenko won a re-run of Ukraine's rigged presidential election by a wide margin, according to exit polls published after voting closed Sunday.

A Yushchenko victory is likely to push the ex-Soviet state, poorly managed for years but with huge economic potential, closer to Europe and, Moscow fears, further away from its traditional influence.

Yushchenko scored 56.5 percent in an exit poll to 41.3 percent for outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, whose victory last month was overturned by the Supreme Court after mass opposition protests. A second exit poll gave him a lead just shy of 20 percentage points, cheering supporters in central Kiev, many dressed in their trademark orange.

Yushchenko had claimed the Nov. 21 election was rigged against him and was backed by hundreds of thousands of protesters who brought central Kiev to a halt for two weeks. The Supreme Court agreed there had been fraud and annulled the result.

The exit polls appeared to hand Yushchenko a large enough victory margin to rule out legal challenges from Yanukovich if reflected in official results, the first of which were due at 2100 GMT.
...

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- Outside, a hard winter's afternoon settles on the village, but inside their cottage Nikolai and Nastia lay out a spread: apples from their orchard, pickles from their garden, mushrooms from the woods around and full glasses of samogon, otherwise known as Ukrainian moonshine. Samogon, the locals say, offers protection from radioactivity, a consideration since we are in a "black village" written off for human occupation in 1986 after the explosion of Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station a mere dozen miles away.

"You grow your own food?" a guest asks.

"All of it," Nastia says.

The guest takes a discreet glance at his dosimeter.

The village is called "black," as in abandoned. But as if to make the name literally true, the neighboring houses have turned black and tilted into a slow slide into the earth. Trees reach in and out the windows. The yards are littered with bureaus, picture frames, chairs.

At the beginning of the cleanup, the authorities buried the most radioactive houses, until it dawned on them that they were doing an excellent job of poisoning the groundwater. So the contaminated houses stand. For how long? According to an ecologist at the power station: "In 250 years everything is back to normal. Except for plutonium - that will take 25,000 years."

Nikolai and Nastia's cottage is basically one room around an oven with a built-in shelf to sleep on during the coldest nights.

"It's home," Nastia says. She wears a sweater and shawl permanently. Her smile is bright steel, and her blue eyes shine with delight and a certain sense of collusion. Visitors are rare in the 19-mile-radius Zone of Exclusion around the reactors and, of course, she is not supposed to be there at all. Nastia and Nikolai were evacuated like everyone else, but sneaked like partisans back to their cottage in the woods. So much for zone security.

Since then, the authorities have largely let Nastia and Nikolai alone among the zone's phantom population of returnees, scavengers and poachers. Almost perversely, the wildlife there is flourishing; poachers hunt wild boar, served later in the finest restaurants of Kiev and Moscow. Scavengers cut up abandoned radioactive cars and trucks to sell as parts in the chop shops of Russia.

Nikolai and Nastia aren't on the run, they've just become invisible. They didn't vote in the recent presidential runoff election; there were no polling booths in the black villages. (To vote, they would have had to be bused out of the zone to cast a ballot bearing the address they had been assigned to and escaped from.) Doctors warned Nastia that if she remains in her village, radioactivity will give her cancer in 25 years. Nastia is 75 now. She says she'll take her chances.

Nastia sings a traditional harvest song in a young, birdlike voice. The samogon has brought out a fine sweat on every brow.

What amazes me is not that two elderly peasants have become invisible, but that Chernobyl itself has, as if it were a subject too awful to contemplate. In the rain, the sarcophagus, the 10-story steel-and-concrete box heroically constructed over Reactor 4, leaks like a radioactive sieve into groundwater that drains in the Pripyat River, which feeds the Dnepr, which is the drinking water for Kiev.

Ninety percent of the core is still in the reactor, breaking down and heating up, and the station's managers say that the sarcophagus itself could collapse at any time.

How dangerous would that be? Estimates of deaths from the explosion range from 41 to more than 300,000. The Zone of Exclusion is not an area of containment, no more than a circle drawn on the dirt would stop an airborne stream of plutonium, strontium, cesium-137. Seven million people live on contaminated land in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. People around the world carry in their chromosomes the mark of Chernobyl.

We search in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, while a more likely danger is another explosion at Chernobyl. It may not be a meltdown, but it will be the mother of all dirty bombs. (A better sarcophagus is promised in five years, but at the site there is little sign of activity, let alone urgency.)

And in all the drama of the recent election, the inspiring rallies in Independence Square, the spirited presidential debate on Monday and the apparent triumph of good over evil, the subject of another nuclear disaster rarely came up, and then mostly in nationalist rhetoric: It is an article of faith that the West forced Ukraine in 2000 to close the perfectly good reactors that remained at Chernobyl. The truth is that you have to sympathize with Viktor Yushchenko, the likely winner in the rerun of the presidential runoff on Sunday, because he will have to deal with Chernobyl. Or not.

So, no wonder we're drinking samogon. The air is yeasty with it.

Nastia sings, and I picture her and Nikolai plucking apples off their poisoned tree, digging potatoes from their poisoned earth, fishing in their poisoned stream.
Martin Cruz Smith is the author, most recently, of ‘‘Wolves Eat Dogs.’’