Yanukovych Recites ‘Ukrainian’ Proverb (In Russian, Of Course!)

Ever seen a comedy starring presidents and oligarchs? Try YES.

The 7th annual oligarchfest has attracted the greatest number of VIPs so far.

Javier Solana and Aleksander Kwaśniewski (permanent fixtures, to name just a few).

Moving on: Bill Clinton...


How much this time, Bill?


That much?

Bruce Jackson reportedly showed up too. (Mr. McCain, as you support Ukraine, who do your associates support?)

And, YES, there was no shortage of comedy: premoderated questions, canned answers, misspelled names and communication gaps.

Solana: Would you go to Brussels again if you were elected president today?

Yanukovych [in Ukrainian]: Yes, there’s...there’s this really old proverb, a Ukrainian one, I guess [switches from Ukrainian to Russian]: “Sapogi dorogu znayut.” [“The boots know the road.”] That’s why...

Moderator: Let’s hope, then, you have good sapogi!

It turns out to be a Soviet Army joke, thanks to the interpretation supplied by Ukrayinska Pravda’s Serhiy Leshchenko.

Q: How do you get home drunk like that?
A: How? The boots know the road!

I wonder if Yanukovych actually went off the script with that one. What if he didn’t?

That sapogi thing sounds so true-to-life!




Sources:
http://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2010/10/3/5440739/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Aouv7r_VcI
http://durdom.in.ua/uk/main/photo/photo_id/19265.phtml
http://durdom.in.ua/uk/main/photo/photo_id/19322.phtml

What’s in It for Ukraine?

The U.S. midterm elections have returned results that President Yushchenko can relate to. In this spiritual exercise, he should ask himself a couple of questions.

Question 1: Does Yushchenko still believe that being opposed by Parliament, by its own nature, contradicts the founding the principles of government?

As a Reagan White House intern, First Lady Kateryna Yushchenko probably never kept her husband in the dark about this not being true. That dealing with hostile legislatures is normal practice for Western leaders demands no further explanation. Needless to say, the piece of evidence America has just provided us with casts the local “lyubi druzi” school of thought in a less intellectually appealing light. It was those oppositionphobic gentlemen who posed as maids of honor to Yushchenko, their lucky star, whose marriage by arrangement to Yanukovych would have multiplied their fortunes.

Question 2: Does Yushchenko expect Bush to nurse his own Universal of National Unity?

When Yushchenko — obsessed with justifying his tango with “bandits” and “vote riggers,” as he once had gently termed them — came up with that political prenup of his, the only person he fooled was himself. And that summer coalition fling cost him dearly, by putting him in cahoots with individuals his voters had revolted against in the thing called the Orange Revolution. As the NSNU Convention reopens this Saturday, the patient is a bureaucratic mammoth debilitated with the special interest contagion, severely disconnected from its grassroots support group, stuck in single-digit territory. NSNU is a four-letter word, period.

No sooner had the Democrats uncorked their champagne than Moscow pocketed its pride and rushed to sign a bilateral protocol with the U.S., on concern that, with Dems taking both the House and the Senate, it may be grounded in the WTO limbo for a long time.

That explains why Moroz has been working against the clock on WTO-related legislation while steering clear of the NATO issue. The accounting formula behind the $130 price tag seems to be written on the walls: “NATO, for this you’ve paid us; WTO, for that you haven’t.”

The D-Day hardly spells a Moscow-centric U-turn on the Hill with regard to Ukraine. In fact, friends of Ukraine can even be found among the surviving Republicans like Richard Lugar, John McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What it does spell is bad times for the bad guys.

By the way, there’s a ruling party in Ukraine that, behaviorally, has established itself as a much uglier version of everything that’s wrong with the GOP. For reasons outlined above, that party should watch itself very carefully. Otherwise, its day of reckoning, too, will come.

It’s Not the Economy, Stupid!

Obviously, the Goldilocks economy is faring much better than the GOP. Dubya has finally got his comeuppance. It took a whole D-Day — the Democrats’ Day — to smoke Rummy out of the Pentagon.

After an almost bloodless takeover of Iraq in 2003 had seemingly opened 1001 opportunities for making that woebegone country into an oasis of democracy, the Bush administration let them slip away one by one.

Having seriously misread one of the world’s oldest nations, not to mention its own, the Bush administration did very little to set the record straight.

As time passed by, one could hear the U.S. casualty clock ticking ever more loudly. Punctuated with gory, internet downloadable beheadings of Western contractors, not to mention the untold Iraqis killed by mistake, the clock went on and on, slowly sinking the Bush administration into a geopolitical quagmire beyond the resuscitative power of Kerry’s sense of humor.

The recent gains made by Reps turned out not to be a case of too little to little, for a scandal scarred party unable to heal itself.

Good news for Saddam: He may now occupy his well-deserved seat on death row secure in the knowledge that, in a way, he has settled the score. The unfound stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have finally made impact on his enemies, becoming weapons of mass defrockment.

The sea change in the U.S. legislature offers yet another perspective on the pendulum of public opinion. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupt absolutely. With that in mind, the Democrats should do their best to keep the pendulum from leaving their side. And that means avoiding mistakes their predecessors made.