While summer is usually a slow season for news, this year we’ve had a bumper crop of silly stories to blow Ukrainians’ minds. You couldn’t make it up if you wanted to.
Just this week, we heard that a “dinosaur” from the Donbas has been terrorizing residents of Kyiv Oblast for a month, invading their gardens and eating all their courgettes.
A group of 50 street artists stopped a train in Kyiv, threatening the driver with bats and painted eight wagons with graffiti in 25 minutes.
Ukrainian police arrested several suspects who were illegally producing the digital currency bitcoin at a swimming pool of the state-owned Paton Electric Welding Institute.
A 19-year-old security guard at a Black Sea beach resort in Lazurne, Kherson Oblast, felt asleep on an inflatable trampoline and woke up in the middle of the Black Sea, and was blown all the way to Russian-occupied Crimea.
And the crazy news keeps rolling in this August.
In this second week of the month, we’ve barely had time to get over the “Watermelon barge tracking madness.”
Andriy Reva, Ukraine’s Social Policy Minister said Ukrainians spend too much money to buy food not because of the high prices and small wages but because “they eat too much.” Well, he should know.
Social Policy Minister Andriy Reva speaks with the Kyiv Post on May 23. (Volodymyr Petrov)
That’s why we all should take an opportunity to laugh of the craziest month in news from Ukraine, cause soon our parliament will come back from vacation and there will be no place for humor.
We’ll also be back to bad news from the Donbas war front, where Russian-backed separatists keep violating the Minsk agreements and ignore the cease-fire.
And there is more and more news of the repression of Crimean Tatars in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula.
Dinosaur from Donbas
This is my personal favorite of the week: On Aug 7 activists from the Animal Rescue Group of Kyiv, which saves animals in trouble, published a very odd and hilarious claim from an elderly lady who lives in Kyiv Oblast, who asked the activist to help save her garden from a dinosaur who had been ravaging her vegetable beds for several weeks.
“She said that a dinosaur had eaten all her courgettes. Despite the strange claim, a woman described the “dinosaur’s” appearance in detail.
The team went to the village of Krushynka in Kyiv Oblast and discovered a meter-long iguana sitting on a bush in woman’s garden.
“A lizard was exhausted and dehydrated. We took it to vets at Kyiv zoo,” the activists wrote.
Soon after the Kyiv Zoo specialist found the owners of the beast. It emerged that they moved with Harry the iguana from the war-torn Donbas to Kyiv as IDPs.
An Animal Rescue Group activist poses for a photo, holding Henry the iguana, whom he caught in an elderly lady’s garden in Kyiv Oblast on Aug.7. (Courtesy from Kyiv Animal Resque Group)
E for efficiency
A gang of 50 street artists halted a suburban train at a train station in Kyiv for 25 minutes and painted eight wagons of the train with graffiti, Ukrzaliznitsya wrote on Facebook on Aug.8.
“This was an organized group of more than 50 people wearing masks. They were armed with bats, trapped the driver in his cabin, and videoed the whole process,” reads the message.
Ukrzaliznitsya also said that it will take two weeks and Hr 150,000 to repaint the train.
Maybe Ukrzaliznitsya should just ask or force the same gang to paint it back the way it was? It appears they are quicker and more efficient than the workers of our state railway monopolist.
I also bet those guys could do it much cheaper.
Ukrzaliznitsya also said that such graffiti hooliganism is growing. In 2016 street artists painted 32 of its wagons.
I wonder if this is a signal that Ukrzaliznitsya should finally do something with the dull blue-grey-rusty colors of its trains?
A photo of a suburban train, newly painted with graffiti. A gang of 50 street artists halted the suburban train at a train station in Kyiv for 25 minutes and painted eight wagons on Aug.7. (Courtesy)
Life of Pi (Ukrainian version)
Unlike the main hero of Ang Lee’s movie “Life of Pi”, who was accompanied by a tiger during his trip across the ocean, 19-year-old Ukrainian Mykhailo Doroshenko was all alone during his unintentional sea journey to Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula.
After his shift on Aug. 1, Doroshenko, who was working as a guard at the beach of Lazurne resort in Kherson Oblast, took a nap on an inflatable trampoline left on the beach. When he woke up, he found he had been washed out to sea.
Three days later, Russian border guards found him at sea, dehydrated and suffering from heatstroke.
While Ukrainian and Russian internet users joked about whether he was actually trying to illegally enter Crimea, I hope the paranoid Russian government won’t see this accident as a new sneaky tactic by Ukraine to deliver saboteurs to Crimea. Hopefully, Doroshenko will be sent back to Kherson, and hopefully not by the same mode of transport.
