So while
breathtaking landscapes and skylines are pleasant enough, a video showing a
member of Ukraine’s parliament hoisting the prime minister by his crotch proved
irresistible. In less than a week since Oleh Barna tried to carry Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk from the podium on Dec. 11, the incident has been
viewed more than five million times on YouTube.
Moreover, the
video of Yatsenyuk — and the fight that Barna’s actions triggered — made the
news internationally in ways that Ukraine’s tourism promoters could only dream
about.
“Rowdy
parliamentary brawl.”
“Getting a
bit carried away.”
“Man gives
PM flowers then picks him up by his crotch.”
These headlines
accompanying the video got thousands of shares, likes and comments.
The latest fight
in parliament also undercut one of the main messages of the promotional
“Ukraine. Open for U” video, released on Dec. 4 in an effort to show that
“Ukraine is beautiful and safe now, so come visit.”
Perhaps I
exaggerate, but what safety can we promise tourists when Ukraine’s top
officials regularly resort to violence — and one member of the ruling
coalition can lift the prime minister up by the crotch and start hauling him
away, before Yatsenyuk’s allies rushed to pummel the offending Barna.
Fights among
lawmakers are, of course, not rare.
Another lawmaker,
Volodymyr Parasyuk, while attending an anti-corruption committee meeting on
Nov.19, kicked Vasyl Pisny, an officer of the Security Service of Ukraine, in
the head.
Two weeks
earlier, Oleksandra Kuzhel, a lawmaker with Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna
Party, was allegedly struck in the head with a bottle by Yatseniuk’s faction member Andriy Teteruk.
Needless to say,
the fights and fighters go mostly unpunished. Barna was, however, expelled from
the ruling Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko.
Ukraine does,
indeed, have beautiful nature, literature, music, food and, of course, women.
But war,
corruption and scandals are what people usually find when searching for news on
Ukraine.
The Ukrainian
government should definitely keep promoting Ukraine.
But until its
politicians stop making fools of themselves, the promotions won’t do much good
when people hear of Ukraine and think: “Ukraine, right, I saw their prime
minister manhandled in parliament.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected]
