Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Sometimes, it's really, really hard to take Ukrainska Pravda seriously...

Yesterday, one story that they ran - about Yushchenko's order to abolish traffic police - had been written by Nestor Chyrfush: if you read the guy's last name backwards, you get 'Shufrych' - Nestor Shufrych, a PM whose truly pathetic manners gained him lots of notoriety during Yanukovych's failed attempt to become the Ukrainian president last year...




The byline on another story - about the extremely expensive lifestyle of Yushchenko's 19-year-old son - is Leonid Amchuk: read the last name backwards and you get 'Kuchma' - Leonid Kuchma...



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Update: It looks like they've been doing it forever: a July 15 piece about a recent conflict between Yulia Tymoshenko, the premier, and Volodymyr Lytvyn, the parliament speaker and former Kuchma's ally, was written by Victor Chyvokunya - 'Yanukovych'...



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Another update: Add to this a banner flashing at the bottom of the Ukrainska Pravda page, linking to something called Shaved Pussies - brityye kiski - on Obozrevatel, another widely-read Internet daily, and you'll have an idea of what fun it is to be a journalist in Ukraine... Too bad Georgy Gongadze didn't live to see it...



(And no, Shaved Pussies isn't porn - it's just the pictures of those really bold cats, shaved kitties...)

1 comment:

  1. congratulations on being pregnant and getting married.

    i asked andrei to liason but he was too busy gulping white beer and organizing zn's next zakazukha.

    writing under assumed names about touchy subjects remains the norm. it's even a business.

    prytula and pravda has come a long way in the past six months, at least on the gongadze thing.

    hats off to shevchuk.

    only one month to go b4 the fall, and two b4 i'm in moscow. let's meet.

    cheers,

    peter

    07.21.05 - 5:45 am

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