Petro at Petro's Jotter has started a collection of photos of campaign billboards. Here's one more for him - Volodymyr Lytvyn'd bloc, the green Santas I wrote about here:



That's on Khreshchatyk, but they're everywhere, variations of the 'happy holidays' theme. Lytvyn actually seems to have started the campaign earlier than others, back in November or perhaps even earlier, with posters featuring people of various professions, from farmers to factory workers, in a somewhat socialist-realism kind of way. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine also had pretty tacky billboards everywhere at that time, something sentimental about Kyiv. And yesterday, during our walk, we saw portraits of Yulia Tymoshenko on the windows of #62 buses - very amusing, the Beauty and the Beast, the beast being the stinky buses packed with the gloomy electorate, dressed in all black because it's winter now. And then there're Yevhen Marchuk's ads, very meaningless and forgettable - forgettable unless something memorable happens, as it did to me: I was passing one of them when Marta's stroller shook like crazy and almost fell through an especially huge crack in the asphalt; I cursed loudly in Russian, making a woman walking nearby turn to look at me. It was like Newton's apple, in a way, this realization: why don't these idiots, all of them, fix the roads, make everything look like that little new maidan in front of the presidential administration, and take credit for it, and then win all those votes they need, win because people would be grateful to them and would consider them trustworthy? Instead, they're wasting all this money and paper on their shitty campaign ads.