A brief note on today's City Council mess:

Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky is a blend of Kuchma and Yanukovych, a real shame. He sounds as retarded - slow and content-free (though there is some hope here, as both Kuchma and Yanukovych imroved somewhat over the years). He speaks a terrible mix of Russian and Ukrainian (I do that often myself, too, adding some English to the cocktail, but I horrify my family and friends this way, not the whole fucking country). He likes to switch into prosecutor/thug/mafioso modes, sounding inappropriately menacing in all three of them. He looks repulsive, too, but that's a matter of taste, I guess.

There's a pro-mayor majority in the City Council now - 70 deputies from Chernovetsy's Bloc, the Party of the Regions, Lytvyn's Bloc and some other entities. At least three defectors from BYuT. That sucks, obviously. And it also emphasizes the importance of all those tiny election winners - whores.

Today (well, yesterday) there was another rally by the City Council, which I couldn't attend, but I watched the live broadcast instead. From the window, I could see that the rally wasn't as big as the one a few weeks ago - because cars continued to run on both sides of Khreshchatyk.

Inside the City Council building, they spent a few hours congratulating each other on the Civil Servant's Day and failing to agree on the agenda - possibly waiting for the people outside to lose patience and go home. Which is exactly what happened around noon.

Yulia Tymoshenko's Mikhail Brodsky (also quite repulsive in manner and appearance, even though he's on "our" side) is the rebel hero of the tariffs war. He kept yelling something from the back of the auditorium, trying Chernovetsky's patience, until they deprived him of the right to speak from the podium for the day. A punishment for "naglaya morda", as the mayor put it. (How would you translate it?)

I'm too sleepy to continue writing now, so I'll just mention that the thuggish-looking guys who allegedly started the spectacular fight that I managed to catch on TV as it was happening, could've been Chernovetsky's bodyguards. Also, the opposition is expecting mass protests at the beginning of January here, when people receive the new communal services payment forms in their mailboxes and are expected to pay 3.5 times what they are paying now. Who knows. The pro-mayor majority have voted to look some more into the tariffs issue, but even if they do agree to change something, it won't be more than 10 percent off. The opposition wants to cancel the new tariffs altogether (if I'm not mistaken).