Vitrenko's people have crossed Khreshchatyk to my side and are now moving towards Maidan.

Are they doing this now because they aren't allowed to be on Khreshchatyk on days off - or is it part of Vitrenko's campaign to drive the drivers crazy?



P.S. No, actually, they aren't moving anywhere - they stand next to Vitrenko's tents right outside my window. They are protesting the blockade of Transnistria, from what I can hear. They say about 200,000 citizens of Ukraine live there - is that really so? And they are now here to support the economic rights of Ukrainian citizens, blah blah blah...

Kyiv's too small for them...

This morning, there are Yushchenko's tents (which have been on Khreshchatyk since Sunday), Pora-PRP's and Lytvyn's flag-waving - and Natalya's Vitrenko crowd with their flags, all of them crammed on the other side of Khreshchatyk...

I've just posted this on Global Voices Online:

Preved, omerekancheg!

A Chicago-based LJ user angstzeit encounters a Russian-speaking bear and through a flashmob of Russian commenters learns about the Preved!-mania. John Lurie's original drawing; hundreds of followups at ru_preved LJ community; Preved! CafePress.com stuff; lots of Russian slang and obsceneties; a Cold War between the Preved Bear and the O RLY Owl; a discussion of stereotypes - and an invitation to visit Russia from LJ user romeus: "All of my American friends tell me that they have gotten happier after they visited Russia. you should come visit Moscow! PREVED!!! In Moscow the "Preveders" have already gone twice to the Moscow zoo to say PREVED to the bears. How happy is that?!!! :)))"

This may not be clear at all from what I post here, but I think that following the situation with the presidential election in Belarus is a lot more interesting than following the current Ukrainian campaign.

Right now, for example, I'm reading a number of Belarusian LiveJournals (many of them in Belarusian) - but I doubt I'll get myself to comment on what I read. Maybe I'll do a little summary for Global Voices, later.

***

This blog's links sidebar is very outdated, and I just can't organize myself and fix it.

But here's my Bloglines Central & Eastern Europe blogroll:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/neeka

Below is the Party of Putin's Politics stcker - I wrote about it back in January:



It's hard to think of anything more idiotic.

Klichko was at Maidan in the evening: he sounds quite menacing, which I think is good - but he was also praising Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor, his way of dealing with those who are building new, luxury housing in Moscow. I wasn't listening carefully - but I still find it alarming and suspicious: Omelchenko, Kyiv's current mayor, seemed to be Luzhkov's fan, too, and because of that we now have those tacky underground malls - and no parking space whatsoever.

Photographing Yushchenko's brand new orange tents all over Khreshchatyk was about as fun as photographing newly-installed garbage bins or something as prosaic. Boring.

Sterile, not spontaneous. A costly formality.









***

A friend has told me today of a Tymoshenko supporter who is volunteering as an election observer from Yushchenko's Our Ukraine - as a spy, deliberately, in order to catch them doing something illegal - and he's already been approached by someone, offering him to take part in rigging the results. I don't know the specifics, unfortunately.

Ha-ha, today's Victor Yushchenko's Day on Khreshchatyk - or should I say Yuri Yekhanurov's? Our Ukraine's Day.

They probably have some schedule somewhere, but I really like not knowing - and then I just look out of the window in the morning and, well, know. (Maybe they announce it on TV - but, as I said earlier, the last time I watched TV for more than a couple minutes was last year.)





I hope to have more pictures later - hope it won't rain/snow like yesterday.

Beautiful pictures of Moscow - beautifully ominous, scary - from the same photographer who made the marvelous Armenian shots I linked to ten days ago.

Photos of today's Yanukovych campaign event on Khreshchatyk are here.

The weather was nasty - rain and snow and wind, all more or less together. Several huge drops landed on my camera's lens right away, so the quality of the pictures isn't nice, and I wasn't trying too hard anyway - I was on the way to the Mothercare store at Maidan, for the first time since Marta's birth.

There were very few people, ridiculously few compared to Yulia's Feb. 26 event - but the weather was nice then, and there were free pancakes in addition to all the hats and scarves, and Yulia is much prettier than Yanukovych, too, and - she had bothered to come over to Khreshchatyk in person and give a little address.

A stage was set up, and there was some pop singing, and there were lots of blue flags in the audience - because the audience consisted almost exclusively of the young people hired to carry the blue flags around. That was funny.

I saw a number of bums with Yanukovych plastic bags - happy-looking bums. A guy from one of the tents came up to me and asked me to take one such bag, and I refused, very softly.

I'm glad the weather was lousy and it didn't turn out to be a good day for Yanukovych. And I'm sure it wasn't the weather that kept people away - after all, it was much worse during the Orange Revolution and on its first anniversary. Maybe the terrible campaign songs were the reason people shunned Khreshchatyk today...

One thing I did like, though: the color blue. I loved it, surprisingly. Must be because of a prolonged exposure to Marta's pink and other sweet, girly colors.

Oh, and the Mothercare store is amazing. I spent, like, an hour there, walking around with a silly silly silly smile on my face. I bought two sets of sleepsuits for Marta, but they turned out to be too huge for her yet. I wanted to buy everything, though.

Mothercare is quite expensive, of course, but there are plenty of truly wonderful Ukrainian-made kids' stuff being sold in Kyiv - very, very good quality and not too expensive. They must've learned how to make it this good by working as cheap labor for big foreign labels.

My mama, too, keeps being amazed at all the stuff you can buy for kids now: her experience of trying to dress me in the 1970s was totally different.

And Mishah's mother stopped by today and told us this story: one day, also sometime in the 1970s, she ran into kids' coats being sold in the Passage. Brown coats, nothing too special, but a rarity still. There was a huge line, of course, and as she stood in it, she prayed for there to be enough coats - and for the saleswoman to be kind enough to allow her to buy two - because she had twins to dress. So when it was her turn, people behind her (I mean, assholes behind her) began to bitch: prove us you have two kids, show us your passport, etc. And she didn't have her passport with her - and she ended up getting so upset that she started to cry. And the saleswoman turned out to be of a rare kind, too: she took pity with Mishah's mother and sold her two coats. And she scolded those assholes in the line for being so heartless.

Anyway, here're a few pictures from the Yanukovych event:

Wow - Slobodan Milosevic has been found dead in his prison cell. Always strange to realize that those guys are mortal, too.

[Had a screenshot of Gazeta.ru piece with his picture here - but I've taken it off. Don't want him here.]

It's raining and Marta's staying home today, and I'm waiting for mama to return and stay with Marta while I go out.

***

So I've been thinking this: if I force myself to look at the pre-election circus as if I'm an outsider, from high above, sort of, and as someone who's not expected to vote, not expected to choose between so many God-knows-what's - then it all begins to feel very normal, amazingly decent and civilized.

Peaceful co-existence of all those competing parties, blocs, and their campaign booklets, posters, tents, flags and cheap-labor human representatives. No violence whatsoever, not even much verbal abuse (which doesn't count anyway). The electorate has a chance to make up their minds and pick up some free scarves, baloons and plastic bags.

We are way cool, and if the majority follows Les' Poderevyansky's principle and chooses more "noble" shit over less "noble" shit, then maybe by the time our children (or grandchildren) grow up, our "political elite" will evolve into something not to be too ashamed of... If I do end up voting for someone (Pora-PRP, most likely), and not against them all, this will be the reason.

Here're a few photos of peaceful co-existence:

Shit, today's Yanukovych's day on Khreshchatyk...

Blue tents, blue flags everywhere - but what's really annoying is the music: we laughed at it with Mishah last weekend, but now I'll have to spend the day listening to it... The thing is, Yanukovych and his Party of the Regions are using the tune of We Will Rock You - and their own lyrics, which include this:

My za Regiony! S nami Yanukovich!

("We are for the Regions! Yanukovych is with us!")

Like, God's with us.

I think it's so ridiculously dumb. Poor Freddie Mercury.

Anyway, here's what it looks like from my window now:





I'll try to get outside later and take some pictures, if Marta allows me.

P.S. I keep forgetting to link to this little info about Yanukovych's campaign supplied by Scott W. Clark at Foreign Notes:

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In a hush-hush deal, longtime Republican lobbyist Paul Manafort signs on as a behind-the-scenes campaign adviser for the much-maligned Ukrainian opposition figure and close friend of the Kremlin, Viktor Yanukovych, who earned the scorn of the White House during the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought his opponent to power in Kiev. (Via the Action Ukraine Report.)

So wonderful to read something really positive about Ukraine - a New York Times story that has nothing to do with the elections, about an ambitious ski resort project in the beautiful Ukrainian Carpathians:

With master plans from Canada, high-speed lifts from Austria and $125 million in start-up capital, Mr. Dobrovolsky's Bukovel resort is the most significant investment in the region.

No great claim for this distant land of weathered wood houses and horse-drawn carriages in this Ivano-Frankovsk oblast, or administrative region. But if investment plans for the next few years are met, Bukovel will be one of the largest ski resorts in the world, with more guest accommodations than megaresorts like Whistler, in British Columbia, or even Vail.

Plans call for a total of $1 billion to be invested by 2010, when the resort will have 26 lifts and 75 miles of trails, said Mr. Dobrovolsky, now 31. The airport in nearby Ivano-Frankovsk is slated for expansion to handle international visitors.

And the very end of the piece is very moving, too:

Mr. Bidniy and Mr. Mudraninets know that a vibrant ski industry is just one step in the right direction for a poor country.

"If I had a lot of money, I'd rebuild the Uzhhorod orchestra," Mr. Mudraninets said. "It's the sign of a good city. Good roads and a good symphony orchestra. When we have those things, you know Ukraine will have arrived."

God bless them.

And here's a little of the March 8 bullshit from Ukrainian politicians:







This last one is Mykhailo Poplavsky, a man who thinks Ukrainian hairdressers need a college degree: he has created the Hairdressers' Academy at the Ukrainian National University of Culture, which he heads.