The year of 2015 was (another) one of war and corruption in Ukraine. The body count from the east continued to pile up as Russia kept up its war. Meanwhile, numerous corruption scandals snared top officials on a regular basis.
But there were also plenty of surreal moments in the headlines, and the Kyiv Post has rounded up the top five most bizarre stories from the passing year.
Darth
Vader runs for office
Darth Mykolaiovych Vader ran for mayor of
Odesa during the local elections in October. He came in 15 out of 42
candidates.
Around 20 Vaders have featured in recent
Ukrainian elections after legally changing their names – many on the Internet
Party’s mandate. Two ran for prime minister and president in 2014.
Darth Mykolaiovych, who also unsuccessfully
campaigned for parliament in Odesa in 2014, dresses up in costume almost
every day and can be seen around the port city accompanied by Chewbacca and
Imperial Stormtroopers.
Some residents of Odesa seem to prefer Darth
Vader to other politicians. An artist in the city, home of Darth Vader’s
Internet Party, built a monument to Darth Vader to replace a toppled statue of
Lenin.
Chewbacca
gets arrested
Chewbacca was handcuffed and bundled into a
police car by several police officers in late October. He was searched, and
even his lightsaber was confiscated after police caught him campaigning for
Darth Vader in Odesa on Election Day, which is forbidden by Ukrainian law. He
also landed in hot water for driving Darth Vader to the polls without any form
of ID.
Chewbacca – in full costume for the duration
of his encounter with police — reportedly did not go quietly, putting up
resistance and refusing to pay the $5 fine that police slapped him with for
failing to show his passport. He said he couldn’t pay because his funds were
“in an intergalactic bank.”
A police statement on his arrest read:
“Nothing unusual here, just Chewbacca detained for being without documents
while driving Darth Vader to the elections in Odessa. The Sith Lord has already
claimed this was illegal as Chewbacca is his pet and general servant and thus
does not require documents.”
A
fake columnist presents made-up evidence of a war crime involving very real
people
There were a lot of mind-boggling conspiracy
theories to come out of the Ukraine conflict, but one in particular deserves
honorable mention.
Around the one-year anniversary of the MH17
tragedy, which claimed 298 lives and was widely believed to have been caused by
pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east, the media arm of Russia’s Defense
Ministry claimed to have some sensational news.
The news outlet, Zvezda, posted a story
claiming to have the smoking gun that the CIA had been behind the MH17
catastrophe – and a journalist from the BBC just happened to be the “agent”
executing the West’s nefarious plans.
The source for this earth-shattering news was
an obscure website registered in the UK that turned out to be nothing more than
an online search engine where people could anonymously post text.
Some mysterious “Caleb Gilbert” had posted the
“news” that David Stern, a correspondent for the BBC, had been caught redhanded
in a newly discovered audio recording between him and his handlers in Langley.
Upon listening to the leaked audio, however,
it was nearly impossible to take the allegations seriously. The dialogue in the
conversation was so contrived and the accents of the speakers so wrong, that
many believed Russian voice actors had simply done an astoundingly poor job
with their latest propaganda stunt.
A dead body and vodka burst through a
Ukrainian checkpoint on the Russian border
Ukrainians have grown accustomed to news
reports of shoot-outs and shelling of Ukrainian checkpoints on the Russian
border, but in mid-August border guards found themselves face to face with a
surreal situation.
Two vehicles without any license plates burst
through the checkpoint, despite warning shots fired by border guards, and were
later found to be transporting a dead body and contraband vodka.
Investigators later said the vodka had been part
of a contraband scheme, though details on the identity of the dead body and how
he wound up dead were never released.
Yanukovych’s
corrupt legacy temporarily overshadowed by his penchant for ostriches
Hated in Ukraine for being a symbol of corruption,
ousted Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych gave a baffling interview to
the BBC in June, in which he attempted to justify his actions during the
violent EuroMaidan Revolution protests that began in late 2013.
When pressed for answers on how he could allow
corruption to flourish and whether he was responsible for the killings of
innocent protesters on Maidan, the disgraced fugitive claimed he wasn’t
corrupt, he just happened to live on the territory of a private zoo. Refuting
the BBC reporter’s allegations that he owned his own private zoo and his own
flock of wild animals, including ostriches, Yanukovych, with exasperation, said
the ostriches “just happened to be there” on the territory where he was
residing.
“That I supported the ostriches, what’s wrong
with that?” he asked, as if it was absurd for anyone to question the ostriches’
role in Yanukovych’s rule.
Yanukovych’s comments quickly went viral, and
some savvy entrepreneurs even began offering T-shirts for sale featuring an
ostrich saying “We just happen to live here.”
