Summer is known to be slow in news. Unless it is a Ukrainian summer.
The first week of August brought to Ukraine the 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) heat and a bunch of really strange and sometimes funny news.
For four days, the whole country and even government officials have been enthusiastically tracking a barge that sailed up the Dnipro River from Kherson to Kyiv, carrying 250 tons of watermelons. The intrigue? It happened for the first time in 14 years and allegedly marked the revival of the river transportations in Ukraine.
In other news, Ukraine’s security service SBU on Aug. 1 detained a drug mule who swallowed 28 condoms filled with cocaine to smuggle it in Ukraine.
And on Aug. 2, Marilyn Manson told the fans at this show in Kyiv that they “make Moscow sound like your bitch”.
These are only some of the craziest news of this week.
So why did Ukrainians care so much about this stuff? Especially since there were much more important things to pay attention to.
This week, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a controversial law on new Constitutional Court that allows the president, parliament and the Congress of Judges to appoint their loyalists in an arbitrary way.
But we don’t want to think about it.
We also don’t want to know about the new wave of harassment against watchdogs and other critics of the current government.
We don’t want to care about our President being so afraid to lose his cozy office, that he stripped the citizenship from Mikheil Saakashvili, who wasn’t even his biggest competitor but criticized his actions loudly.
We also don’t want to think too much about a yet another failed attempt of a Ukrainian court to make a ruling in the high treason case of the ousted president Viktor Yanukovych on Aug. 3.
The thing is, the reality in Ukraine has always been scary and dark, a place where everyone needs to fight for existence.
That’s why we are thirsty for good or funny news that would help us to get relief from all the madness around. The news that brings hope or make us laugh.
August served plenty of that already.
Watermelon fever
On Aug. 4, a barge delivered 250 tons of watermelons from Hola Prystan River Port in Kherson Oblast to Pereyaslav Khmelnitsky in Kyiv Oblast, having traveled more than 300 kilometers up the Dnipro River.
It was the first time in 14 years that the watermelons from Ukraine’s south were delivered by the river – a symbol of the alleged revival of the river cargo transportation.
Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan said that up to the beginning of the 1990s Ukraine used to transport more than 60 million tons of cargo a year by rivers. However, during the 1990s and 2000s the river transportation infrastructure got worn out. And the cargo transportations dropped to 5-7 million tons a year.
In terms of USAID project of help for Ukrainian agrarians, Ukrainian agro holding Nibulon and Silpo funded the watermelon barge trip. Omelyan said that the ministry allocated Hr 100 million for infrastructure repairs.
The minister said that shifting 1 million tons of cargo from the automobile roads onto the rivers every year will save Hr 800 million in road repair costs.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman also got super excited about the watermelons barge. He wrote several tweets and posts on Facebook about the watermelons.
Somebody even started a Twitter account on behalf of “a watermelon from the barge.”
Al Pachino’s iconic scene from “The God Father” trilogy, where Michael Corleone sits behind the table with a huge amount of cocaine was turned into a meme by Ukrainian Facebook users. The meme has a caption “When a barge with watermelons finally came to Kyiv”. (Courtesy)
Swallower
The Security Service of Ukraine arrested on Aug. 1 a 25-year-old Ukrainian man who tried to smuggle 1.3 kilo of cocaine from Brazil into Ukraine in his stomach. The drug mule swallowed 28 condoms filled with cocaine, the Prosecutor’s General Office of Kyiv Oblast Department said.
A bitch or not a bitch?
During his concert in Kyiv American rock legend, Marilyn Manson tried to cheer up his Ukrainian fans and said: “Kyiv! Now I don’t want to be political but you just made Moscow sound like your bitch..”
Although he was referring to the fact that Ukrainian fans were supporting him more loudly than his Russian fans at his July 31 show in Moscow, many saw his words to be a political statement.
Russian media went as far as saying that Manson offended the whole Russian nation with his words.
Just look at these headlines in the Russian media:
Life News: Manson in Kyiv: “You forced Moscow to cry like a bitch!”
Regnum: “Manson offended Moscow in Kyiv”
Moscovskiy Komsomolets: “Manson abused Russia in Kyiv”
Well, many Ukrainians also wanted to interpret his words as an act of support in the Russia’s war against Ukraine, but we were satisfied even with their real meaning.
“Watermelons are coming!” reads the caption to the meme, Ukrainian social media users created from “The Game of Thrones” TV series scene, where Daenerys Targaryen sails home to Westeros in season six. (Courtesy)
