Volodymyr Zelenskiy declared his personal income for the first time since the outbreak of war with Russia, as part of his effort to increase transparency in his government.
In 2021, the year before Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskiy and his family reported income of 10.8 million hryvnia ($285,000), down 12 million hryvnia from the previous year, even as his income was boosted by the sale of $142,000 of government bonds, according to a statement on his website.
In 2022, the first year of the Russian invasion, the Zelenskiy family’s income fell further to 3.7 million hryvnia as he earned less income from renting real estate he owned because of the hostilities.
Even as the war allowed Ukrainian officials to withhold revealing sensitive personal information, Zelenskiy pushed to make them publicly declare assets. Increasing transparency and tackling graft are necessary for his country to ensure continued financial aid from its western allies, even as more than $100 billion of funds are held up due to political maneuvering inside US and EU.
Gotta say, that’s an almost aggressively reasonable salary for running an entire country,
I’d consider myself pretty well taken care of for that level of pay.
Don’t forget, he was a very well known actor and comedian before.
This is what still blows me away.
A fucking actor is doing a better job running a country specifically during wartime than a typical politician.
It’s fuckin embarrassing to every single person on this planet who’s dealing with stupid/corrupt/inept politicians who would sell their constituents for fuckin toilet paper.
Tbf, the US tried the actor president twice, and they turned out to be the two worst presidents in modern US history, so it might not always be the best idea to elect the “outsider”.
Which two?
Reagan and Trump. The former was a b-list actor before becoming governor and then president and the latter played a successful businessman in the fictional series “The Apprentice”.
It’s so ironic that California and New York, two beacons of progressivism have us those two turds.
Liberalism, not progressivism. There are big and important differences.
You’re right about the rest though, of course.
Calling him just an actor is sort of unfair to him though. He was basically Ukraine’s Jon Stewart. He does a great job as a politician because he spent years satirizing them, so he knows how the sausage is made and he knows how they totally fuck up and how to avoid it. That’s why he’s so successful at his job.
And, I imagine, if Jon Stewart ever ran for office, he would do similarly well.
imagine, if Jon Stewart ever ran for office
Please, I can only get so erect. I’d tune in 24/7. With popcorn.
Stewart/Colbert would be the ticket to the greatest America.
Bruh everything about zelenksy is fucking incredible. What a guy
I think we’re gonna learn some things about him after this war is over that we won’t like. He’s doing great as a war time president, but no one is this squeaky clean.
True.
For example Churchill: great wartime PM, but also very much an anti-worker free market believing imperialist who actively fought against both independence for and immigration from the British colonies. People tend to only remember the first part, though.
The hypocrisy in his support for Israel is infuriating, but otherwise yeah.
I mean he’s a politician and in order to protect his people he has to suck up to the US.
Isn’t he just generally a Zionist? Like even before this war.
You don’t want Israel to exist? And, yes, Zelenskiy was born Jewish. I’m sure he supports the existence of a Jewish state, aka a Zionist.
Setting aside that Israel is fundamentally an Apartheid state (that’s kinda the sales pitch when you say “Jewish state”) and therefore shouldn’t exist, that’s not what I’m talking about. He’s been pretty loud about his support for Israel’s war when he could’ve just stayed silent.
Why don’t you look at Israels demographic before calling it an apartheid? By that definition most middle east countries are apartheid
I’m… Not sure what you’re even trying to say. Israel’s sales pitch is a state where Jews are superior to none-Jews. That assumption is in every fabric of Israeli society. By your definition South Africa wouldn’t have been Apartheid because they had black people.
He deserves every damn penny of it, and more.
His country is on the line and he is dependent on the West for support. Ukraine has nothing to gain and everything to lose from supporting Palestinians.
Edit: Huh, could’ve sworn the message I replied to read that Zelensky’s support for Israel is infuriating.
As the guy who wrote that: Yeah I guess it’s inevitable given the current situation, though I’d at least want him to stay silent instead of going on about Israel’s right to defend itself. I more meant in general, but now that I think about it I don’t remember him going above and beyond for Israel before 2023.
Don’t give too much air to that argument, drawing broad comparisons between the legitimate struggle of the sovereign country of Ukraine against Russia and the Israeli response to the all out terrorist attacks of Gaza against them is pretty insulting to Ukraine. I’d imagine zelensky being jewish is also somewhat of a factor in his perspective.
drawing broad comparisons between the legitimate struggle of the sovereign country of Ukraine against Russia and the Israeli response to the all out terrorist attacks of Gaza against them is pretty insulting to Ukraine.
Only if you think Palestinians have no right to resist Israeli occupation. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and Russia is attempting to commit genocide in Ukraine (or at least parts of it).
Resisting is probably fine but doing large scale terrorist attacks against civilians and blindly firing rockets into Isreali territory is unhinged and in no way justified.
Firing rockets into Israel is one of the few ways they can actually do something. It’s what stopped people in Sheikh Jarrah from getting evicted in 2021 if you remember that. And while many atrocities were committed on October 7th, we can’t ignore the fact that it had clear military targets and goals. Or the fact that the IDF killed an unknown but significant number of their own citizens during their response to the attack. Your interpretation of the events of October 7th seems like it’s based on early reporting of the attack; we know a lot more know and it wasn’t as one-sided as Israel wants you to think.
That something that they’re doing is currently getting a lot of their civilians killed while not really archiveing any tangible military goals. I think I remember the incident you are referencing and even if I trust your statement that it stopped the evictions, “terrorism worked in the past, therefore terrorism is justified” strikes me as a very weak argument. You’d probably complain if I said that Isreal going ballistic against its enemies worked for them in the past, therefore an ethnic cleansing of Gaza is A-OK, right?
We now know a lot more details about how bad the terrorist attacks really are and that they justify dismantling Hamas. Even the surrounding Arab nations hate them and want them gone, so no recognized powers (except Iran, maybe?) are doing anything about Isreals actions. If you referring to the memes about Isreal killing their own civillians that were uncritically amplified by western media then too bad, most of these claims were made up.
Btw I don’t really look too much at any of the involved parties in any conflict when it comes to getting the facts straight, they’re good for corroberation at best.
I swear, I’ve been seeing so many different spellings of his last name lately. I’ve seen -sky, -skyy, -skey, and now -skiy. I wonder why different outlets seem to be using different spellings.
His actual name is written in Cyrillic so the latinized versions are all just ways of trying to write a bunch of latin letters that roughly correspond to how his name is pronounced. That’s going to be quite different across languages that use the latin alphabet, even across different accents in the same language.
If you were to write a word like 🚽 the way it actually sounds, would it be toy-let (canadian), tuy-leht, (if you’re from parts of britain) tay-let (if you’re australian), tee-let (new zealand)….?
Is there not a standardized translation for Ukrainian Cyrillic to English? Every other language seems to manage it.
Also accents don’t change your spelling. We all still spell it toilet.
It’s a bit more difficult, since you have to substitute letters and pronunciations that don’t really exist in the Latin alphabet e.g. Я>ya, Щ>shch. For English there is no one correct pronunciation of words so there are regional differences. The the way you would write these sounds drifts even further apart in other languages, in German I would write the two examples like: Я>ja, Щ>schtsch
Not sure if that helps but translating what essentially boils down to different sounds is a bit of a mess.
The best part about standardization is picking the one you want to use the most.
If you were to write a word like 🚽
Average Kanji enjoyer.
Very much this.
The suffix at the end of that last name is also causing some trouble:
- In Ukrainian, it’s Зеленський (note the “ь”, a silent letter supposed to soften the consonant before itself)
- In Russian, it’s Зеленский (no “ь”, the “н” is not soft)
- In Polish, it’s Zełenski (no “й” or anything similar, resulting in a different pronunciation again)
Now compare it to the last name of a Polish author: Сапковський (Ukrainian), Сапковский (Russian), Sapkowski (Polish).
Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles all have examples of last names like these, but the rules of our languages dictate that we handle them differently, even in terms of spelling and pronunciation; for people not speaking a Slavic language naturally, it understandably is a nightmare, as neither spelling is objectively the right one in terms of linguistics.
For now, it’s probably best to either go with one of the following:
- Zelensky or Zelenski, akin to Polish equivalent spelling of similar last names
- Zelenskyy, as seems to be the more or less official or judicial spelling of this Ukrainian last name
As messy as it seems, I believe it’s going to stay the same. Romanization of the Russian language is already an equally messy phenomenon despite multiple efforts to standardize the process, yet it only resulted in several ways of tackling the difficult cases, which is of very little help; Ukrainian seems to be an even more complicated case for romanization as it has some features that would either require intricate rules to create accurate spellings, or make greater use of diacritics.
Slavs are pretty fucked. My fav is a name Артём that defies any hope for a consistent translation.
Artyom?
Due to Ё being randomly changed into Е in some formal documents, both Artyom and Artem are seemingly valid transcliterations, and this Ё can be written in many ways, all of them far from original spelling.
My source of credibility is that I’ve studied linguistics and translation/interpreting and got a BA on the matter, so I’m not talking out of my ass entirely.
Get ready for some dorky read.
Artyom is pretty much the expected translation, regardless of the original spelling: like with Sapkowski becoming Сапковский in Russian, which may not be what the original pronunciation or spelling intended, but that’s fine, because it’s intended to be used in a different language.
If you want to follow the spelling example, then every language is fucked because King George is very far from the Russian equivalent of Король Георг, let alone the fact that individual vowels and consonants and then their combinations are all, in fact, different sounds between languages. None of it means a translation isn’t accurate or right - it’s about ideas and legibility, comprehension achieved with the means of a target language first and foremost, no matter the limitations or differences of the source language.
Back to Artyom, regardless of the spelling I Russian, either Артём or Артем, you pronounce it the same, so it makes most sense to spell it as Artyom in English.
@x4740N@lemmy.world said languages should translate words phonetically, but that’s far from practical or comprehensive in general - but it has applications in proper names, and even then there are exceptions to handle stylistic or purely linguistic aspects.
And none of that is strictly a solely Slavic problem. It’s not even a problem, actually.
It’s indeed a problem when you get international documents where you are sometimes written as Artem or Artyom, and you are just Art’om. If you don’t insist on one translation, you’d get many problems with documents not being consistent.
