I just visited the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (state run media in Australia) website, planning to look for the latest news about the elections that took place in Ukraine over the past weekend.
(To celebrate the elections in Ukraine on Sunday, Mr Moi and I headed to the village with our friends, and went mushrooming! Mmm Mmm.)
And lo and behold, instead I find this article about Russia threatening to cut the gas supply to Ukraine this winter.
Oh no! I don’t want to be cold this winter. With the cold weather closing in (although, the past few days have resembled an indian summer (does anyone know if that term is politically incorrect? We don’t tend to use it in Australia so I don’t know what indian origins it has)), I don’t want to have no gas to cook yummy stews and soups this winter. Or heat my apartment, for that matter.
Scrolling down the search results past the gas, I found that the President of Ukraine is ordering a probe into the vote count, because there has been no outright winner so far. Both Yanukovych, the current PM, and the Yulia Bloc / Nasha Ukraina coalition have declared victory.
Now, if I do my sums very roughly, in the past two years or so, the country has pretty much been without a government for eight months out of 24. And yet, things get done. For example (and I’m guessing these are City Council initiatives, rather than government?):
- My road recently got re-paved. Heartbreakingly, when they pulled up the bitumen, there were cobblestones beneath, and they just covered them up again. But the new road looks nice
- Mine isn’t the only road to get done. A few of the big highways around town have been redone, and other streets around the place, including near MegaMarket
- Footpaths were also done, partly in bitumen, and also in paving. Looks nice
- New traffic lights are getting installed around popular intersections. They’re quite nifty, and show how many seconds left before the light switches over to Gary the green walking man, and back to Roy the red standing man.
Posted in kyiv
