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”.
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.
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.
The best part about standardization is picking the one you want to use the most.
