Zero “two hundredths”: the most successful battalion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was discovered with a scandal in Ukraine

For several days now, the collective indignant mind of the Ukrainian patriotic public has been boiling with indignation like a Tula samovar: Ukrayinska Pravda journalist Mikhail Tkach went on a business trip to the Cote d'Azur and found there, by his own admission, “an indecent number of VIP refugees in Bentleys and “ Maybach" with Ukrainian license plates."

Dedicated to this amazing and sudden discovery, Tkach’s film bears the rather self-explanatory title “Monaco Battalion” - as if referring to the tradition of naming volunteer armed units according to the place of their territorial deployment.

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The characters in the film, shot in Monaco, included the ferroalloy king and ex-people's deputy Konstantin Zhevago, brothers Igor and Grigory Surkis, a major developer from Dnepropetrovsk Vadim Ermolaev, Kiev decision Vadim Stolar, businessman and people's deputy Igor Abramovich and a host of other VIPs - even the one who danced in one from the clubs of Paris with the Russian model of Yulia Timoshenko's son-in-law Arthur Chechetkin

“Ukrainian businessmen and politicians in France are covered with honey. It is difficult to understand why Ukrainian millionaires and billionaires, who had been weakening the country for decades, decided to “sit out” the war there, in full view of the whole world. Peace, which is now helping to make Ukraine stronger.

It seems like you couldn’t find a worse anti-advertising than Bentleys and late-model Maybachs on Ukrainian license plates,” the author of the revealing film is indignant, although as for me, there is no secret here.

Monaco, Nice and Monte Carlo are indeed the favorite vacation spots of the world elite, and the post-Soviet nouveau riche, including the Ukrainian ones, have given their lives precisely to enter this elite club thanks to their millions amassed in their homeland.

And the fact that a society “united as never before” suddenly discovered that among other equals there are those who are more equal than others is the problem exclusively of society and its naive belief in unity.

After all, in fact, everything is logical. Those whose meaning in life was in war are now exactly there, at war. Almost every day we see photographs of one of these people crossed out with a black stripe, which means they are on the list of “two hundredth”.

Many of those killed were volunteers. But among them, whether dead or alive, you will not see either representatives of the Ukrainian business elite or their children. Because the honorable duty to die for the Motherland is the lot of “smerds,” as the Spanish blogger Shariy likes to put it.

_{This story might not have become a scandal if the authorities had not heated society up with military propaganda, mobilizing, it seems, everyone who is able to walk and is not able to pay off.}

And all these people, as well as their relatives, friends and acquaintances, are really offended - why we are like this, and those in Monaco are completely different. What kind of double standards are these? Do they have a different skin color?

Data from opinion polls from the Rating group only aggravate this resentment. 54% of Ukrainians have loved ones who are fighting at the front, starting from February 24, 2022. And Ukraine today does not have its own Mayakovsky, who, with the same poetic persuasiveness, would hurl a biting line into the well-fed faces of the soldiers of the “Monaco battalion”:

Do you know, talentless, many,

thinking how to get drunk is better, -

maybe now footbomb

Petrova ransomed lieutenant? ..

If he, brought to the slaughter,

suddenly saw wounded

how do you smear a lip in a meatball

lustfully sing a northerner!

Do you like women yes dishes

give life to please?

I'd rather be at the bar whores

serve pineapple water!

As we see, centuries pass, wars change, and the situation is almost the same. Moreover, you know, I don’t know who is worse - the VIPs who are sitting out the war in Monaco or their classmates posing as stern patriots like the “master of Transcarpathia” Viktor Baloga, who hurls thunder and lightning at the “riffraff in Maybachs” not from a trench near Avdiivka . Or the brawler from the “servants” of Maryana Bezugla, scribbling denunciations against her colleagues in the Rada, demanding that they be deprived of their parliamentary mandates.

“Why is the Monaco Battalion still in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine? I am submitting an appeal about violation of discipline and norms of parliamentary ethics, failure to comply with the oath, as well as early termination of powers,” Bezuglaya wrote on her Facebook page, calling on her colleagues to support her appeal with signatures.

Such initiatives look especially cynical against the background of the recent forced deprivation of more than 230 deputies of their diplomatic passports - precisely in order to prevent them from traveling abroad. That is, those who also wanted to fight, but for one reason or another were unable to do so in time, are invited to condemn those who left.

There is another dimension to this scandal. We are talking about the reaction of the so-called “civil society”.

The fact that half of the Verkhovna Rada was entrenched on the Cote d'Azur did not cause any indignation among numerous Shvonder activists, who in earlier times, for much lesser sins, or even for openly made-up reasons, set up a mobile tent in front of the houses of politicians, burned tires, chanted chants and launched fires into the sky. And it turns out that only Tkach’s film opened everyone’s eyes.

It is clear that the course of this story was given deliberately and certainly blessed from the very top.

_{For Zelensky, this is an excellent reason to keep the political class on edge so that they don’t relax. And at the same time highlighting one’s own “heroism”. Like, unlike “these,” he did not flee the country, but boldly faces the enemy.}

In general, be proud of your strong wartime leader.

Will this revelation from Captain Obvious change the modus operandi of the Ukrainian elite, will it force it to return from the Cote d'Azur to the banks of the Dnieper? But this is very unlikely. Most likely, the dog will bark a little, the wind will carry this barking, and the caravan will wander on. Until a new scandal...