The good folks in the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic, formerly known as Ukraine, want you to know that they’re not too busy fighting to pay attention to what’s happening in the U.S. of A. In fact, they’re using an image spreading over Russian-language social media that reminds the United States to mind its own business.
On Tuesday, the former “Prime Minister” of the self-proclaimed republic, Alexander Borodai, tweeted some commentary on the recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, over the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Here’s the translation:
Obama: Hello
Putin: Hi, Obama, they tell me that your Ferguson is rising up against the authorities. [We] should probably back them up…
Obama: Vladimir, don’t do this, I’m begging you!
Putin: I’m kidding, Barack! Russia, unlike certain others, doesn’t interfere in the internal dealings of foreign governments
Obama: Phew! That Putin is going to drive me back up a palm tree with his jokes
Because no good Russian joke is complete without a tinge of racism.
Borodai found time to tweet amid a couple of very tough days in East Ukraine. The region looks like a war zone as all sides blame one another for attacks, and Ukrainian forces make their way deeper into rebel-held territory. On Monday, the Ukrainian government announced that rebels had attacked a caravan of internally displaced people heading out of Luhansk, killing dozens. (Evidence of this has been hard to come by; so far the only proof is a video interview with purported survivors.) Rebels denied the attack.
To try to contain the situation along the border, which now is slowly but surely headed toward an all-out military conflict, Vladimir Putin is set to meet with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and EU officials next week. As for that much-touted aid convoy … well, that’s still in Russia.
In another example of international pot-calling-kettle, Egypt’s totally-democratic-government-that-definitely-didn’t-come-into-power-because-of-a-coup also weighed in on the Ferguson shooting, urging the U.S. to exercise caution in Ferguson.
Because, you know, that’s what they did all those times they sentenced pro–Muslim Brotherhood protesters to death en masse.
