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.
My bad, I see now.
Still not a Slavic problem primarily, as far as I know - it’s just the Russian language being kinda bad at spelling, especially when it comes to Ё. Learning German made me realize the true value of Umlauts and clear, consistent rules for using them in a given language with definite alternatives for cases when they can’t be used as is, such as email addresses and other tech areas dominated by the Latin/English alphabet.
I’d make it a strict rule to never use Е instead of Ё - they’re not interchangeable in any way; maybe there was a period of time when typewriters couldn’t conveniently take this letter into account, but in the digital era, with its greater ease of typing, there’s really no excuse in going with Е instead of Ё, ever. If that was the standard, I’m sure some relatively short time in the future the inconsistent transliteration could be much less of a problem for all the Russian-native Artyoms out there.
As for the international documents… I believe a proper standard would suffice, one that would define proper and correct translations for names. There probably is one (or one thousand) already, but it doesn’t seem like it’s that definitive after all.
I could wish that to be truth, but standartization doesn’t seem to be doable. One of the biggest blows to it’s concept comes from bolsheviks’ passportisation effort, where any initial standard was absent (and, honestly, both scribes and people were of questionable literacy). It cemented different forms even for names that were borrowed from other languages, invented it’s own and even saved a suffix to the sense of ‘X’s son’ for one of it’s nations, Azeri. With that, and a confusing two-sided pull for both russification and codification of national languages, it all came to mess. I do think this affected most soviet nations, but indeed Ё is only our pain I think.
Sadly enough Ё is lasily avoided even by state’s officials and press. There’s where this trend of saving it should’ve been started. Even M$ Word can be put to mark misuse of Е as a mistake – that’s for an American corporation – but those screaming about rusophobia and cultural erasure can’t move a finger a bit further one time per a paragraph.
I too adore German from my little time with it back in school. Sometimes pretty complex, but at least consistent. These two funnily resemble how the law is stereotypically applied both here and there. Except for genders, they suck in both. Learning English made me love genderless words and the struggle of local feminists to unificate feminine nouns in Russian, well, I loved the idea but sighed at execution.
When I was writing it, I remembered a thing that puts my sorrow over one letter to shame. Tajik language which sounds very lovely if spoken by natives has been written in three alphabets in the last century: cyrillic, latinic and arabic scripts. Let this rabbit hole be my thank-you gift for an interesting discussion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajik_language