Glamorous? Well, anything Vogue does is glamorous, it can’t help itself. But the pictures from the Vogue shoot are more than that. They are determined, powerful, evocative.
I guess we really do have Russian bots on Quora, because who else would have posed this question? Also, the syntax seems weird. Unnatural.
Olena Zelenska is an exceptionally beautiful woman, and Vogue noticed that. She has, as the article accompanying the photos states, a “luminous face” and large, expressive green-brown eyes that reflect “deep sadness, flashes of dark humor, recollections of a safer, happier past, and a steely core.” If you’re the top fashion magazine in the world, why wouldn’t you want to put that on your cover?
Part of the luminosity of Olena’s face comes from eating vegetables. Before all this happened, she took it upon herself as First Lady to overhaul school lunches in Ukraine. She made sure the children got good helpings of tastily prepared vegetables instead of only meat and potatoes. Melania Trump is from the Eastern Bloc, too. What did she ever do for our children when she was First Lady? You can bet she will do the same amount now.
This question states the Vogue article was an “example of how divorced this jet-setting, luxury-living yahoo president is from the plight of his people which he 100% caused by poking Russia.” Oh yeah? Not rolling over and letting Russia take over was “poking” Russia? It wasn’t Zelenksyy who “poked” Russia; the plight of Zelenskyy and his people, his family, was and is caused by Putin invading Ukraine. Moreover, Zelenskyy does not live a “jet-setting, luxurious” life. Zelenskyy is right in there with the people of Ukraine. The one touch of luxury he may have is the ethereal beauty of his wife, but that is God-given. Moreover, the couple fell in love as teenagers in high school. Olena was not bought, not like Melania was for Trump. Their’s is a true marriage, a true love story.
The Ukrainian’s fight for their freedom and independence is heroic. I hope the Taiwanese do that if China decides to mess with them. Hey, Taiwan, it would make it sooo much easier for us to help you. We would send you materiel and people to show you how to use it. You do the fighting yourselves.
But would Taiwan actually fight the Chinese? I don’t want to find out. China has a massive army. And so we need to stop Putin so China doesn’t feel it can do what it so desperately wants to do: take over Taiwan. That would bring the world to its knees because Taiwan supplies so much of the world semi-conductor chips.
So, yes, we should support Ukraine in their fight against Putin. Ukrainians fighting makes the whole world safer. It shows megalomaniac dictators that they can’t necessarily expand the borders of their country, that the small countries around them might not simply roll over and let them do whatever.
There is a little restaurant in my neighborhood, “Bevri”, that serves Georgian food, not from Georgia in the American South, but from Georgia in Europe: the little country on the Black Sea surrounded by Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Azerbaijan. One of the waiters is in his mid-20s, from Russia, barely speaks English. He and his girlfriend married hastily so their parents could see it and then they slipped out of Russia so he wouldn’t have to fight in Ukraine. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley; I eat out a couple times a week. I’m at the Georgian place maybe once every couple months. I ask the young Russian waiter how he’s doing, how his wife is doing. She’s a Tae Kwon Do master.
It seems that I’m not the only one who wants to support Bevri. The restaurant is always busy, even though the food isn’t that good and it’s expensive (like everything in Palo Alto). Don’t get me wrong, the food seems well prepared. It’s just that it seems Georgia never developed much of a cuisine, they made do with what they had, and Silicon Valley is a great place for foodies. The world comes to Silicon Valley. You walk several blocks away from Bevri and you have excellent Hong Kong cuisine, it feels like you’re in Hong Kong (including the make-up of the clientele), a couple blocks in the other direction and there’s great Italian, a little further are two fabulous Greek places, and a wonderful Persian steakhouse, on and on. Around the corner is a young Japanese-American chef from Hawaii who does Asian fusion so creative it’s reminiscent of Alice Walker before she got stuck-up. He’s such a hit that that Gwenyth Paltrow ate there when she visited the area.
And then there’s little Bevri. With its humble Georgian food. And its young waiters, all speaking together in I’m not sure what languages. Russian for sure, I can recognize that, but other languages as well. They are of all colors. One looks Asian, but not quite. I’m not sure what they think of us. They are wary. But we support them, these heartbreakingly young people, so far from home. Bevri is always busy. We buy their $26 bread with the raw egg on top (well, it has cheese, too), 10% sales tax, Palo Alto “living wage” tax on top of that, plus tip. Yeah, we’re liberal coastal elite snowflakes. But we’re also one of the great engines of the country. If California were its own country, we’d be the fifth largest economy in the world, and a lot of that has to do with tech innovation that comes out of Silicon Valley. We gave you the internet, home computers, cell phones. We’re working on AI. We incubated Elon Musk. You think he could have done what he did if he'd stayed in South Africa? (Peter Thiel, too. And now they don’t want to pay taxes to us.) 40% of the residents of Silicon Valley were not only not born in California, they weren’t even born in the US.
War is a terrible, terrible thing. But we in America are not afraid to face it. Of course we don’t like to fight, no one does. So when we do, we want to fight on the side of people who are willing to fight for themselves. We don’t want to do all their fighting for them.
That’s Ukraine. Tiny, heroic Ukraine. The Ukrainians are doing all their fighting themselves.
When all this is over, I would like to visit Ukraine. Spend some tourist dollars there. Drink matcha at a tiny table on a square in Kyiv. They have that there, I’ve read about it, both the little tables and the matcha. Perhaps they are bombed out of existence by now, but they can rebuild. I want to smile at the children. Give them little American flags and candy. Oh, but Olena might not like that. They should be eating vegetables, not candy. OK, just the flags, then. Maybe? Because I know where to get candy necklaces, the same ones I thought were the bees knees as a child😏😉. I want Ukraine’s children to know that we thought about them, we worried for them all these months and years, we supported their president and their First Lady when they came asking for help. Candy needs no language🙂.
May you win🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦. Slava Ukraini and Godspeed🇺🇦.
Ukraine’s postage stamp commemorating the sinking of Russia’s flagship battleship, the Moskva. That finger really was there on the stamp, no kidding (I fact check everything I write):
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