Begging Bowls, Stripper Poles, and the Eurovision Exchange Rate

Take a look at the photo above. A blackened, gutted building stands as a monument to Russian artillery, while right in front of it, people are just trying to buy their vegetables in the rain. That is the grim, unyielding reality of a country fighting for its survival.

Yet, when I’m back in the UK, I find it endlessly fascinating how some people choose to process a massive, existential land war in Europe. Rather than acknowledging that reality, they prefer to construct a safe, cartoonish alternate universe for themselves.

Here are two dispatches from that universe, gathered in just the last week.

The Eurovision Exchange Rate

Earlier this week, I saw a status update from an old British acquaintance—a bloke whose primary life achievement remains managing to crash one of my buses. He was absolutely fuming about the Eurovision Song Contest.

His logic was a masterclass in entitlement. He acknowledged the UK entry was complete rubbish and naturally deserved “nil points,” but he was furious that Ukraine only awarded the UK a single point. Why? Because we have been sending weapons for what he elegantly dubbed their “crappy little war,” and according to him, they owed us.

I clearly need to brush up on my wartime diplomacy, as I hadn’t realized there was a strict exchange rate for pop music votes.

• Does a shipment of NLAWs guarantee a top-five finish?
• Do Challenger 2 tanks buy us Douze Points?
• Do we need to throw in a few Storm Shadows to offset a bloke singing off-key in a sparkly shirt?

Imagine the conversation in a trench in the Donbas: “Right lads, we need to try and survive the artillery barrage, but first, did everyone text to vote for the UK? We owe them.” Absolute clown behavior.

The Phantom Stripper Pole

As if that wasn’t enough, yesterday an absolute idiot confidently informed me that President Zelensky is essentially “Oliver Twist going around with a begging bowl.” For a touch of razzle-dazzle, she added that he also “used to be a stripper.”

Let’s unpack this clown car of a statement.

First, the stripper pole. This individual is regurgitating a myth that circulates in the less intellectually rigorous corners of the internet. It stems from a viral video of a man in a red outfit belly dancing—which fact-checkers have definitively proven is an AI deepfake superimposed onto an Argentinian dancer. Alternatively, they might be referencing a famous 2014 comedy sketch by Zelensky’s old troupe where they spoofed a pop band by dancing in heels and leather.

Before entering politics, Zelensky was one of the most successful comedic actors and television producers in Eastern Europe. Doing a parody sketch doesn’t make you a stripper, in much the same way that Daniel Craig isn’t actually a licensed assassin, and Rowan Atkinson doesn’t actually suffer from severe cognitive impairment.

The fact that a deepfake convinced grown adults in the workplace that a millionaire TV producer was working Tuesday nights at a strip club is an indictment of Western society’s critical thinking skills.

The Cold, Hard Reality

Then we have the “Oliver Twist” analogy. “Please, sir, I want some more… 155mm artillery shells so my cities don’t get flattened into gravel.”

Look at the photo again. That isn’t a scene from a Dickens novel where people ask for gruel; it’s the raw aftermath of people fighting to not be erased from the map. It takes a staggering amount of ignorance to look at a nation acting as the physical meat-shield for European security and reduce their desperate need for ammunition to a begging bowl.

Here is the reality: In 1994, Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world under the Budapest Memorandum. In exchange, countries including the UK and the US provided “security assurances.” They are now being invaded by the very country they handed those nukes to.

Zelensky isn’t rattling a charity tin. When he asks for weapons, he is offering a horrifically grim transaction: You provide the metal, and we will provide the blood. The West gets to severely degrade a hostile foreign military threat without sending a single British soldier to die in the dirt. We aren’t doing Ukraine a charitable favor; we are paying the cheapest possible insurance premium for our own geopolitical security.

But sure. Let’s go with the stripper begging for porridge, and a military alliance based entirely on Eurovision votes. It’s much less mentally taxing.