Antony Blinken's guitar diplomacy draws criticism in Ukraine

This is the best summary I could come up with:

During a surprise visit to Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the stage alongside a local band, 19.99, and played Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

Wearing a tucked-in black shirt and blue jeans and wielding a cherry red Epiphone guitar, Blinken, 62, started with a few words to the crowd at Barman Dictat, a legendary, speakeasy-style venue in a basement in downtown Kyiv.

Artistic merits aside, many Ukrainians felt it inappropriate that Blinken was rocking out at all, given that, in their view, Washington’s tardiness is largely to blame for their struggles in the battlefield against Russia.

“Six months of waiting for the decision of the American Congress” has “taken the lives of very, very many defenders of the free world,” Bohdan Yaremenko, a lawmaker and former diplomat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s political party, said in a post on Facebook reacting to Blinken’s performance.

So many people die every day because we don’t have enough weapons and enough support from our allies.” He advised the “secretary of state to visit a military cemetery instead of a bar.”

Ponomarenko accepted that Blinken may have chosen a “bad time” for the cameo and that the U.S. “policy towards Russia’s war has major flaws,” but he chided his 1.2 million X followers that “we have more important things to do.”

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4 comments

This is dumb but also it’s amusing
- Nero fiddling vibes right there
America is a prejudiced circus projecting itself on the rest of the world.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
During a surprise visit to Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the stage alongside a local band, 19.99, and played Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Wearing a tucked-in black shirt and blue jeans and wielding a cherry red Epiphone guitar, Blinken, 62, started with a few words to the crowd at Barman Dictat, a legendary, speakeasy-style venue in a basement in downtown Kyiv.
Artistic merits aside, many Ukrainians felt it inappropriate that Blinken was rocking out at all, given that, in their view, Washington’s tardiness is largely to blame for their struggles in the battlefield against Russia.
“Six months of waiting for the decision of the American Congress” has “taken the lives of very, very many defenders of the free world,” Bohdan Yaremenko, a lawmaker and former diplomat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s political party, said in a post on Facebook reacting to Blinken’s performance.
So many people die every day because we don’t have enough weapons and enough support from our allies.” He advised the “secretary of state to visit a military cemetery instead of a bar.”
Ponomarenko accepted that Blinken may have chosen a “bad time” for the cameo and that the U.S. “policy towards Russia’s war has major flaws,” but he chided his 1.2 million X followers that “we have more important things to do.”
The original article contains 705 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!