Ukraine tried to score a PR victory in Nepal after the quake. It didn’t turn out well

KYIV, Ukraine — When several dozen Ukrainians in earthquake-stricken Nepal appealed for help late last month, it was the perfect opportunity for Ukrainian officials to score some points by swinging to the rescue.

Thanks to war, economic turmoil, lingering corruption, and a Russian state media machine that’s made the most of it all, Ukraine’s been short on good PR lately.

But the government's attempts to pull its citizens out of Nepal didn't exactly go smoothly.

What began as a two-day, quick-fire extraction descended into a weeklong folly featuring broken airplanes, a gaggle of stir-crazy journalists and one dogged senior bureaucrat who captured the media’s imagination.

“It was like a marathon for an untrained sprinter,” Bohdan Kutiepov, a video journalist who meticulously documented the journey, told GlobalPost after returning to Kyiv on Thursday.

Led by Zoryan Shkiryak, the charismatic acting head of the State Emergency Service, the expedition set off on a Defense Ministry airplane late last week with a small team of rescuers and around 14 journalists to cover the mission.

But the problems began right on the runway, according to Kutiepov, when their flight was delayed thanks to a faulty refueling system at Kyiv’s main airport.

The next day, after stopping over in Delhi's sweltering heat, the team learned from a local Ukrainian diplomat that their flight didn’t have clearance to land in Kathmandu for another three days.

Oh, and that their plane was broken. Even as they’d flown into India.

Here’s Shkiryak photographing the team’s broken airplane before heading to Nepal:

 

Зорян Шкіряк фотографує наш бідний Іл-76 в аеропорту Делі перед вильотом в Катманду три дні тому.

A photo posted by Bohdan Kutiepov (@kutiepov) on May 4, 2015 at 2:52am PDT

“We would hear the same thing twice a day for the rest of the journey: ‘There’s bad news, but everything is under control,’” Kutiepov said.

Determined, emergency chief Shkiryak took part of the team on a commercial flight to Nepal — some of them on his own dime — to get cracking on the relief effort. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials shipped a replacement part for the stranded plane to India.

Had it been the correct part, the mission might’ve chugged right along.

But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

Instead, the rescue team hunkered down in local hotels and, later, a bizarrely opulent villa in Kathmandu owned by a Ukrainian diplomat. They were joined by around 40 evacuees.

It was right around then the irony became obvious: “I propose to send a rescue mission to rescue the rescue mission,” Kutiepov wrote on his Facebook page Monday from Kathmandu.

Before the rescue flight finally landed in Nepal, the journalists had basically been booted from their villa, long since drained of cash and clean clothes. They were forced to write appeals asking to be counted among the evacuees in need of material assistance.

That got them an extra $20 and another night in a local hotel.

Here’s just a small taste of that adventure, as filmed by Kutiepov:

Meanwhile, Ukrainian media back home were wondering why Shkiryak had brought his girlfriend, a yoga instructor in Kyiv, along for the ride. 

Not to worry, he insisted: Kateryna Khramova was well-trained in the ways of the east and therefore qualified to join the expedition, Shkiryak told local media. Plus, he added, she paid out of pocket.

The expedition, including some 75 evacuees in total, finally began their long journey home on Tuesday.

But not before one last hiccup: While on the return stopover in Delhi, the plane busted a wheel.

The team, Shkiryak included, spent the night roughing it on the runway. The images quickly spread over social media and became the visual symbol of the ill-fated trip.

On Thursday, the beleaguered team finally found their way back to Kyiv (through Azerbaijan). Meanwhile, officials traded blame over the broken airplane provided by the Defense Ministry.

Upon their return, Shkiryak — by now the the man of the week — came out swinging and painted the expedition as an against-all-odds success story.

“No one will make a scapegoat out of me,” he wrote on Facebook, “keep dreaming!”

That didn’t stop someone from making a hilarious video mash-up of the country’s newest celebrity bureaucrat.