Cafe guests were treated to... gun cartridges in Kyiv

Guests of the Evrazia sushi bar, Shokoladnytsia and Cof­fee House, all located in the city cen­ter, were treated to… gun cart­­ridges as a kind of dessert in Kyiv on June 24. The event took place as part of the all-Ukrainian campaign “Do Not Buy Russian.” In this way, the activists tried to attract atten­tion of the Russian-owned es­tab­lishments’ guests to their origin.

The event started at the Evrasia. The bar’s director came after a while, denying his establishment’s status as a Russian business. However, he did not provide any conclusive evidence to prove his statement.

The activists went then to the Shokoladnytsia and Coffee House. Half of the former’s guests just walk­ed away. “One girl even asked us to delete her photo because she did not want her friends to find out that she had ever been a guest of this establishment,” an activist said.

A total of 100 training cartridges for the Kalashnikov assault gun were distributed during the event.

Let us recall that “Do Not Buy Russian” is a nationwide civic campaign aiming to institute a boycott of Russian goods, which arose as a reaction to the Ukrainian export blockade launched by the Rus­sian Fede­ration. The campaign started on August 14, 2013 with appeals on social networks that were widely spread online. Later, the activists held a rally and went on to mass distribute leaflets, posters, stickers and so on. The campaign weakened with beginning of the Euromaidan in November 2013. However, the acti­vists announced restart of the boycott of Russian goods on March 2, 2014, after the beginning of the Crimean crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The campaign is organized by the Fightback movement.