Rossiyskaya Gazeta, in an article titled “Zakharova: How a descendant of Ukrainian migrants changed the US President’s program with just a couple of words,” reports a text published by a representative of the Foreign Ministry in her Telegram channel. Maria Zakharova writes (original punctuation retained):
“The other day, Biden's press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre casually announced that Joe Biden's visit to Papua New Guinea scheduled for the next few days is cancelled. Allegedly, the American president urgently needs to return to Washington to meet with congressmen.
It seems like passing news, but if you start digging it up, very curious details will become clear. What is most surprising here was not without Ukrainian nationalism and colonial racism inherent in the Anglo-Saxon world. By the way, both phenomena are bizarrely interconnected.
Begin.
According to The Guardian, the "historic" visit was being prepared for more than six months, and the country's central media covered every step in its preparation.
There is a version that the meeting with Congress here is more of an excuse, and not the real reason for canceling the visit.
Until very recently, Papua New Guinea's foreign minister was Justin Tkachenko.
Tkachenko is a descendant of Ukrainian emigrants who left for Australia, a great specialist in the field of horticulture (for which he was even awarded the British Empire Medal). Since 2006 he has been living in Port Moresby, periodically becoming the central protagonist of corruption scandals. In general, the reputation of a Ukrainian emigrant from an Anglo-Saxon country (in this case, Australia) is observed and not discredited.
And few people would know about him, and Joe Biden would hardly have adjusted the program of his foreign tour, if not for one thing. A native of Australia, a descendant of Ukrainian migrants, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Papua New Guinea, called the citizens of the state in whose government he works, excuse me, "primitive animals." Here is a direct quote from the Minister of Foreign Affairs: "I call them primitive animals because they are." That is how the Minister of Foreign Affairs called the citizens of the country he represents.
Tkachenko's anger was caused by criticism of his family, who traveled to London for the coronation of Charles III for almost a million dollars in public funds. Residents of the state, where more than 80% live below the poverty line, did not really like such Tik-Toks of the minister's family. For this criticism of the egregious case of corruption, the inhabitants of the country received such name-calling from their minister.
I must say that the Prime Minister forced the Australian-Ukrainian self-degenerate to resign after this. He apparently did not know that in Tkachenko’s historical homeland, insulting his fellow citizens on racial, national, religious grounds is part of the political reality, and here Tkachenko was clearly guided by President Zelensky, who called the Russian residents of Donbass ‘specials’.”
Biden's visit to Papua New Guinea is indeed canceled, but this can hardly be connected with the Justin Tkachenko scandal, because the president also canceled a visit to Australia, where he planned to take part in a meeting of the leaders of the Quadripartite Security Dialogue (a group including the United States, Australia, Japan and India). According to Voice of America, Biden decided to immediately return to the United States after the G7 summit to continue negotiations with Republican leaders on raising the national debt threshold: if Congress does not do this, the state faces a technical default.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Papua New Guinea, Justin Tkachenko, resigned on May 13, but the reason for this was not the words about “primitive animals”, but suspicions of embezzlement of public funds: he included members of his family in the delegation that attended the coronation of Charles III.
Tkachenko's phrase about "primitive animals" in an interview with an Australian TV channel was not referring to the people of Papua New Guinea, but to TikTok users who posted offensive comments on the video of the minister's daughter about luxury shopping at the Singapore airport on the way to London for the coronation. He later apologized for the line, calling it "an unfortunate choice of words". In turn, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, James Marape, accepting Tkachenko's resignation, said that he wanted to apologize to his family and especially his daughter Savannah, noting that "no woman deserves such treatment as she has faced in the last few days."
Zakharova is right about one thing: the cases with the sharp phrases of Tkachenko and Zelensky are indeed somewhat similar. Zelensky’s words “there are representatives of people, not all representatives of people are people. There are individuals” also referred not to the population of Donbass at all, but to 23 citizens of the Russian Federation and 5 Ukrainians, against whom in November 2021 the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions. The fact that this phrase allegedly referred to the inhabitants of Donbass was stated in an interview with RIA Novosti and RT by the head of Zakharova, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. So she demonstrated mastery of his methods.