S2 E14 "Lies, Damn lies, and...White lies?"

World leaders take a crap on the heads of Ukraine and Vasya over his ungentlemanly rejection of the IMF loan. Olya, his ex-wife and current Finance Minister tells him in front of the cabinet that he must apologize and lie: say that he was under medication or had air sickness, something.

The cabinet isn't looking at him.

        They're not buying this a-lie-is-a-lie moralizing.

          (The serious string music begins playing.)

My dearest Oxana is shaking her head from side to side in the background.

 

Now they start looking at him.

 

 

 

                   I am not exactly clear what he's saying here by "We aren't there"--which is unfortunate because it is precisely this that affects everybody and they all start looking at him. There may be a translation issue. It's an abstract concept that he's talking about.

 

 

This example of his does not clarify, for me.  The example is in quotes so this is the people saying to each other, "They look like us but aren't us."

     

This doesn't help me either but as you can see everybody else gets it, including white lie evangelist Olya.

"Where's the submarine"???? Wtf? It may be an intra-Ukraine incident. As he goes on to explain this example his point gets a little clearer to me.

Or maybe "it wasn't there at all." Meaning, I'm thinking, deny that there ever was a submarine with people on it that drowned. Gaslight the public.

There you have President Goloborodko’s, perhaps President Zelensky’s, Compleat Book on Lying. It’s a short book.