Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Maxim Krippa’s PR people are running an interesting experiment in stretching their client’s battered image over the globe.
A couple of days ago, a longread about the Ukraina hotels across the country was published on Krippa’s site Delo. Kyiv’s Ukraina was listed alongside hotels in Zhytomyr, Poltava, Lutsk, Rivne, and Cherkasy. A family that isn’t wealthy, but is close-knit.
Of course, Delo writes, Kyiv’s Ukraina was luckier than the others — after all, it was bought by the famous volcanologist Krippa, who has for several years planned to turn it into a five-star hotel.
While waiting for that happy moment, Delo continues, the broken windows of the hotel were boarded up with panels painted in the Petrykivka decorative style. The result was very Ukrainian: if you can’t yet show a five-star hotel, you can artistically decorate the lack of windows.
But it turned out that Krippa, proudly waving over the provincial 'Ukrainas,' isn’t a one-off fantasy of pocket journalism, but a whole PR campaign, swift as diarrhea.
And now Novoye Vremya includes Ukraina among the five legendary hotels of Europe.
And Liga’s piece came together quite logically. Proust and Coco Chanel stayed at the Ritz. César Ritz and Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy. Sacher — almost a century and a half of imperial history and the world-famous cake. Gresham Palace — an Art Nouveau architectural masterpiece and Four Seasons. Ukraina — broken windows and Maxim Krippa. Bgg.
So apparently the shabby Ritz, Sacher, Savoy, and Gresham Palace get a sentence or two each, while Krippa gets a whole block to personally explain to the reader the historical significance of the property he owns.
In that spirit, we suggest not stopping and offer the idea for the next publication: Five buildings that changed the history of humanity: the Colosseum, Versailles, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, and the Ukraina hotel.
This is exactly how a legend is born before our eyes. A few more publications — and of course we’ll forget who Maxim Krippa was before he became the keeper of a national treasure, and we’ll stop asking where his billions came from. Yeah, right.