Ukrainians will soon stop receiving civilian assistance (Bürgergeld), which is intended for unemployed German citizens and amounts to EUR 563 per month, and social benefits will be reoriented in general, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said, according to Bild.
“We should consider a separate legal status for refugees from Ukraine, Ukrainians… should not… immediately receive civilian assistance, which is focused on providing a socio-economic subsistence level and participation in society even without work,” Lindner told Wirtschaftswoche.
According to the minister, Ukrainians should receive the same benefits as other refugees. Currently, they amount to EUR 460, which is less than the Bürgergeld. According to Lindner, Ukrainians will still not have to go through the asylum procedure, but they will not automatically receive civilian assistance.
Currently, there are about 1.2 million Ukrainians in Germany. According to Bild, 65% of them receive Bürgergeld, and this share is much higher than among immigrants from other countries.
During a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last week, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski also proposed changing the mechanism of social payments to Ukrainian refugees. In an interview with TVP Info following the visit, he said that he proposed to direct the social benefits that Ukrainian refugees currently receive in Germany directly to support Ukraine.
“It’s not good that there is a financial incentive to be in Germany instead of men fighting at the front and women restoring the tax base,” said Sikorsky, who said that payments in Germany can reach EUR 1200 per month.
The price of Bitcoin (BTC) remained unchanged due to the event and surpassed the $68,000 mark for the first time since late July.
Italian Deputy Finance Minister Maurizio LEO said the government will raise taxes on capital gains in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin from 26% to 42%, Reuters and Bloomberg reported.
According to Bloomberg, the Italian cabinet made the decision because “this phenomenon is spreading,” the LEO said of Bitcoin during a conference call on Wednesday.
The move comes in the wake of Italy’s decision to strengthen its tax on digital services as part of plans to boost revenue in its 2025 budget.
The price of Bitcoin (BTC) was unchanged, posting a weekly gain of more than 12%, surpassing the $68,000 mark for the first time since late July.
From October 23 to November 15, an exposition of Nikita Tsoi’s new painting project will be presented in the hall of the Goldens auction house, in which the author denies the established, stereotypical norms of collective myth-making.
Working with the category of memory, Nikita Tsoi explores subconscious collective pain, trauma, and fears that are passed down from generation to generation. He listens closely to the stories of witnesses of past events about the past, determining their influence on the formation of stereotypical mythological consciousness, and deconstructs the worldview norms, the clichés in which the true and complex human “EGO” is embedded.
“A typical example of mythological thinking,” the artist believes, ‘is people’s ideas and fantasies about the lives of their ancestors, where the past appears picturesquely idyllic: ’it used to be better’. And, accordingly, in such fantasies there is an infantile mythologization of certain historical events.
“In my new works, I try to knock myth and romanticization out of literal reality with phantasmagoria and magical realism: I go for cynical realism under the guise of cheerful phantasmagoria, replacing everything with it and leaving a small way for the subjective memory of a person.”
The plots of the artist’s works on the borderline between reality and absurdity (“it is very difficult not to understand my painting fantasies – maybe it is actually easy,” the artist jokes) touch upon the most secret and dark corners of the human subconscious, its duality, where “each of us has his own double (doppelganger), for whom there is everything we refuse in everyday life.”
According to the artist, the antithesis of the visible real life of a person with its complex of stereotypical ideas formed by the environment is the possible existence of his or her deeply hidden second self, inherited from the subconscious – “these are, first of all, reflexes originating in our body and its experience, which are a counterweight to our EGO, which originates in moral and ethical virtues.”
In many of his paintings, Nikita Tsoi imitates the shadow of a camera flash, “feeling the desire of this shadow” to give reality to his unpredictable images. This use of the black shadows of the caravaggists helps, in his opinion, “to assemble the human body from the remnants of the environment and phenomena that have been ‘embedded’ in the person.” But it also brings mystical, even eschatological moods to his works.
Nikita Tsoi’s dynamic, boldly and skillfully painted characters balance between the worlds of realism, surrealism, expressionism, and symbolism, where their twisted, deformed, sometimes hyperbolic flesh is surrounded by either bizarre symbols or ordinary objects, and inscribed in the attributes of either supernatural situations or quite ordinary events.
These images are certainly allegorical, but they embody concepts that are not so easy to reveal.
By analyzing archetypes, rethinking them in a new way, combining the absurd and the incompatible, the artist finds and destroys the threshold between acceptance and rejection, admiration and denial, sarcasm and compassion, the horrible and the funny, the sublime and the mundane, the fantastic and the real.
Nikita Tsoi’s works evoke a complex set of emotional states in the viewer, which are quite difficult to understand. They encourage not only the expression of feelings, but also intellectual practice, in which the titles of the works often play an important role.
“Antitheses to Visible Stories” is a research project, the results of which can be completely unexpected. According to all the rules of the postmodernism game, which require direct participation from the viewer. Just like everything that happens in the strange, stunning, and truly unique world of Nikita Tsoi.
The project is represented by 15 paintings. The exhibition is open to the public from October 23 to November 15.
For more information about purchasing works included in the collection of the exhibition project Nikita Tsoi. Antitheses to Visible Stories”, please contact the specialists of Goldens auction house in the exhibition hall and in the online catalog by clicking the ‘Interested’ button.
Nikita Tsoi (b. 1991) is a Ukrainian artist. He was born in Kyiv. He grew up in a creative family where art was respected, so he developed his drawing skills in a creative environment and in conditions of freedom of expression. He began his career as an artist at the age of five and has been participating in exhibitions since the age of seven. He studied at the Kyiv Children’s Academy of Arts (1997-2006); Taras Shevchenko State Art School (2006-2010); National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (2010-2016), where he studied with M. Storozhenko; Kyiv Academy of Media Arts (2018-2019). Member of the National Union of Young Artists of Ukraine (2016). Lives and works in Kyiv.
Work schedule:
October 23 – November 15, 2024
12:00 – 19:00
Monday – Saturday
Sunday – day off
The entrance is free
Address:
Kyiv, 4 Leonid Pervomaisky str.
Goldens auction house
+ 38 050 462 95 32
Ukrainian world heavyweight champion according to the WBA, WBO, WBC and IBO, Oleksandr Usyk, and British boxer Tyson Fury held their first press conference before the rematch for the world heavyweight title, the meeting took place in London on Wednesday, October 23, reports Suspilne Sport.
Usyk appeared in front of the audience in the image of “Hitman” from the popular media franchise. He took the stage with a briefcase containing posters of his fight against Fury – the Briton signed them at the request of his opponent.
When asked about his motivation before the rematch, the Ukrainian explained: “Only my regimen, my concentration is my motivation. That’s enough”.
Fury, for his part, reminded that the Briton has won all the rematches in his career so far. The former WBC champion hopes to be composed in the second fight with Usyk and rehabilitate himself for his debut defeat.
It is reported that the second fight between Usyk and Fury will take place on December 21 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Three major heavyweight titles will be at stake: the WBC, WBA, and WBO versions.
Agrotrade Agroholding has completed harvesting industrial hemp, which it grew on an area of about 230 hectares in Chernihiv region, the company’s press service reported on its Facebook page.
According to the report, 2024 was the final year of the agricultural holding’s hemp cultivation trials. The company has determined the best technologies and herbicide plant protection products, and understood the technical features of working with this crop.
“By changing approaches to seed harvesting and processing, we have obtained very good quality grain indicators: the oil content is high, and the acidity and peroxide values are low. The yields were slightly lower than we expected. The hemp was dry and the fiber was easily separated from the bast, so technical support during harvesting was the biggest challenge. The reason is that you can’t just pick up any harvester at any time: you need to know exactly what kind of hemp is best for what time and what kind of harvester will be optimal. These are the technical features of hemp that we have figured out,” says Oleksandr Ovsyanyk, Director of Agrotrade’s Agricultural Department.
“This year, we started harvesting later to get higher quality seeds. Due to the peculiarities of the variety and the year in general, threshing took longer than expected.
The agricultural holding emphasized that the Ukrainian market is not yet ready to consume large quantities of hemp grain, so this year’s harvest will be exported. If it can be sold profitably and in large volumes, the company will consider expanding the area.
Agrotrade Group is a vertically integrated holding company with a full agro-industrial cycle (production, processing, storage and trade of agricultural products). The company cultivates over 70 thousand hectares of land in Chernihiv, Sumy, Poltava and Kharkiv regions. Its main crops are sunflower, corn, winter wheat, soybeans and rapeseed. It has its own network of elevators with a one-time storage capacity of 570 thousand tons.
The group also produces hybrid seeds of corn and sunflower, barley, and winter wheat. In 2014, a seed plant with a capacity of 20 thousand tons of seeds per year was built on the basis of Kolos seed farm (Kharkiv region). In 2018, Agrotrade launched its own brand Agroseeds on the market.
Vsevolod Kozhemiako is the founder and CEO of Agrotrade.
Export changes in % to previous period in 2023-2024
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