#bell end

The UK expression bellend is rather uncommon on this side of the Atlantic. The closest North American equivalent would be dickhead. We welcome linguistic feedback from our British friends on this. 🙂

In any event, there’s a village in Worcestershire called Bell End. Residents took advantage of their rudely named municipality to erect a statue of Vladimir Putin who was awarded the title of Bellend of the Year.

The Russian leader earned the gong after launching his bloody invasion of Ukraine, leading to tens of thousands of casualties on both sides of the conflict.

The monument was put up in Bell End, Worcestershire, so eggs could be hurled at it on Thursday.

The protest's organiser - who did not want to give their name - said: "I needed to award somebody with the Bellend of the Year award and I thought there was one person who has universally been a bellend this year - and that's Vladimir Putin.

[ ... ]

Within his own country, Putin has tried to keep his grip on power by imposing harsh jail terms for critics of the war and brutally clamped down on protests that broke out after the war began and when mobilisation was announced.

He recently had to cancel his yearly question-and-answer session, a largely scripted affair designed to promote his image. There are ongoing questions about how healthy he is and whether his position is secure given the way the war has panned out.

In Bell End, the protest organiser said they were going to sell small figures of the statue to raise money for Ukrainian refugees.

Somebody should buy up a bunch of those small Putin bellend figurines and use a drone to drop them on Red Square.

With all respect to the awesome villagers of Bell End, Ukraine had publicly (if unofficially) designated Putin a dickhead back in 2014. After Putin illegally annexed Crimea and started a proxy war in Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014, the chant of “Putin – dickhead” («Путін хуйло» in Ukrainian; «Путин хуйло»  in Russian) became common at many public events. It’s also displayed as graffiti.

Here’s a soccer match in Kyiv from 2014 featuring thousands of fans chanting that Putin a dickhead.

Simon