Vegan Held A Bus Hostage To ... Promote A Joaquin Phoenix Documentary?

You know, vegans get a bad rap. Most of them are perfectly polite folks who understand that a person's dietary practices are no one's business but their own (something their critics often fail to grasp). But in every community, especially those concerned with ethical lifestyles, there are a few bad apples who need to get off their high horses, if only because they probably consider horse-riding abuse. Usually, they're brand-new adherents, still riding that wave of virtue that, like all drugs, eventually stops hitting the same way. Still, few of them go so far as the Ukrainian man who held an entire bus full of people hostage on Tuesday to promote a 15-year-old animal rights documentary narrated by Joaquin Phoenix. We did it, everyone: We found the worst vegan:

But the 13 hostages on that bus probably didn't know that. The authorities who faced off with Maksim Krivosh for 12 hours certainly didn't. They just figured he was up to your run-of-the-mill terrorism shit, as evidenced by the shots he took at them and the grenade he threw from the bus at one point.

Things escalated to the point that Krivosh managed to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on the phone, who he asked ... to tell people to watch the 2005 documentary Earthlings.

That's all he wanted. (He also asked for 13 government officials to release statements declaring themselves terrorists, but apparently, he was flexible on that.) So Zelenskiy did it.

Just like that, all the hostages were freed unharmed, although they were also forced to watch the documentary during their ordeal, so it can't be said that they emerged totally unscathed. With Krivosh in custody, Zelenskiy deleted the video and replaced it with a statement that included what may or may not have been an intentional dig at the guy who ruined his day: "Human life is the most important value." Better get some plant-based ointment on that burn.

Top image: Maksym Kryvosh, Nation Earth