I took part in Yevgeny Kiselyov’s program “Big Politics.” The show airs in Ukraine, so I appeared there as “Oleksii” (the Ukrainian form of Alexei). It’s a good program with interesting questions—Kiselyov is Kiselyov. It’s a shame that shows like this have died out as a genre here. We talked about parallels with the Maidan protests, what to do next, and so on.
http://youtu.be/na7mD4M4Jzk By the way, I had always been sure that the Kremlin backdrop in these kinds of satellite appearances was real—that the studio was just cleverly positioned somewhere. Nothing of the sort: you just sit there, look into the camera, with a green cloth behind you. You can’t see what’s happening in the studio. Whether they can see you or not is unclear. You really want to scratch yourself, but you’re afraid—what if they can see you? For calling for integration, I’ve already been branded by the pro-independence Ukrainian press: Russian opposition figure Navalny turned out to be just another imperial chauvinist. But that’s not the scary part—the scary part is that I start every new sentence with “well,” which is awful. Is it even possible to unlearn that? Maybe I should buy an electronic training collar so someone can press the button every time I say “well.”