I got off the train this morning, and was home by about 8 a.m. I didn’t wake anyone.
Today is Anton’s birthday: he is eleven years old already!
At one o’clock this afternoon, his friends came to our apartment and we all went to the Hidropark. We found the Paintball Planet club fairly quickly, and there we all put on our outfits and masks and picked up our guns. We divided into two teams, the Greens and the Blues. We each tied a headscarf in our team’s colour around our neck. Then we spent almost two hours shooting paintballs at one another. It was cold outside. We took regular breaks and went inside the club building to warm up and drink cocoa from a vending machine. When we ran out of ammunition and the battle was over, we went home to eat pizza. The party ended at 7 p.m. Everyone was happy, especially the birthday boy. Only one of Anton’s friends was slightly upset: he hadn’t put his mask on properly and, during the first battle, he got hit on the lip by a paintball. After that, he didn’t want to take part any more. But a couple of the club’s employees took him to the shooting range and, once he’d calmed down, he practised knocking over beer cans.
Today, the police and the Berkut sent reinforcements to protect the television centre on Mechnikov Street, as well as the television tower. The Maidanistas say they plan to mount a demonstration there, to protest against the government’s information policy – it has to be said that the main television channels’ news programmes are completely silent on the protests – or to stop them broadcasting.
An activist from Road Control,8 Andrey Dzindzya, has been arrested. In Cherkasy, there are clashes between pro-European protesters and police. In Donetsk, there are finally protests against the government. Many people think that Yanukovych has already signed an agreement with Putin for Ukraine’s entry into Russia’s Customs Union. But this evening, a member of the Russian government stated that there was no agreement of this kind and that the subject had not even been discussed during the meeting, the previous day, between the two presidents. It’s hard to believe that.