In spite of everything that is going on, I did make a speech for the launch of Yuliya Pilipenko’sfn1 autobiographical novel, Ginger, at the Cinema House. She came to Kiev just for that. There were seven people in the audience, which, given the situation, can be considered a huge success!
The day began quite peacefully.
At 9 a.m., a free hairdressing salon opened on the first floor of the city hall occupied by the protesters. Volunteer hairdressers snipped the locks of whoever asked. There was soon a line of customers. But not everyone managed to get their hair cut because soldiers with metal shields closed off Hrushevskoho Street, then the Berkut launched an attack against the picket lines that protesters had set up near the Cabinet and Parliament buildings. Several vans full of soldiers sealed off the Maidan from European Square. Berkut agents swarmed from buses near Bessarabskyi Market. The police ordered restaurant and shop owners to close their doors and send their employees home. The three central metro stations were also closed; we suspect they have been mined. Passengers were evacuated. Trains no longer stop in the centre of the city.
At his home in Mezhigorye, Yanukovych gathered together the siloviki – the main enforcers of law and order – and then promised a round table and declared that he would speak on television, with the three previous presidents.
And he did speak. I thought it was a vile spectacle. When he talked about the students who’d been beaten up in late November by Berkut agents, it looked like a satisfied smile played across his face. The first president, Leonid Kravchuk, appeared to be smiling too. Only Leonid Kuchma seemed visibly uncomfortable. Yushchenko wore an indifferent expression, as if he wasn’t really there.
Impossible to know what is happening at the moment in the Maidan.
fn1 Yuliya Pilipenko, twenty-eight, had a kidney transplant ten years ago. In 2007, she became world tennis champion in singles and doubles at the World Transplant Games in Bangkok.