I have just arrived in London. Yesterday, in the countryside, Liza planted onions, but there is still a lot of gardening to be done. Our stay in Lazarevka – one week for the boys and four days for Liza and me – was a bucolic festival of work and relaxation. I would have loved to stay there longer: it is the perfect time of year, with nature awakening, the birds giving a concert every morning, echoed by the cockerels who are still celebrating the sunrise at ten in the morning. But at four o’clock yesterday afternoon, we went home to Kiev.
In the evening, we walked to Podil to see Eric, a very hospitable French diplomat who made us cocktails of his own invention – champagne with pomegranate juice, Koktebel cognac and coriander seeds – which he has christened Free Crimea. Of course, this cocktail really needed Crimean champagne, but in the absence of anything better, we had to make do with French wine. The actor and director Sergey Masloboyshchikov and the documentary-maker Sveta Zinovyeva were there. We spent three hours talking about the Maidan: all the incidents and events, etc. It was gone midnight when we took a taxi home.
At 7 a.m. I took another taxi, this time to the airport. On the way there, the cabbie and I strongly criticised Tymoshenko and praised Poroshenko. We also talked about justice. He remembered making several journeys on the night of the shootings – 18 February – ferrying around an obviously delinquent young man, not from Kiev, to the most expensive restaurants and clubs in the city.
Masloboyshchikov described how he had been at the corner of Vladimirskaya Street and Velyka Zhytomyrska Street, in front of the belfry, when Yeremey, the journalist from Vesti, was killed. The actor saw several hundred baseball-bat-wielding titushky pass close by. He wasn’t wearing any Ukrainian badges or Maidan insignia, so he wasn’t worried. In Rylsky Street, four young members of the self-defence movement came out to meet him. They had just been fighting with the titushky, and they asked him in Ukrainian where those thugs had gone. He told them there were hundreds of titushky in that direction. So the young men decided to change their plans and to return to Streletskaya Street. Three minutes later, another ten self-defence members came towards him. Masloboyshchikov explained the situation to them too. They asked about the four he had just seen, so he sent the new group to join them in Streletskaya Street. Later, he learned that Yeremey had attempted to photograph the titushky from his taxi: that was why they dragged him from the vehicle, beat him up and shot him in the chest.