It is raining. Russia continues to lose its mind. In a children’s theatre in Moscow, the staging of Gianni Rodari’s work Cipollino has been hurriedly reworked. The story of the vegetables’ revolution against Prince Lemon has been deleted. In its place, in a new variation, the discontented vegetables present Prince Lemon with a petition demanding reforms. And Lyudmila’s solo has been scrapped from Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila – part of the programme of concerts for Moscow’s Historical and Cultural Heritage Days – on the basis that the text included the words ‘Dnieper’ and ‘Kiev’.
The writer and journalist Zhenya Polozhiy, the editor of the regional newspaper Panorama, was violently attacked late this evening, in Sumy, in the north-east of Ukraine. He has an open fracture in his arm. He had managed to avoid the worst during the Maidan rebellion in Sumy, of which he was one of the organisers. But now that the Maidan has won and the struggle for Ukraine’s integrity has begun, pro-European activists and journalists are being attacked in various towns by unknown hands.
My old friend Tanya told me today that her neighbour, a single woman of thirty-nine, had hidden two wounded protesters during the Maidan rebellion. One of them, a chef in a Lviv restaurant, had been shot three times in the leg; the other, also from Lviv, had been beaten so badly by Berkut agents that he was unrecognisable. His nose was broken, one ear torn, his jaw damaged. Automaidan activists brought volunteer doctors to provide first aid. Then, in the middle of the night, they fetched a surgeon and converted one of the apartment’s rooms into an operating theatre. The three bullets were removed from the cook’s leg. One day, when the woman came home from work, the wounded chef apologised to her: he had been through her freezer without her permission. There, he had found a chicken, which he had thawed and cooked for her as an expression of his gratitude.