Dmitri Yakovlev, a Muscovite who supports Ukraine in her fight for freedom will present the story of Putin’s rise to power and interesting facts about Russian propaganda and politics. Attendees will be invited to raise questions.

Dmitri is COO and co-founder of a local high-tech company and works with a web development team in Ukraine.

“As I speak with members of our team in Ukraine, I often hear rocket alarms going off during our Skype conversation. To me, it’s unnerving. They simply work through it.”

Since Putin’s war started, Dmitri has been helping raise funds for Ukraine to purchase power generators for local maternity and psychiatric hospitals (Russia is bombing Ukraine’s infrastructure to leave citizens without power or heat).

In 1991 Dmitri spent two nights on the barricades in Moscow streets standing up for democracy during the coup-d’etat attempt. He is a dual citizen of Russia and USA, living here since 1993. He has family in the US, Russia, and Ukraine. Dmitri was in Moscow on the day Putin started the war and saw firsthand the reaction of Muscovites: the unrest, the protests, the panic, the ugly support for Putin and his war.