The former press secretary of the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin, documentary filmmaker Sergei Yastrzhembsky, called the most shameful episode in his work with his boss.
This incident happened at a press conference in Stockholm in 1997, Yastrzhembsky said in an interview published on the RTVI Entertainment YouTube channel.
“If you mean in human terms, to be ashamed of the president, [таких ситуаций] there was not a single one,” Yastrzhembsky said, answering the question whether he was ashamed of Yeltsin. – When the president was not, say, in adequate shape and made some mistakes when answering questions or commenting – yes, there were such situations. And the most difficult situation was at a press conference in Stockholm in December 1997.”
Probably, this refers to the case at a press conference in the Swedish capital, when Yeltsin was confused in numbers, mistakenly called Japan and Germany nuclear powers, said that Russia and Sweden fought in the 20th century (obviously confusing Sweden with Finland, with which the USSR fought in 1939-1940), promised not to fight with the kingdom “for at least two and a half years” that he had to remain in power, and also got tangled in the microphone wire and almost fell – then Yastrzhembsky had to support the president by the hand.
This episode is described, in particular, in the book of the former journalist of the Kremlin pool Elena Tregubova “Tales of the Kremlin Digger”.
