In Russian regions they speak Russian, but for at least a decade have been watching television and filling out forms in Ukrainian.

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They want to speak to Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch based in London, about whether the club was used to launder money.

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He has a little sideline in providing building services for westerners in Kiev, most of whom speak neither Ukrainian nor Russian.

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Observers say social networks also have helped mobilize protesters in Moscow, where tens of thousands have filled the streets to speak out against Russian parliamentary elections they say were rigged.

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The Ohio native does speak Russian, having focused most of his military service (from West Point graduation in 1973 until 1993) on the Soviet Union.

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Thanks to his mother who bribed a teacher at a state school, Marc escaped the narrow confines of the world of East European Jewry, learnt to speak Russian instead of Yiddish and eventually made contact with the bourgeois, cosmopolitan society in St Petersburg.

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"I already have a masters degree in physics and astrophysics a PhD in astronomy, I'm a scuba diver, I speak basic beginner's to advanced Russian, and I have flying experience, " one hopeful, Tracy Parker, tells CNN.

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My college boyfriend the same one who took me to Niagara once refused to speak to me for a full day because I declined to hike in the Rockies with him and instead read a Russian novel in the car.

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The scandalous imprisonment of a Russian pilot in Tajikistan and Russia's response of rounding up and deporting Tajik workers from Moscow speak louder than all the windy rhetoric in Mr Putin's Eurasian manifesto.

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