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I worked with a programmer, let's call him Andrew, on a project last month. Andrew lives in Kiev, Ukraine and even though our time zones were different, we were making progress towards fixing a strange memory leak in the application. But about two weeks ago Andrew disappeared! Not on-line and no word from him on e-mail. Today he signed on to AIM for the first time and said that he "had been doing political things" for the past two weeks.

iConsultant biz: hi Nick
Nick Gray WFU: hey Andrew, how's it going? I haven't seen you on-line lately
iConsultant biz: i'm participating in political activities here
Nick Gray WFU: can you tell me a little bit about the situation there in Kiev? what sort of political stuff have you been doing?
iConsultant biz: actually we have two candidates for President position. One is a "successor" of current power, he has 2 criminal records and cannot write a word without 1-2 mistakes. Also he wants Ukraine to move towards Russia (he promised to make Russian an official language here and allow double citizenship with Russia)
iConsultant biz: his name is Victor Yanukovich. Now he's a premier-minister. Second candidate is Victor Yuschenko. He is a very talented banker, one of the world's six best bankers in 1997. He stands up for democratic ideas and moving towards Europe, integrating into EU etc, although he was a premier-minister in 2000 and managed to make couple mistakes at that time
iConsultant biz: Actually I don't know any person here who supported Yanukovich: no one wants to join the Russian empire nor see an illiterate criminal as a president. However after elections current state power announced that he is a winner. But it seems like people didn't vote for him. There are tons of evidences that there were grave infringements during elections. For example, in some cities 110% of inhabitants has voted for Yanukovich :-)
Nick Gray WFU: and then the KGB poisoned Yuschenko, right?
iConsultant biz: Well, I don't know. But Russian special forces seem to be involved.
iConsultant biz: And then people just came out in the streets to protest. It was expected that protests will grow into bloodshed however there were no confrontation at all because there are actually no opponents at all: everyone want the same :-)
iConsultant biz: I have participated in protests couple days. Now I'm registering as an official observer for next elections. (previous elections are canceled by supreme court)

That's his real AIM name - iConsultant biz - so feel free to chat him up and encourage the democracy in Ukraine.