Steve Rosenberg

of this legislation for us.

And so they asked us to pause broadcasting just for a few days while the lawyers in London could study the legislation.

And that felt very, very strange.

With such dramatic events swirling around us, we went silent.

And yeah, that was quite frustrating.

I remember at that moment, the piano actually was my savior.

So I sat at the piano a lot for those three days and I wrote a piece of music that tried to express how I felt at that moment, this sort of sense of isolation, really.

We had no idea what was going to happen.

I mean, from hour to hour.

And that sense of uncertainty was quite difficult to deal with.

And a lot of the contributors who used to speak to us, give interviews to the BBC, stopped doing so.

The other big difference was we used to have a really big, bustling bureau.

There were dozens of staff members who worked for BBC Russians, who were broadcasting in Russian to a Russian audience on the BBC Russian website.

But after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, BBC Russian took the decision to leave Moscow, because they were very much on the front line, leaving us, the small number of English-language newsgatherers.

And, yeah, suddenly our big, bustling newsroom became a very quiet, ghost-towny newsroom.

When we go out of Moscow, go to the regions, quite often you get the feeling that there is a people following you.

This chap has been hanging around us for a good 10 minutes or so, clearly filming us, I think.

That's not new.

That's been the case for some time now.

And I wouldn't say I feel intimidated by it.