In March, during the Kvartal concert tour, Vladimir Zelensky invited his team to hold a debate with Petro Poroshenko at the stadium, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Servant of the People screenwriter Yuri Kostyuk spoke about this in an interview with the Kyiv publication Ukrainskaya Pravda.
“Vladimir said: we need to think about the format, we definitely understood that this is not a studio. At the end of March, Kvartal traveled around Ukraine with concerts. And I remember there was a concert at the Dnepr Arena, we were standing backstage, Vladimir came down and said: “I understood where to do the debate. At the stadium,” Kostyuk said.
The screenwriter of the series also told how Zelensky’s team came up with the idea to record a video invitation to the debate.
“Even before the first round, we had this story. The decision to record a video invitation at the Olimpiyskiy was born in this building (at Zelensky’s headquarters), they came up with it at lunchtime and recorded it in the morning,” Kostyuk noted.
According to him, Zelensky’s team “90% thought that Poroshenko would refuse.”
Kostyuk also told how Zelensky prepared for the debate.
“Zelensky was preparing for the debate with his staff. We can say that he was preparing for them throughout the entire campaign; expert meetings on all possible issues took place here almost daily. And one way or another this is also pumping. Before the debate itself, Vladimir just had to sit down, independently systematize the information and actually prepare for his opponent’s questions,” Kostyuk said.