”I literally owe my life to Ruben.

When I was 16, I entered the international college in Dilijan founded by Vardanyan: from a small yard school in a dormitory neighborhood, I went to Hogwarts. Imagine: in a school on the outskirts of Dilijan (population 17,000), Ivy League professors teach, businessmen from the Forbes list give lectures, and the school’s official spokesman is George Clooney. I mean literally: here is George Clooney (who starred in the movies “From Dusk Till Dawn”, “Oh, Where Are You, Brother?” and “Ocean’s Eleven”) sitting in the front row at our graduation in the auditorium.

And I am not from a rich family, but one of the hundreds of students whom Vardanyan’s team gave a chance: teenagers from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and about 70 other countries studied with me. Many of them learned for the first time only in Armenia, for example, what it is to live and not to starve. I am not even talking about the opportunity to get an education.

Vardanyan was once partly rightly considered a Russian oligarch, but at the decisive moment he took a different path: the path of investing not in golden ruffles, but in people, and I am living proof of that.

During his imprisonment, Vardanyan had already spent three weeks in a disciplinary cell, where he was deprived of food, water and the opportunity to change clothes. In his open letter, he said that the protocols of his interrogations were falsified, and his lawyers and interpreters signed them retroactively under extreme pressure.

Probably, one can have a different attitude towards Ruben Vardanyan. But damn it, he certainly does not deserve this”.