Hello again! Andrey Vorontsevich of CSKA Moscow here, talking to you from Vilnius, Lithuania, where our Russian national team arrived a couple days ago for EuroBasket 2011's second round. First and foremost, these days have not been easy. As you probably know, more than 40 people died in a plane crash in Russia just yesterday. One of Russia's best ice hockey teams, Lokomotiv, had chartered a jet that crashed near the city of Yaroslavl, on the Volga River north-east of Moscow. First and foremost, I have to say that we are deeply sorry for their families and friends, for everyone that loves this team, their fans... everyone. Yesterday was one of the darkest days in Russian sports history. It has been a big tragedy and I know it won't change much, but we will try to our best for all of them.

These are terrible news but we have to keep working hard and play basketball. Of course, we will wear black ribbons to remember the victims. We have to prepare because we must play against Finland today and this team has played really well so far. Nobody expected them to be in the next round, but they qualified and beat Bosnia by a lot of points. It is a team ready to fight. We have to respect every opponent and Finland has done very well, otherwise it wouldn't be here.

We have been unbeaten so far and managed to overcome Slovenia in our... more

Hello, Euroleague fans! This is Andrey Vorontsevich of CSKA Moscow, currently with the Russian national team and ready to play at EuroBasket 2011! We cannot wait to get to Lithuania after such a long, hard preparation - just as always. I think we have a very good team, full of good players, and we could do something big. Everybody fights and our coach David Blatt has made us work very hard in practice. We got phsyically ready for the event and played several preparation games before the tournament. It is not an easy work to do but we all need to do this to get good results and everybody understands that. We need to be ready to play from the very beginning, as only three teams out of six will qualify to the next round.

It is a shame that my CSKA teammate Sasha Kaun will not be with us in Lithuania. He got injured and needed surgery. It is not a good thing, because he is the kind of player that always helps his team. We need to find another way to do well in the tournament without him. Even with that, I think we have a lot of size with Andrei Kirilenko, Viktor Khryapa, myself and Timofey Mozgov, who has played very well so far. OK, Sasha will not be with us but I think that if we all play hard and give our best, we will do well despite not having him. We already proved by beating Lithuania twice - in Khimki and then on the road, against a very wild crowd, against a basketball atmosphere that it was not easy to play against. Actually, preparation games are what they are, it shouldn't be very important as long as we get to Lithuania ready to give our best. We beat Lithuania, yes, but also lost in Israel just the other day and I think... more