Victor Afanasyev has died.
At the 21st of Dec 2020 the former director of the observatory of the largest BTA telescope, Viktor Leonidovich Afanasyev, died of the covid.
Victor is a man with whom you could talk free about anything.
It is a pity to lose a rare and very important interlocutor in life.
Wonderful professional: he is the author of the famous spectrograph "Scorpio" on which a huge number of Soviet and Russian works were made. 

 The first RFFI MASTER grant was supported by Afanasyev and this was the first recognition of me as an experimenter and
our entire group as a strong team with a great future. His frankness in this phrase made a simple sense, look at your good project, but there is not much
money in the state and just you will not have. He said in his manner and took out of his reserve an excellent grisma for our first MASTER - a
telescope 20 times smaller than his, it is not known to whom he was assigned, standing in the village, in the disgusting astronomical sky, 2
kilometers from Domodedovo Airport. He believed that we could catch a gamma-ray burst at the other end of the universe and remove its optical
spectrum! But it was an astronomer in whose hands there was a 6-meter telescope! By the way, at my request, he could interrupt observations and
remove an object of interest to me. So we co-authored. He shot the spectrum of this "zironki" (and we were both Kievans), which turned out to be the
longest-period eclipse-double star known to mankind. By the way, it is completely incomprehensible how it arose at all.

He was not indifferent to the fate of Russia. He was interested in the essence in science, in life, in a person. 
Once he published his article on this in Russian Pereplet.

Sadly. Such specialists in the country on the fingers can be counted. My condolences to his loved ones.
All MASTER team grievs about this greate russian astronomer.... 
V.Lipunov

The Russian text is here
Victor Leonidovich Afanasiev invited talk at Russian Highlights in Astrophysics 2018
He was a member of SOC in 2015,2016,2019,2020.
 Prof.Afanasieve page at Russian Pereplet