In 1967, he played a peasant boy, Fedka, in Mark Donskoy's movie, A Mother's Heart, about Vladimir Lenin, and then he stopped his artistic career to concentrate on English language studies.

[3] Vitaly Churkin with support from Yuri Dubinin are known to have organized future US President Donald Trump's first visit to the Soviet Union in July 1987.

[13] The choice of Churkin, then a relatively junior diplomat, was due to his reputation as the most fluent English-speaker in the Soviet embassy; media reported he possessed "an array of English slang".

[13] Churkin's performance was filled with denials, deflections and whataboutist rhetoric, which led to his being parodied in Mark Alan Stamaty's Washingtoon, a political cartoon series in The Washington Post, as Vitaly "Charmyourpantsoff".

[citation needed] On 12 June 2014, Churkin briefed on the crisis in Baghdad, Iraq, saying that there was no threat to his colleague Nickolay Mladenov, who is the head of the UN's political mission in that country.

[20] The UK sponsored a resolution, the purpose of which was to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the massacres in Srebrenica and that would have emphasized acceptance of those tragic events as genocide as a prerequisite for national reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

[citation needed] India's Permanent Representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin, also expressed his condolences, calling Churkin a "friend" and a "stalwart diplomat".

[26] Former President Barack Obama's UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, tweeted that she was "devastated" and described Churkin as a "diplomatic maestro" who did all he could to bridge U.S.-Russia differences.

[27] Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Churkin had met several times from 2015 until 2017, sent an email to tech billionaire Peter Thiel stating, "As you read my Russian ambassador friend died.

[37] Hours after Shirinskiy's death, Russia's government-owned news agency TASS published a list of names and brief biographies of senior Russian diplomats (naming five), who had died "of natural causes" "in the past two years" (in fact, since 30 May 2016, the day when Russian Chargés d'affaires ad interim to Ukraine Andrei Vorobyov, aged 57, died suddenly in Moscow), that included Churkin.