News
February 21, 2019
I arrived in Kiev in late February 2014. Moscow's man Viktor Yanukovych had fled the country, but the new Western-backed government hadn't yet been installed. The worst of the violence was over, but there were still bloodstains and trails of flowers on the Maidan. News had arrived that masked gunmen were seizing control of Crimea, but Moscow hadn't formally annexed the peninsula yet, and it would be several months before the Kremlin-backed insurgency in Eastern Ukraine flared up in full. Here are a few scenes from those days between the climax of the revolution and the tenuous new order that followed.
At the height of the violence, pro-government snipers and police killed more than a hundred protesters. Some of the regime's marksmen allegedly shot from the windows of the Hotel Ukraina, which overlooks the Maidan in the distance. In a potent fusion of Orthodox ritual and Ukrainian nationalism, Maidan activists and supporters spontaneously hailed the dead as martyrs, honoring "The Heavenly Hundred" with impromptu shrines of flowers and candles.
▲Activists and critics of the Yanukovych government had camped out on the Maidan for months before the violence erupted in February. When things got hot, they fashioned barricades out of wood and old tires, welded together makeshift Czech hedgehogs, turned a metro entrance into a Molotov cocktail factory, and converted the nearby McDonalds into a "psychological first aid" center. Paving stones were torn up and stacked in neat piles for use against the police. I remember in particular the acrid commingling of gas generator fumes, woodstove smoke, and burnt rubber. The removal of the encampments would eventually become a politically sensitive issue for the new government.
▲The Trade Union building, located on the Maidan, served as the headquarters of the protest movement until it was burned down on the night of 18 February, allegedly by pro-regime forces. Both sides of the conflict would remember this when, months later, a fire at the trade union building in the port city of Odessa killed dozens of pro-Russian activists during clashes with Ukrainian nationalists.
▲A pathway of flowers and candles laid across the square and up to Institutska Street, where dozens of lightly armed protesters had been shot while trying to make their way towards government buildings further up the hill.
▲Arseniy Yatseniuk, a well known politician supported by the US and EU , was sworn in as prime minister of the new government on 27 February. Faced with the nearly impossible task of governing a deeply divided and partly occupied country as it slouched towards a deepening conflict with Russia, he said he felt he was leading a "kamikaze mission." Yatseniuk would last two years as Prime Minister before a fallout with his coalition partners led to his downfall.
▲Arseniy, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, got together with a few pals and drove a tank up to the Ukrainian Parliament building. A reminder, he said, that "the people control this government." Although the Euromaidan protests grew out of frustration with President Yanukovych's decision to abandon closer integration with the EU, the movement was hardly monolithic. It included avowedly pro-European activists, but also far right nationalist militants, some general anti-establishment folks like Arseniy, anti-corruption activists, and others. While virtually all were happy to see Yanukovych gone, not everyone was thrilled with what followed.
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