Euromaidan and Aftermath

With the exception of the disaster that took place at Chornobyl in 1986, Ukraine used to be almost invisible to much of the world until angry Ukrainians propelled it recently into the news. In 2004-05, the country got sympathetic media coverage in the West and elsewhere where there is a free press because of the Orange Revolution, a grassroots action that succeeded in preventing Viktor Yanukovych from stealing the presidency through a rigged election; and then there was mostly sympathetic coverage again in the same parts of the world nearly a decade later, in 2013-14, when Euromaidan exploded on then-President Viktor Yanukovych, and then drove him from office. There were many reasons for the people's anger, and many protests against him during his time as president (and even before), but the trigger for Euromaidan and what eventually did him in was that fateful announcement on November 21, 2013 that he had changed his mind about the direction that he would take Ukraine, and that he preferred to follow a path in tandem with Russia and to not seek closer association with Europe and the West as he had once promised. It is almost certainly no coincidence that Yanukovych's change of heart followed a trip to Moscow, where he met with Russia's President Putin, and where he may have been threatened or dressed down, or both.

The protests that followed grew much bigger after November 30, when Ukrainian riot police began beating peaceful protestors and journalists on Maidan, such that eventually there were hundreds of thousands of citizens gathering on the square in central Kyiv, and countless more in other cities across the country. The more repression the government aimed at “Maidan,” the larger and angrier the protests became, and the more the activists on Maidan dug in. They lived in tents on the square and on nearby streets, built barricades using sandbags, paving stones, and “urban materials” such as park benches, signposts, and street-side planters. Also, they set up kitchens, medical clinics, and tent churches for various denominations, as well as distribution systems for food, water, firewood, warm clothing, and blankets.