It is obvious that Russia would not allow this interference in their undisputed sphere of influence.
Once the Right Sector extremists from western Ukraine got their way, which involved the killing of 12 Berkut riot police by the way, it was obvious that there was going to be a counter revolution in the south and east of Ukraine because those people consider themselves Russian.
All of this should be obvious, unless you’re a fool who believes that the main stream media tells the truth.
All of the above, of course, is a myth. It is a construction based on shreds of fact and deliberately twisted for fairly obvious reasons. So the myths need to be addressed – challenged with logic and fact.
That was EuroMaidan?
It does not matter how many times our “partners” in Russia might call what happened in Kyiv a ”coup” it was not that, it was a revolution. The mafia like clan that was headed by Viktor Yanukovych was not minded to find peaceful solutions, they were not about to let the people get in the way of their lucrative scams.
Although Yanukovych had been legitimately elected he was now despised because of how he, his entourage, his family, behaved.
Characterizing the “Revolution of Dignity” as a sudden violent upheaval is simply wrong.
There was violence, the TV footage and photographs of Molotov cocktails and burning barricades wasn’t staged, that really happened.
But, and this is key, it took months to get to that stage. There were a lot of important things that happened along the way that shaped the course of events, without exception every single one of those important things came at the deliberate instigation or downright arrogance of the then authorities and those with whom they colluded.
This too is key, the evolution of EuroMaidan was always the reaction, not the catalyst.
Analyzing the timeline and seeing things in context is extremely important in both understanding the reality of EuroMaidan and also in debunking the myths stated in the opening paragraph.
EuroMaidan started after Yanukovych announced that he was not going to sign an important agreement with the European Union.
This agreement was something Yanukovych had pledged to go ahead with in his election campaign, it was also something that Russia had not previously raised any objection about, and the first talk of signing such an agreement had come as early as 2002 from then President Leonid Kuchma.
Yanukovych’s about turn was a shock, and a betrayal, and any notion that the EU had somehow “suddenly tried to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit” is hereby dismissed completely. For 12 years and three consecutive Presidencies completing this agreement was Ukraine’s clear national objective.
It’s also important to note that Maidan wasn’t about support for any one political party from the very beginning. The main demands of Maidan were always about ending corruption and ensuring an evenly applied rule of law based system. These central questions were the “European values” that people of all walks of life came to Maidan demanding.
Contrary to that, on Nov 29 Yanukovych and his cronies demonstrated the criminality that was the hallmark of their rule by busing several hundred thugs to Kyiv.
They were photographed and filmed, alongside uniformed police officers, lining up for a roll call and orders in a park next to parliament.
These mercenaries played a constant role in the events that were to follow, but, just take a moment to think about this. A government employing thugs, and doing it in the open, and use that as the base perspective to start to understand what the people of Ukraine were up against.
On Dec. 1 what had been a protest became a revolution.
On Nov. 30 at 3 a.m. riot police moved in to clear Maidan of the few hundred peaceful protesters who remained despite the bitter cold.
There is a version of events that the imported thugs, nicknamed “titushki,” were supposed to turn up and cause trouble giving the police a pretense for their actions, but this didn’t happen. So the riot police went ahead and cracked skulls anyway. In Yanukovych’s Ukraine, they could literally get away with murder, the law was above the law.
The opposition called for people to gather the next day, Dec. 1 in Shevchenko Park.
They had no idea how many people would show up and had discussed various scenarios for what to do depending on how big the turnout was.
Ukrainians are peace loving people, the footage of the brutality dished out by the police disgusted and angered them, and close to one million people turned up. Those million people marched on Maidan, the Interior Ministry troops who had held the territory since the previous night simply walked away.
There was trouble later on that day outside of the Presidential Administration a short walk-up Institutskaya Street from Maidan, it was instigated by provocateurs who even brought a construction site earth mover from which a man later identified as a Berkut riot police officer tried incite people to storm the building.
This bumbling stupidity and use of dirty tricks by the crooks of the Yanukovych regime hardened the resolve of the people who were simply sick of having their intelligence insulted.
From that day the EuroMaidan became a permanent encampment in the heart of Kyiv.
Not much happened there during the week, the point of holding on to the territory was to facilitate the weekly Sunday gatherings.
One million people gathered again on Dec. 8, this day was perfectly peaceful.
Anywhere else in the world, if a million people took to the streets the government would resign.
Kyivans did it two weeks in a row and the response of the now-Moscow-resident then-authorities came on Dec. 11 when they sent thousands of riot police to make a second attempt to clear Maidan by force.
The sheer determination of the people to win this struggle was demonstrated that night as many thousands of people rushed to Maidan in the middle of the night in freezing temperatures to defend the territory, taxi drivers brought people to the square for free, many stood by the stage in the center of the square making up the numbers of an immovable body of people, others clashed with police attempting to remove barricades on the outskirts of the square.
This physical confrontation was certainly not instigated by those who were protesting against Yanukovych’s corrupt and cruel regime.
Is Ukraine moved into the holiday season there were no further attacks by the authorities on Maidan, although on Dec. 14 a very real threat of violence was neutralized.
As with every Sunday peaceful citizens were going to gather on Maidan, but on this particular weekend then Prime Minister Mykolo Azarov also called a rally on European Square, a few hundred meters from the site of the protests against him, his crooked government, and his president.
What could have happened that day can only be left to the imagination, but it is clear that mass violence involving thousands of people was being orchestrated.
However, as Azarov stood on European Square warning the titushki who made up his audience that the EU Association Agreement would have meant forced gay marriage for everyone and other such nonsense Maidan started to fill up for a concert from the legendary Ukrainian rock band, Okean Elzy.
The idea of listening to great music overtook any other dynamic and the band’s front man welcomed everyone, whether they “came from the east or the west, and whether they came from that square or this one” he said.
For context now on Putin’s generous offer of $15 billion to Ukraine, the offer that Yanukovych “chose” because it bested the EU’s offer. That came in fact on Dec. 17, there was a lot of revolutionary water under the bridge when Putin opened his (country’s) cheque book.
Over the new year break Yanukovych and Co. were still busy, working on a new way to end these problematic events. Changing their behavior didn’t occur to them, of course, but changing the law seemed like a smart thing to do.
On the morning of Jan. 16, members of Parliament had been instructed to turn up at the Verkhovna Rada as the very important business of passing the budget needed to go ahead.
When they gathered however the budget wasn’t the only they were presented with to vote upon.
A package of laws had been prepared that were designed to legislate an end to the protests and essentially legislate an end to democracy in Ukraine. The opposition were basically powerless to stop the process but somehow managed to shut down the (much abused) electronic voting system in Parliament meaning that the Regionnaires and their (in name only) Communist allies passed this raft of laws by a show of hands. They cheered when each “law” was passed after each 4 second hand count and declaration that there were 235 votes in favour, but screen shots of the voting process showed in fact that there were only 123 people voting there in person, in the vote record later published another 112 names were added to make up the numbers.
Without any irony, opponents of EuroMaidan today claim that it was the protesters who did not observe due democratic process.
The next Sunday rally on Maidan had an air of anger and resentment. The politicians on stage argued that the events of January 16th showed that Yanukovych was scared, and that the protests were working. The politicians were never in charge of Maidan, the people whistled and booed at every one of them and they left the stage looking dejected, the people then left Maidan and headed around the corner to a police barricade blocking access to the government district.
Over the next 5 days, Ukraine was in the news again as pictures of Molotov cocktails being thrown at police were beamed around the world. They were particularly played up in Moscow, of course, with no context or explanation. But it is not reasonable to disassociate the clashes of December 19th onwards from the illegal events in Parliament on Jan. 16.
It is also extremely relevant to consider the actions of the police (and other more sinister forces) during these clashes.
In the back and forth that we witnessed on Hrushevskoho, the riot police very deliberately trashed a first aid center at this location, they attacked it with stun and smoke grenades and smashed all of the glass as well as all of the medical supplies with their batons.
They also shot at journalists and medics with rounds that would not kill, but, deliberately aimed at the face, those shots did a lot of damage. The smoke bombs and stun grenades they launched into the crowd often had wood screws taped on to them as shrapnel to maximize injury. Let this sink in, the police behaved this way.
There was a soundtrack to Hrushevskoho Street, it came from pieces of wood or from stones being banged against metal. It was constant. This rhythm was played by ladies of a generation that have seen many changes in their lives and who stood in the middle of this, banging oil drums, because they were sick of the thieves who were raping their country.
The end of the fighting on Hrushevskoho was marked by the funerals of three men. One of the three dead men was Yuri Verbitsky, a geologist. He had been injured on Hrushevskoho and went to hospital along with another man to get medical treatment. They were both kidnapped directly from the hospital, taken to a remote location, and tortured. The other man, Ihor Lutsenko, was released bloodied and battered, but he was told he was lucky, Yuri was getting worse, he was from Lviv, a “Banderite” therefore.
Yuri Verbitsky was beaten until he was close to death, and then left in a forest where he died, maybe the temperature of minus 20 numbed his pain, maybe he died in agony. His murder at the hands of the Yanukovych regime and those acting for it at that time was brutal and deliberate.
In the final weeks of the Maidan protests the focus once again shifted to finding a negotiated way out of the situation. There were a few problems to this process, namely that nobody had any trust whatsoever in Yanukovych who continued to have people kidnapped and tortured, like Dmitry Bulatov, who disappeared on Jan. 22.
During his eight days of torture, Bulatov was crucified, nailed through his hands to a piece of wood, and part of his ear was cut off. His injuries were recorded by doctors in Lithuania and at a press conference from a hospital there he revealed for the first time information about his interrogation, interestingly one of the stories that he stated that he made up because he thought telling his captors what they wanted to hear would end his nightmare had been repeated by a member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, precisely and in detail, to a Kyiv Post journalist several days before Bulatov had been found. The only logical conclusion to this is that a member of the president’s party was privy to information being gathered under torture.
Nevertheless the dialogue moved in the direction of reversing the constitutional changes Yanukovych had made giving himself more powers, and early elections.
It was agreed that on Feb. 18 these constitutional changes were to be discussed in parliament.
When the order of parliament business for that day was published and it did not include this item, meaning Yanukovych had once again broken his word, the protesters moved towards the parliament building and clashes broke out between them and the hired thugs who had been every present around Kyiv, and who were still based in the park next to parliament.
Clashes also broke out along Institutskaya Street and again on Hrushevskoho Street.
As protesters ran away from the baton charges of the riot police to the safety of Maidan, the initial lines of barricades were left unguarded and the police advanced on to the square where new lines of barricades, reinforced by burning tires and manned by people of all ages and all walks of life, were already being built.
In late afternoon on Feb. 18, police and protesters stood 50 yards apart. On the side of the protesters, to hold back any further advance of the police and to defend the people and territory of the Maidan, was an arsenal of Molotov cocktails and stones.
The stones were ripped up from the pavements and broken up by young men, they were carried in sacks to the new barricades or they were passed in long human chains by women of all ages. The Molotov cocktails were made in small factories, sometimes by girls in high heels. The barricades were manned by whoever was standing there, there was no organization, no allocation of positions, it was, in reality, a far cry from the image painted of a Right Sector or any other group paramilitary kind of operation. In truth, it was chaos.
In spite of pleas from the Maidan stage for the police not to follow any orders to attack their own people, on the stroke of 8 o’clock they advanced.
Overnight the new barricades held, the people stood firm, but the police achieved their primary goal for that day, they entered and subsequently set fire to the Trade Union building on the corner of Maidan. This building had been a command and control center, housing a press hub as well as a hospital. The building had been leased to the opposition parties and was not occupied illegally. By the morning it was a smoldering ruin.
The day of Feb. 19 was intense, but without mass clashes. People slept wherever they could. Citizens rallied to Maidan bringing medicines to replace the stock lost in the Trade Union and food for whoever needed it.
I have heard various accounts of what happened on the morning of the 20th, one thing is for sure, a lot of people died.
On the side of the authorities snipers aimed at the heads and hearts of people they decided would die.
Yanukovych recently claimed that he did not give the order to fire, and that he did not have that authority (he was the president, he had ultimate authority) but in that case, the question is obvious, who did give the order to fire? There is much still to learn about the final days of Maidan and I look forward to the facts being established.
On the evening of Feb. 21, Maidan was thronging with people. The horror of the bloodshed had made commanders and other officers of law enforcement structures fear that in light of the collapse of the regime they would be held accountable, so Maidan was not under further attack. As coffins passed through the crowd to typical Ukrainian funeral music a chant got louder and louder, the people were shouting “zeka smert” or “death to the convict” – this was an evolution from a crowd chant throughout the revolution. The convict was, of course, Yanukovych, a man who had served two terms in prison. The earlier chant had been “zeka het” which means “Convict out.”
What the zeka didn’t know was that his entire support foundation was in the process of collapsing. Regardless of what the crowd on Maidan was doing and regardless of the deal Radek Sikorski was negotiating between Yanukovych and the opposition the people who held the balance of power defected. While all of his Party of Regions were rotten individuals who thought of little more than personal enrichment and the power they needed to keep to enable that narrow minded goal, many of them drew a line after the slaughter of the 20th.
Behind the scenes calls were being made from Party of Regions members to the opposition, discussions were had about convening to impeach Yanukovych and return Ukraine to the 2004 version of the constitution which had much reduced Presidential powers.
With this, it was all over. Yanukovych had no support. He had been tipped off that he was to be impeached so he packed all he could and fled to Russia along with those who were the most corrupt and most criminally liable of his inner circle.
Maidan was not a coup. It was a revolution.
It was not the work of any foreign powers but the work of, by, and for the people of all of Ukraine.
To characterize Maidan as a violent mob ignores the 93 day history of the revolution and is a lazy conclusion chosen by people who are (probably deliberately) ignorant of the facts.
Challenging the truth about Maidan is a gross insult to those who lived it. The single cynical reason for creating an alternate narrative about Maidan is that Russia’s rulers and the media they direct simply could not say the truth.
Ordinary people demanding an end to corruption, accountability of elected leaders and a functioning rule of law based democracy is an end to them, just as it became an end to Yanukovych, it will also be an end to Putin.
