A middle-aged woman wearing slippers and shorts is leaning on a fence surrounding a tent in Kyiv’s central Khreshchatyk Street, watching people passing by. A young man in dirty clothes is chopping wood behind her. Smoke is rising from the pan in an old field kitchen nearby.
The woman, Viktoria Sukhromenda, left her hometown of Truskavets in western Ukraine almost five months ago to join the EuroMaidan protests in Kyiv and is not going to come home any time soon. A revolutionary tent, one of the many still standing in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square, is her home.
It’s been more than three months since the EuroMaidan Revolution ended on Feb. 22, but the most determined protesters still live in the tents on Maidan Nezalezhnosti.
Many of them believe the revolution is not over.
“Kids died and for what? I don’t care about the new faces (in government), I’ll leave when I see real changes,” Sukhromenda says and glances towards Instytutska Street, where several dozen protesters were killed in February.
The woman came to Kyiv in January.
“My husband died in November and my both sons came here; where else could I be,” she said and added it was a miracle that her sons survived in the protests, so she “owes to God and will be here till the end.”
The end is not determined though. Kyiv’s newly elected mayor Vitali Klitschko said the barricades have already fulfilled their function and need to be removed.
“We’ll talk to people and try to convince them to move on to a peaceful life. Kyiv should be an example for all cities of Ukraine that still live with the barricades,” he said at a press conference on May 26.
Maidan inhabitants agree to reorganize Maidan territory, but not to leave.
“Maidan won’t dissolve until its demands are fulfilled: punish the offenders, lustration, adoption of laws needed to change the system, etc,” said Natalia Soloviova, Maidan press-center coordinator.
Some of the people who remain on Maidan think they are the reason there are “no Russian terrorists in Kyiv yet.” Among them, Dmytro Yermak, 18-year old student from Kyiv.
Yermak says he first came to Maidan on Nov. 22 and still spends most of his time here. He says the leftovers of the protesters’ camp await attacks all the time, just like they did in the turbulent days of winter.
Despite the expectations, almost nothing happens on Maidan now.
“I would want to go home as soon as possible. Many already fold up the tents. But nothing has really changed yet,” says Yuriy from Ternopil Oblast. He doesn’t want to give his last name, saying that he has no reason to trust the country’s new authorities.
“So many mistakes and crimes were pointed out when the new ones took over, yet not a single investigation was conducted,” he says.
Yuriy is a commandant of the Ternopil tent that used to be home for 15 people. Now it only hosts four people. The rest went home.
Inside the tent it’s dark and clean. Most of the beds are tightly made, the big wooden table in the middle of the tent is clean, and some washed clothes hang on ropes beneath the ceiling.
Yuriy says it is hard to survive on donations lately and he is always in search of food and temporary jobs for his comrades.
“Our rule is 50/50 – 50 percent of the money earned they give to the tent and 50 percent they have for themselves. With the “tent money” we pay for food and wood,” he says.
Volodymyr Vats, from Sambir in Lviv Oblast, says the main problem of the remaining protesters is not the lack of food, but psychological traumas left by the revolution.
“I was taking pills for three weeks and even thought I could end up in an asylum,” he says and adds that most of the people who still live at Maidan are suffering the same traumas. “They just do not admit this.”
According to Kyiv-based psychologist Olha Pavlova, that problem can be solved in a very easy way – the former protesters should hear “thank you” more often.
“Those people feel like they haven’t changed anything, but they did and what our new authorities should do is to show them that and to thank them instead of ordering them to go away,” she said.
Kyivans are ambivalent about protesters’ presence at Maidan.
“I heard Klitschko saying Maidan should be cleaned up. Well, maybe, but not abruptly like that. Otherwise there might be a new conflict,” says Liudmyla Evdokimova, 81, from Kyiv.
She says she was sick during Maidan events and came to the square on May 28 for the first time “to see everything with my own eyes.”
The woman admits Maidan shouldn’t be in central Kyiv forever, “but it should dissolve on its own.”
“People should start leaving for home seeing that the country changes for good, but not yet,” she said and put Hr 50 in the almost empty donation box near one of the tents.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected].
