On Nov. 21, 2013, Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president, abruptly suspended long-running negotiations on an association agreement with the European Union. Though Yanukovych personified the corruption, cronyism and oligarchical capitalism rampant in Ukraine, he had previously promoted the accord, which many Ukrainians, particularly in the country’s center and west, anticipated as a pathway to a better life and communion with the West.
Within hours, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, protesters thronged Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti). Once the riot police started beating demonstrators, and especially after the first fatalities, Yanukovych was doomed. By late February, he had fled. Moscow reacted by annexing the Crimea, Ukraine’s sole Russian-majority region, and supporting an armed insurgency in the Donbas (eastern Ukraine), which, compared with central and western Ukraine, has been shaped more by Russian culture and the Soviet past and contains many ethnic Russians, as well as Ukrainians whose primary language is Russian. The fighting has killed more than 10,000 people and placed a heavy economic burden on a country that can ill afford it.
