Great hopes for a better future drove the wave of demonstrations that swept Ukraine starting in November 2013 – demonstrations that ultimately swept corrupt former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his regime from power.
Three years later, as Ukrainians reflect on the progress the country has made, those hopes remain largely unfulfilled, with scant progress having been made in ridding the country of corruption, drawing Ukraine closer to the European Union, and improving the standard of living.
Moreover, the initial success of the EuroMaidan Revolution has been clouded by Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and the Kremlin’s fomenting conflict in eastern Ukraine, sparking a long-running war that has forced 1.7 million people to flee their homes to other parts of Ukraine.
In the latest survey conducted by a Kyiv-based Sofiya social research center, the majority of respondents, 80 percent, said that life in Ukraine has gotten worse since the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Ukrainians’ see their most urgent problems as being the rising cost of basic necessities, high utility tariffs, the war in the Donbas, low salaries, and unemployment. The public is also dissatisfied with the lack of investigations into the killing of protesters during the EuroMaidan Revolution, and the failure to prosecute corrupt former and current top officials.
“The people’s resentment derives from the state’s indifference to them, because healthcare, education, public order, tariffs and so on represent the extent to which a government cares for its citizens,” said Andriy Yermolayev, the director of the New Ukraine strategic research institute.
In his opinion, Ukraine is standing at the verge of a new revolution. However, this time its agenda may be social justice rather than democratic freedoms or political change. More than half of the respondents of the Sofiya research center’s survey – 60 percent – expressed willingness to take to the streets to protest against rising prices.
“Ukrainian society is lost now,” said Yermolayev. “The desire to protest is strong, but so is the fear of repeating yet another failed Maidan, electing political speculators, and being disappointed again.”
Lawmaker Mustafa Nayyem, whose post on Facebook triggered the EuroMaidan protests on Nov. 21, 2013, wrote on Facebook on the third anniversary of the start of the protests of his own disappointment. He wrote that he continually gets the feeling that the former state of affairs in Ukraine is returning, and that if nothing is done to combat the status quo, a counter-revolution may begin.
“The counter-revolution is a creeping revival of the set of values that led to EuroMaidan three years ago,” wrote Nayyem.
“Not only do those who helped Viktor Yanukovych and his team continue to work, but they are most likely to keep their positions and investigate the crimes of the old regime, including the killings on Maidan.”
According to independent television channel Hromadske, in the 91 cases of killings during Maidan, only nine verdicts have been reached in three years: one person was sentenced to imprisonment, and the rest received suspended sentences.
And although at the end of September the e-declarations of top officials revealed that many have accumulated vast fortunes, no high-ranking figures have been convicted of corruption.
Nayyem’s advice to the public is to continue putting pressure on the authorities by any means, as acquiescence to a return to the status quo ante would be “a grave for our generation.”
Political expert Taras Berezovets believes that the Revolution of Dignity isn’t over yet, and its major achievement so far has been to give Ukraine a chance to address much graver challenges in the future.
“EuroMaidan wasn’t a solution to the country’s problems. It was a turning point that gave Ukraine a chance to break the vicious circle of post-Soviet countries being possessed by nepotism and corruption,” wrote Berezovets.
He called on the public to reject the aggressive rhetoric of populists, and hold on to the values of the EuroMaidan Revolution, since the situation may drastically change and current political figures may soon be gone.
Whether the public will heed that call is another matter: according to the Sofiya research center survey, many people favor the holding of early elections.
But while the overwhelming majority of respondents are dissatisfied with the work of President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, and the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, most people would still vote for Poroshenko, Yulia Tymoshenko or Yuriy Boiko as president.
Sociologists have recorded a drop in popularity of Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot abducted from Ukraine by Russia and subjected to a sham trial over two years of detention, who had been seen as a potential leader of the nation on her release.
At the same time, sociologists leave open the possibility of a rise in popularity of extreme left- or right-wing parties in Ukraine.
