At one in the morning, at Khmelnytskyi station, I caught a train from Ivano-Frankivsk, heading to Kiev. I slept fully dressed on the top bunk and arrived, on time, at 6.12 a.m. By seven, I was home. I lay down and slept for a couple of hours. Ignoring my tiredness and headache after a too-brief and agitated sleep, I decided we should go to the countryside. Gaby stayed in Kiev with a friend – an experiment – while Bogdan, a friend from Anton’s class, came with us.
That evening, the first national television channel showed an interview given by Yanukovych to a journalist who had been very well known during the Soviet era, Vitaliy Korotich. Absolutely dreadful. Korotich, with his bags under his eyes, looked old and weary. Yanukovych appeared to be wearing a mask, only the mouth moving slightly, the movements never coinciding with the words we heard. He talked nonsense. I switched off.
Today, Klichko is supposed to appear in Poltava. The police and the fire brigade have already surrounded the building where the event is due to take place and they are not letting anyone in. They have cut the power and announced a bomb alert.
In Kiev, the opposition has agreed to clear out part of Hrushevskoho Street and to evacuate the city hall. But the opposition is one thing; the protesters are quite another. The Maidanistas have condemned the opposition’s promises. No one has any intention of leaving Ukraine House, the October Palace or the Trade Unions building. Again, there are rumours of troops converging on Kiev, rumours that a new operation against the protesters will be mounted on Monday. A Molotov cocktail was thrown at Hanna Herman’s parents’ house, in the Lviv region. The house did not burn down, at least not completely.
The library in the Maidan has begun donating books to village libraries. Mila Ivantsova, Galya Vdovichenko and other writers are taking care of this. In some villages, the authorities have forbidden libraries to accept books with the stamp ‘Maidan Library’ and declared that if any of their librarians do take these books, either they will be forced to tear out the pages bearing this stamp or they will be fired.
To begin with, Leonid Kozhara, the Foreign Minister, criticised the Russian diplomat who claimed that Ukraine was already, de facto, federalised, but yesterday Yanukovych announced that he would have to re-examine the possibility of a federalisation.
The veterans of the Afghanistan war supported Euromaidan, then a group of them declared an armistice and left, upset that the masters of the barricades on Hrushevskoho Street did not listen to their professional opinions about combat. Last night, presumably in an attempt to persuade the remaining ‘Afghans’ to leave the centre of Kiev, Yanukovych established a medal for the ‘25th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan’.
In Simferopol, an American named Jeffrey Lubbi was beaten up simply because one of his Ukrainian friends, when asked what he thought of the Maidan, replied that he fully supported the protest movement.
Near Kiev, farmers discovered the corpse of a man in a field, dressed like a Maidanista with a blue-and-yellow ribbon in his jacket, his face disfigured.