Yesterday, Liza and I ate breakfast at the Maystruks’, leaving the children enough food to make their own breakfast in the kitchen. And today we drove the Maystruks’ son Vovchik to Kiev. We had just arrived and unloaded the car when the people below us knocked at the door and told us that there had been loud noises coming from the apartment until three in the morning: Gaby and her friends had thrown a party. The experiment is a failure.
While we were driving from Zhytomyr towards Kiev, we saw an Automaidan procession speeding past in the opposite direction: in front, a powerful three-wheeled motorbike with a black-and-red flag. Behind, a dozen people carriers and saloon cars, some of them dented, with mangled bumpers and crumpled sides. Following them were five or six traffic police cars. Soon after that, we passed a police patrol that had stopped several Automaidan vehicles. Closer to Kiev, the same story again. The police are attempting to chop up the Automaidan into little groups.
In the afternoon, Piatras and I took the car to go and see Yura and Alisa. All over the city, and along the roads to Kontsa-Zaspa and Obukhov – every five hundred yards, by the roadside – there were two or three police cars. The officers were stopping all cars flying Ukrainian flags. So now the national flag has become a sign of anti-government activity!
Today, as I learned when I arrived in Lisnyki at Yura and Alisa’s place, we were celebrating the national holiday of Lithuania. We stayed until 8.30 p.m., drinking wine and playing pool.
Then I received a call (the second) from Ira, who asked me if I could help them obtain multiple-entry Lithuanian visas, because they had decided to celebrate 8 March in Lithuania! It is clear that they would like to flee the country in these troubled times and that they are trying everything possible to get Schengen visas.
The return of the city hall to the authorities has caused a great deal of discontent. After it occurred, a group of people in balaclavas, armed with clubs, went up to the fifth floor and trashed the offices. We still do not know if they were agitators or if they really were members of the paramilitary organisation Patriots of Ukraine wishing to avenge their comrades from Vasilkov who were sentenced to prison.
According to the newspapers, Ukrainian oligarchs have not had access to foreign borrowing for the past two months now. I doubt that.
On Hrushevskoho Street, the barricades have melted. Many members of the self-defence groups no longer hide their faces; they walk around in helmets, smiling, once again allowing bystanders to take their photos. A young woman with her six-year-old son came to look at the blackened street. The passage, the clearing of which marked an important step in unblocking the street, is very narrow, indistinct, almost non-existent. And utterly meaningless because, beyond there, in any case, stretch the cordons of Berkut agents – so much so that no traffic can possibly flow through. Everywhere you see piggy banks bearing the words: Help for victims. Behind Ukraine House, in the building’s courtyard, you can hear the sound of sticks colliding: a detachment of self-defence groups in training.