Nobody is celebrating victory. For the moment, there is no victory, and there probably won’t be one. Ukraine has already lost. More than a hundred of its citizens have been killed, among them students and university lecturers, some of them women.
Yesterday, Liza told me that Theo had said: ‘Mum, I think I should be in the Maidan. Can I go?’ Liza replied: ‘If you were three years older, I’d be surprised if you weren’t there already. But you’re fifteen, and we’re all going to stay at home.’
New negotiations between Yanukovych and the opposition give hope, but only to inveterate optimists. Yes, Yanukovych signed papers regarding the conditions for a ‘solution to the conflict’, and more precisely for ‘the cessation of hostilities’. The elections are set for December. So, in other words, until then, the man with more than a hundred deaths and more than five hundred wounded on his conscience will remain president, and he will fight the next election too.
For the participants in the protest movement, this agreement means nothing. Although the opposition leaders are trying to appear assured, they do not control the Maidan. No more than 30 per cent of protesters listen to their opinions. However, everyone is well aware that a peace agreement is necessary. Not a truce that will inevitably lead to yet more bloody conflict, but a real peace.
The country still exists, even if Yanukovych’s supporters are working hard to divide it. The president of the Crimean Parliament has already been to Moscow, where he expressed the desire of the peninsula’s inhabitants to become Russian citizens again. We won’t have to wait long for the reaction of the Crimean Tatars. The Tatar people, deported under Stalin, and who only rejoined their historical homeland in the early 1990s after the declaration of Ukraine’s independence, will use all means necessary to oppose Crimea’s return to Russian rule.
In Kharkiv, the regional governor is assembling a congress of deputies from the south and east of Ukraine to study the possibility of separating from Kiev. The country is trembling all over – it is close to being torn apart – but Yanukovych doesn’t see this. Right now, the problem he faces is remaining in power until the expected elections.