CHAPTER TWELVE IN THE AUTUMN OF 2013, Mezhihoriya was still hidden behind its security fence. Though known to all as hopelessly corrupt, Yanukovich seemed firmly in charge. The economy had recovered slightly from the 2008–9 crash, the media were cowed (though less so than in Russia), and the opposition still dispirited by the failure of the Orange Revolution. Pent-up frustration had produced a 10 per cent protest vote for the nationalist party Svoboda (‘Freedom’) in the 2012 parliamentary elections, but by the following spring opposition protests had petered out. The next potential flashpoint was assumed to be the presidential election due in 2015.
What changed all that, to the near-universal astonishment of the Western foreign-policy establishment, was a trade agreement. Ever since independence, Ukraine’s relations with Russia had been scratchy, soured by endless squabbles over gas payments and the Black Sea Fleet. They worsened dramatically after the Orange Revolution, as Yushchenko tried to tip Ukraine westwards, pleading for a Membership Action Plan, or ‘MAP’, into NATO, and opening negotiations on a wide-ranging trade deal, known as an Association Agreement, with the EU. Campaigning for the presidency, Yanukovich promised to ‘rebalance’ Ukraine’s foreign relations: Ukraine was to be a ‘non-bloc state’, neither in one camp nor the other. This chimed with public opinion, which was in favour of EU membership but split on NATO.
As president, he let negotiations over the Association Agreement – seen as a prelude to full EU membership – continue. It was popular with the public – the prospect of visa-free European travel a major draw – and it gave him leverage over the Kremlin, which was trying to put together its own free-trade area, the ‘Eurasian Economic Union’. A sticking point was the EU’s insistence that Tymoshenko be let out of gaol. By October 2013 the two sides were close to a compromise – Tymoshenko would be released, but despatched for medical treatment to Germany – and the Agreement seemed set to go ahead. Putin, however, was having none of it. Threatening a wider trade war, he slapped restrictions on Ukrainian food exports, holding up hundreds of Ukrainian trucks and goods wagons at the Russian border. On 21 November, a week before a scheduled signing ceremony at an EU summit in Vilnius, Yanukovich caved in, announcing that the Agreement would not go ahead for ‘national security reasons’, and that Ukraine was resuming talks with Russia.
Kievans were unsurprised by the U-turn, but bitterly disappointed. What mattered was not so much the Association Agreement itself – the content of which was deadly dull and nobody understood – as the sense of doors closing, and hope for change receding. Typically fatalistic was the Russian-language novelist Andrei Kurkov. ‘Closer ties with Europe,’ he wrote in his diary on hearing the news, ‘have been abandoned. Now, we are going to love Russia again.’ Unable to concentrate on work, he headed to his local café, ordering coffee plus a restorative cognac: ‘It didn’t make me feel any better.’ Trawling for distraction on the internet, he noted that a Swiss traveller had just ridden into Tbilisi on a camel, ‘an animal from which he has not been separated for more than thirty years . . . Here, everything is simpler and sadder. Once again, we have had our future taken away from us.’1
Others were more proactive. The first to post a Facebook appeal for demonstrators to gather at the Maidan was Mustafa Nayem, a 32-year-old, Kabul-born journalist on the same online paper, Ukrainska Pravda, which Georgiy Gongadze had founded, and co-leader of the youth group Pora! That first evening, only a few dozen students assembled, sheltering from the rain under a tarpaulin. As one remembers,
We all knew about Nayem’s post, and were waiting to see what would happen. Then on Twitter I saw a photo of three guys standing under the statues. One was a friend. So I went along, and there were five of us, and we stood discussing what we wanted for our city. We sent out more invitations on Facebook, and the next day there were two hundred people. Why did they come? It was like a wave. First you felt angry, then sad. Then you understood that you had to take steps, do something. That’s how I was motivated.2
Though the protests grew substantially over the next few days (to around 100,000 on the first Sunday, 24 November), what turned them into a mass movement was the government’s clumsy use of violence. At 4 a.m. on Saturday the 30th the police moved in with riot sticks, diving into tents full of dozing young people and indiscriminately beating them up. One group of students was cornered in a dead-end street, where they sang the national anthem as police dragged them into vans. Another ran uphill to St Michael’s of the Golden Domes, whose monks let them into the courtyard and helped them barricade the gates. (Demolished by Stalin, the monastery was rebuilt in exact replica in the late 1990s. Part, vitally, of the Kiev rather than the pro-Putin Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, it subsequently served as a protestors’ first aid centre and hostel.)
The brutality of the attack mobilised people who had previously only grumbled from the sidelines. In the words of Andrei Terekhov, the ex-banker who a year later found himself sponsoring a sniper unit in the Ukrainian army, ‘It was the police beating up the students that got me involved initially. I was really enraged – first of all because it was so stupid. It was a cold night, and there were only a few dozen of them. If the police had left them alone they would probably have dispersed, as had happened before. Basically, Yanukovich decided to spit in the face of the nation. It was so idiotic, and so unprovoked.’
The following morning, Sunday 1 December, he decided for the first time since the Orange Revolution to join a protest march. Borrowing an EU flag from the Slovene ambassador, he walked down to the Bessarabsky covered market:
‘I looked up Shevchenko Boulevard – it was full of people, as far as the eye could see. And along Khreshchatyk – full of people. There must have been a million at least. I was thrilled. When you are part of a demo like that you feel you can do anything. The atmosphere was very peaceful. People were extra polite towards each other, careful not to step on each other’s feet . . . It was a wonderful feeling – almost like going to church, though I’m not a believer. You went to feel better, to make yourself better. It didn’t matter who you were, or what language you spoke; you knew that everyone there was a good person. Whatever bad things they had done in life, being on the Maidan redeemed them.’3
From then on, the Maidan convulsed the nation. Initiated by students and young professionals, it grew to encompass young and old, rich and poor, and every region of the country. Even Donetsk had its own mini-Maidan, a few hundred demonstrators braving harassment from police and pro-Russian thugs. For the hundreds of thousands who participated, it was a life-changing experience. One young woman, a volunteer at one of a starburst of start-up charities the movement spawned, told me that ‘before the Maidan, I was totally different. You make new friends, and other people stop being friends. You learn new values. You start talking to people who you’d never have had anything to do with before, because they support you, even if perhaps your own family doesn’t.’ A year on, she still feels a rush of emotion every time she gets out at the Khreshchatyk metro stop: ‘It has a particular smell; I don’t know what of. But it all comes back, and my heart starts racing.’ A colleague chips in: for her, the trigger is the smell of woodsmoke: ‘When you got home after a night on the Maidan your clothes would be full of it, from the cooking fires.’ Like almost everyone I interview on the subject, they wipe away tears as they speak.
Bounded by barricades, the protests initially had a music festival air. On the Maidan itself, green canvas tents filled the area round the fountains where in normal times elderly men gather to play chess. Facing the Stalinist Ukraina Hotel, a covered sound stage hosted an almost round-the-clock stream of speakers and performers. Ruslana, winner of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, appeared night after night, leading the crowds in the national anthem. So did rock bands, folk singers, children’s choirs, Cossack drummers and a seemingly endless procession of poets. Priests – Orthodox and Uniate together – appeared on stage every evening, leading the crowd in prayers. (Yanukovich was told to repent of his crimes, the crowd to repent of paying and receiving bribes.) Performances were punctuated with shouts of ‘It’s time!’, ‘Down with the criminal gang!’ and ‘Glory to Ukraine!’; the roared reply: ‘Glory to the heroes!’ In the Trades Union Building, an ‘Open University’ popped up, at which lecturers from the most progressive of Kiev’s universities, the Mohyla Academy, gave media training and held seminars on economic and constitutional reform. On the pavement outside city hall, students from the Convervatoire took turns on a blue-and-yellow-painted upright piano. Inside, a mass of volunteers prepared and distributed hot drinks and sandwiches, as did many local restaurants. Others handed out sleeping bags and winter clothing. Kurkov saw ‘an old lady carrying hand-knitted socks and offering them to the guys near the Hrushevsky Street barricades. The first one she spoke to said he already had two pairs.’4
In contrast with the Orange Revolution, politicians made little of the running. Ukrainian flags, rather than party leaders’ faces, waved above the crowd, and though opposition MPs spoke regularly from the stage, they got a lukewarm reception: ‘They aren’t with us in the tents,’ one ‘Cossack’ protestor told an interviewer. ‘Look at them all shouting today – “We’re one, we’re one!” But once they’ve got their noses in the trough, they’ve forgotten all about it.’5 Only 8 per cent of participants, according to pollsters, attended as part of an organised group, or in response to an appeal by a political party. Numbers swelled at weekends and after work.
With the approach of New Year, the atmosphere began to harden. On 8 December protestors threw a lasso around the neck of the Lenin statue at the end of Khreshchatyk, pulling it to the ground and smashing it to pieces with sledgehammers. Long gone in the west of the country, Lenins now started tumbling in the central provinces, scandalising the east. (‘It was horrid,’ a Donetsk teacher told me, ‘seeing part of Lenin’s head, or a finger, for sale on the internet. Uncultured.’) In the small hours of 11 December, when freezing temperatures had thinned protestor numbers, the security services mustered for a second attempt to clear the area. News of impending attack spread via Facebook and the bells of St Michael’s, which rang the alarm from 4 a.m. until dawn. Alerted by the world’s oldest and newest communications technologies, tens of thousands of Kievans immediately headed for the Maidan, separating and immobilising the police squads, which eventually retreated.
As well as raiding activist and opposition-party offices and making hundreds of arrests, the authorities increasingly resorted to extra-judicial violence. They seemed especially riled by the ‘Avtomaidan’, a network of car-owners who used their vehicles to picket government buildings. After a thousand-strong motorcade descended on Yanukovich’s Mezhihoriya on 29 December, hundreds of drivers were stripped of their licences, or woke to find their cars burned-out wrecks. Later the Avtomaidan’s chief spokesman was kidnapped and held for a week, during which time he was beaten into ‘confessing’ that he was a CIA spy, before being dumped in woods minus part of an ear. Similarly targeted was the radical activist Tetyana Chornovol, famous for climbing into the Mezhihoriya grounds and posting photographs of them on the internet. On 25 December she was driving into the city when a Porsche SUV forced her off the road. Several men jumped out, dragged her out of her car, and beat her savagely about the head before leaving her for dead in a ditch. Photographs of her pulped face shocked the nation.
Encouraged by Putin, on 16 January Yanukovich rammed a ‘dictatorship law’ through parliament, passed on a chaotic show of hands. Modelled on repressive measures Putin had taken against his own pro-democracy demonstrators two years earlier, it made illegal, among many other things, convoys of more than five cars, the erection of tents without police permission, and the wearing of hard hats during public demonstrations. The protestors responded by donning kitchen colanders. Nor did they take any notice when the prime minister resigned and the dictatorship laws were toned down: it was not enough, and politicians did not speak for the people.
On the 19th police used water cannon. It was Epiphany, traditionally celebrated with an icy dip into the Dnieper, and the soaked protestors jeered ‘Baptism!’ in reply. From now on, the protests turned into near-nightly riots: police firing rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas; protestors replying with cobbles, fireworks and petrol bombs. Instead of sweets and tea, volunteers were asked to bring pieces of forked wood and leather for catapults, and condoms and ammonia, for home-made tear-gas pellets. The barricades surrounding the Maidan’s tented city were built up into massive, twelve-foot-high bulwarks, and supplemented with burning tyres. As the missiles flew and black smoke billowed, shouts and explosions combined with the sound of sticks beating empty oil drums, the long-long-short-short-short rhythm standing for RE-VO-lut-si-ya.
Organised into ‘hundreds’ (an old Cossack term), the hard core of fighters was increasingly made up of working-class men from western Ukraine, an over-publicised minority of them members of the nationalist far right. The riot police or ‘Berkut’, conversely, came increasingly from the east, as the authorities brought in extra forces from the Donbass.6 They were supplemented by titushki – tracksuited thugs, a mixture of football hooligans, fight-club members and petty criminals, given small cash handouts to rough up and intimidate. The original middle-class protestors split. Some, disliking the violence, peeled away. Others stayed put, fighting, giving first aid, helping reinforce the barricades or ferrying supplies. If one defining image of the Maidan is a teenager in a motorcycle helmet lobbing a stone, another is a respectably dressed middle-aged woman passing bricks along a human chain, or filling a sack with rubble. A twenty-something Odessan who spent the winter on the Maidan told me proudly: ‘In Ukraine now, every little girl knows how to make a Molotov cocktail.’ Her own apartment was a startling mix of girly clutter and street-fighting gear: corn dollies and china frogs next to shin guards and a flak jacket; bandage rolls and a loudhailer alongside a box set of Friends. It wasn’t just a pose – she really had been in the thick of the fighting, and had seen friends seriously hurt. Outside Kiev’s old Dynamo football stadium, a home-made siege engine, built of rope and metal girders, looked as though it had come off the set of Lord of the Rings. But it actually worked, flinging rocks hundreds of feet over the police lines.
On 22 January the Maidan’s first killings took place, when police beat to death two protestors on Hrushevsky Street, just down from the National Gallery. Another was beaten, stripped, jabbed with a knife and made to stand naked in the snow singing the national anthem. The same day the bound and beaten body of the activist Yuriy Verbytsky – in normal life a 51-year-old seismologist from the Lviv Geological Institute – was found in woods near Boryspil airport. The previous evening he had been in hospital, waiting for treatment for an eye injury, when a group of men burst in and frogmarched him into a van, together with the Ukrainska Pravda journalist Igor Lutsenko. They were driven to a garage hidden in woodland and violently interrogated, the questions variations on ‘Who’s organising the Maidan?’ and ‘Are you getting money from America?’ Badly injured but still alive, Lutsenko was driven to another part of the woods and released. Verbytsky was left to die of his injuries and hypothermia.7
Andrei Terekhov, by this stage, was spending his evenings standing round a brazier with his former driver, who was manning a tent together with old friends from his home village. ‘At one point,’ Andrei remembers, ‘the guys asked if I could bring gasoline. I realised it wasn’t just for the generator, it was for petrol bombs. At first I said no. But after the first killings I changed my mind. I realised there was no way to win by peaceful means.’ He and his wife filled the back of their Land Cruiser with fuel cans and empty bottles, and bribed their way past police cordons back into the Maidan encampment. Later, he smuggled in six Kevlar vests, wearing them two at a time under his overcoat.8 Kurkov observed in his diary that the Maidan had ‘entered a new phase, which can be summarised with the words: “The bridges have been burned!” Many protestors on the barricades on Hrushevsky Street have removed their masks. They no longer fear showing their faces.’9
The last act played out in the third week of February, sharing the world’s TV screens with Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics. On Tuesday 18 February an initially peaceful rally outside the Rada, led by opposition MPs and demanding a more democratic constitution, ended in running battles as police pushed protestors downhill towards European Square. Far-right fighters (or, as many claim, provocateurs) invaded and set fire to the Party of Regions’ offices near the Rada, reportedly killing two people.10 Around eight o’clock in the evening, the anti-terrorism unit known as the ‘Alfa Group’ did the same to the Trades Union Building, then serving as a protestors’ field hospital and hostel. Most people escaped safely with the help of the fire services, but unknown numbers did not: one eyewitness reports seeing medics remove four charred bodies.11 Titushki killed six protestors outside St Michael’s monastery, and later that night plain-clothes police took a journalist from a taxi outside Santa Sofia Cathedral, beat him up and shot him dead. The (probably undercounted) official death toll for the day was twenty-six – sixteen demonstrators and ten police.
The next day the two sides regrouped. The government announced a nationwide ‘anti-terrorist operation’ – in effect a state of emergency – but also reopened talks with the parliamentary opposition. The protestors reinforced their barricades. Supporters delivered so much food, remembers one, that most of it went uneaten. In six western and central provinces, meanwhile, pro-Maidan mobs stormed police stations, security service headquarters and city halls. In Lviv, cars and several buildings were set on fire.
The climax came on Thursday the 20th. Early in the morning, protestors attacked the police lines on Hrushevsky and Institutska Streets, trying to take back ground lost two days before. This time, the response was rifle fire, from uniformed snipers – a mixture of Berkut, Alfa and Interior Ministry forces – stationed uphill from the Maidan on the roofs of the Central Bank, the Ukraina Hotel and the Cabinet of Ministers. (The snipers are also credibly rumoured to have included men from Russia’s Federal Security Service, though this has not yet been proved.)12 Amazingly, the protestors continued to press forwards, relying on sheer force of numbers to overwhelm the better-armed opposition. Whether or not they also fired back is unclear. One rooftop Berkut was filmed being hit by a round13 and guns taken from Lviv police barracks over the previous two days were certainly making their way to Kiev.14 But the overwhelming impression given by video footage and witnesses is of an intifada-style battle between trained and well-armed professionals and determined but disorganised and ill-equipped amateurs. British academic Andrew Wilson was on the ground:
This was not an armed revolution: the Maidan ‘hundreds’ were barely armed, or even protected. I saw an advertising hoarding being ripped down for use as a shield. Protestors hid behind trees. This time, for obvious reasons, I stayed further away; but I was still close enough to the edge of the Maidan to have to stumble aside at the regular shouts of korridor! – ‘make way’ – for the wounded or already-dead to get through . . . The protestors won with rocks and Molotov cocktails against snipers. They swarmed rather than attacked with precision. When one of their number was shot, they were prepared to keep going.15
Andrei Terekhov also watched the fighting: ‘The attack on Institutska was suicidal, completely suicidal,’ he told me. ‘Armed with sticks and stones, they were advancing up a hill defended by professional snipers. I watched them do it – just collecting up the dead, and carrying on. I was awestruck – they were ordinary people, people just like me. Some were [the far-right party] Svoboda, but only a minority.’16
Initial estimates for the day’s dead were 70 killed and 166 missing. According to the Ministry of Health, 405 were hospitalised, with burns, gunshot wounds, head injuries and broken bones. Over the next weeks the death toll rose, as information came in about the missing and the most seriously injured died. A martyred ‘Heavenly Hundred’ became 103. Altogether, it is now reckoned, 111 people – 94 civilians and 17 police – were killed just in the Maidan’s final four days. Twenty-seven remain unaccounted for.
The slaughter – or rather its ineffectiveness – destroyed Yanukovich. That same Thursday evening, his Party of the Regions finally deserted him. Twenty-two MPs formally left the party. The rest, as Wilson puts it, ‘had other things to do, with documents to destroy and businesses to protect’.17 A half-empty Rada voted overwhelmingly to sack the new interior minister and send the security forces back to barracks.
At the same time the Polish, French and German foreign ministers, plus a Putin representative, flew in to broker emergency talks between Yanukovich and the parliamentary opposition. Early on, according to Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski, Yanukovich took a forty-minute phone call from Putin, after which he became more amenable to compromise. Negotiations continued all night, and a deal was finally reached at seven on Friday morning: there would be a new ‘national unity’ government, a new constitution, and presidential elections would be brought forward from March of 2015 to December. The agreement nearly fell apart again when the opposition party leaders, realising that the Maidan would view it as a sell-out, failed to turn up to a signing ceremony scheduled for 11 a.m. ‘It wasn’t an easy deal for them to accept,’ Sikorski later admitted. ‘Basically what we were proposing was the person who had just killed a hundred people was staying as their president for almost a year.’18 But without it, he argued, Yanukovich would order an even bloodier crackdown. ‘If you don’t support this,’ he told them dramatically, ‘you will have martial law, the army; you will all die.’ At 3 p.m. the opposition leaders finally shook hands with Yanukovich for the cameras, and were duly booed when they appeared on the Maidan later in the day.
Whether the deal might have held is hypothetical, because instead of trying to make it work, Yanukovich fled. At Mezhihoriya, packing had already been going on for three days, the loading of boxes into lorries caught on the complex’s own security cameras. In the small hours of Saturday 22 February, Yanukovich and twenty-one bodyguards left in two helicopters. A sprint round the east of the country followed: first to Kharkiv, where he discovered that the mayor had already high-tailed over the border to Russia, then to Donetsk, where airport officials refused to let him board his private Falcon jet, and finally by car to Crimea. On 28 February he re-emerged just over the border in Russia’s Rostov-on-Don, telling assembled journalists that he was still Ukraine’s elected president, and had fled in fear of his life.
What exactly caused Yanukovich to throw in the towel is indeed a little murky. His chief financial backer, Akhmetov, claims to have withdrawn support as soon as the police started shooting, but we have only his word for it, which should be taken with a bucketful of salt. At the same time, the then US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, sounds disingenuous when he claims to have been amazed and dismayed by Yanukovich’s disappearance: ‘I remember it very vividly. We were like: Where did he go? We don’t know! He’s in Crimea? Why’s he there? Can we get him back? Get the vice-president on the phone to tell him to go back . . . That’s not Putin’s view. Putin thinks we chased him out. But that’s not our view. He left.’19
One possible explanation is that Putin ordered Yanukovich to leave, so as to escalate the crisis and give a pretext for the invasion of Crimea, which started less than a week later. Another is that Yanukovich feared mutiny within the military (he had sacked the head of the armed forces on 19 February) and simply lost his nerve. Whether he makes a comeback into Ukrainian politics – perhaps as Russia’s puppet in the Donbass – remains to be seen.