Ukraine is approaching the tenth anniversary of the Maidan Revolution immersed in a war for its independence that many see as a continuation of those street protests brutally repressed by the Police that ended up overthrowing the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.
“What we see today is the continuation of our fight for our historical memory, for our cultural identity, for our freedom and for our future,” historian Igor Poshivailo tells EFE, a few days before the tenth anniversary of the beginning, on December 21. November 2013, of the revolt that would force Yanukovych to flee the country.
The largest demonstrations took place on Independence Square in central kyiv, popularly known as the Maidan, which means square or public space in Ukrainian.
The trigger for the protests was President Yanukovych’s failure to fulfill his promise to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union (EU).
Under intense pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yanukovych rejected signing with Brussels and opted to remain under the patronage of the Kremlin. Millions of Ukrainians saw Yanukovych’s move as a quasi-definitive setback to his aspirations to live in a democratic and prosperous Western-style society.
“During the Maidan, Ukrainians made a civilizational choice,” says Poshivailo, the historian who is director of the Museum of the Revolution of Dignity, dedicated to the study and promotion of the memory of the revolt.
For the historian, the trigger for the promise betrayed by Yanukovych was just the tip of an iceberg in which there were many other reasons to take to the streets to protest.
“Corruption; freedoms, which were being limited; Ukraine’s decline in the economic rankings after the mandate of President (pro-Western Viktor) Yushenko and the most dangerous thing: that the Yanukovych administration was doing everything possible to make Ukraine a country dependent on Russia economically, politically and militarily,” he explains.
Yanukovych was forced to flee to Russia in February 2014, after 92 days of protests in which more than a hundred protesters died at the hands of riot police and thousands of people were attacked by agents or the infamous ‘titushski’, common criminals in the pay of power to intimidate protesters.
Faced with repeated attempts by the Police to forcibly evict the civic encampment that Independence Square had become, the participants organized their own self-defense units to protect the most peaceful and vulnerable protesters.
Many of these groups were inspired in their name, composition and organization by the so-called ‘sotnia’ (hundred), the Cossack military units made up of a hundred combatants who for centuries fought against the empires that assaulted the territory of today’s Ukraine.
In those days, the Maidan became an “open democratic space” in which people organized themselves and did not accept the leadership of opposition politicians, who had to resign from leading the protest.
For the historian Poshivailo, what happened then in the square is, due to the transversality of the mobilization and the initiative of those who participated in it, a “model of open society” that reflects the Ukrainian libertarian tradition and has been applied again in the military resistance and civic response to the large-scale Russian invasion.
A decade after the outbreak, the Maidan remains a central historical event in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The triumph of the revolt meant for the Kremlin to lose control over its most precious satellite. Aware of this, Putin reacted by annexing the Crimean peninsula and activating separatist guerrillas who declared two independent republics in eastern Ukraine.
Many volunteers from the Maidan self-defense units – often linked to right-wing and nationalist movements – went to the east to fight with the Army in defense of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
One of the museum projects run by Poshivailo collects information about “Russian cultural crimes” in Ukrainian territory. On the walls of schools and museums in the territories recovered by Kiev it is not uncommon to find graffiti in which Russian soldiers write down their reasons for having gone to war against Ukraine. “‘For the Maidan’ is one of the usual ones; it’s like revenge,” says the historian.
