Ukraine’s ‘revolution of dignity’ was a 'point of no return'

When a massive crackdown was launched against anti-government protests in February 2014, Olena Halushka was among the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who had taken to the streets.

The now 32-year-old was working for opposition politician Lesia Orobets when protests first broke out in November 2013 against a decision by then-president Viktor Yanukovych to renege on signing an Association Agreement with the European Union, which would have seen the former Soviet country establish a closer political-economic relationship with the bloc and pivot further away from Russia.

“The next day we saw that the protest was very violently dispersed by the riot police,” Halushka tells TRT World, “and that was the point of no return for Ukrainian society.”

The violent response to the protests only encouraged more to join. The release of jailed protesters soon turned into one of the square’s main demands. Halushka was actively involved in tracking down protesters jailed without trial, taking part in their court hearings thanks to Orobet’s parliamentary privileges, publicising their cases and names to the international media, and organising visits.

“We were using all the available channels to make sure that no one is forgotten and that each and every person missing [would] be found safe and sound,” she adds.

A set of anti-protest laws passed in mid-January only exacerbated violence on the streets, as some commentators at the time remained concerned about the increasing presence of ultra-nationalist groups among the protesters. Violence peaked in mid-February, when more than 100 protesters were killed in Kiev’s Maidan square, many of them by snipers. On February 19, 2014, independent daily Den headlined with a verse by Ukrainian poet Vasyl Symonenko: "There is no more room for graves at the cemetery of killed illusions." 

Those events eventually led to Yanukovych’s flight from Ukraine, and a radical change of course for the country in what protesters dubbed a “revolution of dignity.”

Oleksandra Ustinova, 36, who is now an MP for the centre-right, pro-European Holos party, remembers taking time off from her job with an American company to volunteer at the protests in Kiev’s central Independence Square, working with media and foreign journalists.

“The scariest part was watching it on TV,” she recalls. “When you sit there and watch it, every minute people are running, crying, people are being hurt and killed.”

“I understand it sounds ridiculous, but I was [calmer] at Maidan than outside.”

‘Pushed away for generations’

“If you ask many Ukrainians they will tell you they’d rather Maidan never happened, because they connect it with Russia’s subsequent aggression,” Peter Zalmayev, the director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative (EDI) tells TRT World.

“Likewise, many Ukrainians would say that was worth the price, that the Maidan and the resulting aggression and the war that’s been going on have raised the profile of Ukrainian culture, its distinctive national identity to a level that probably wouldn’t have been possible without this aggression,” he added. 

Russia’s invasion of Crimea later that year, as well as the seizing of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, an area known as Donbas, by Russian-backed separatists, further alienated Ukrainians from Russia.

“[Putin] pushed Ukrainians away for generations to come,” Zalmayev says.

The ongoing war in the Donbas is estimated to have killed 14,000 people, including civilians and military personnel. 

Several polls including those conducted by the Democratic Initiative Foundation (DIF) have indicated growing support for Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO and the EU in the last decade. For Halushka and supporters of the Maidan, the protests were about what they see as an irreversible drift away from Russia in the name of “European values.”

“For us these were dignity, the rule of law, a market economy, respect of human rights, zero tolerance for corruption,” says Halushka, who now works for the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (ANTAC), a reformist NGO in Ukraine who counts American political scientist and free market proponent Francis Fukuyama among its board members.

Russia has amassed an estimated 150,000 troops near the Ukrainian borders, now surrounding the country on three sides as negotiations with the US and Europe continue. In recent days, Vladimir Putin has announced the partial withdrawal of some of its troops, but this was met with scepticism by Western leaders, with US secretary of state Antony Blinken saying there had been “no meaningful pullback” and satellite imagery appearing to contradict Russian claims.

“We really need the West to take decisive action while there is still this small window of opportunity to prevent aggression, because preventing war is usually cheaper and much easier than stopping the war,” says Halushka, whose NGO is campaigning for sanctions targeting Russian oligarchs and their assets in Western countries.

“We have NATO and the EU written down in the constitution,” Ustinova says, referring to Ukraine’s decision to enshrine its will to join the Western bloc in its constitution in 2019. “We're not changing that just because you bring twice [as many] arms to our border.”