Euromaidan Protests in Ukraine
Protests began in Kyiv on 21 November 2013, hours after Viktor Yanukovych's government announced it would not sign the Association Agreement with the European Union that had been negotiated over five years and was due for signature the following week. Russia had applied heavy pressure — trade restrictions through the summer, and an offer of $15 billion in credit and cheaper gas. The first crowd on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti was a few thousand, largely students. It became a movement of hundreds of thousands after riot police beat the encampment on the night of 30 November, at which point the grievance shifted from the agreement to the government itself. The square was occupied through a winter of minus twenty, with barricades, field kitchens, a stage and a hospital in the trade union building. Parliament passed sweeping anti-protest laws in January 2014, which were withdrawn within two weeks after the first deaths. The killing came in February. Snipers shot around a hundred protesters over two days on 18–20 February; those killed are commemorated as the Heavenly Hundred. An agreement brokered by German, French and Polish ministers on 21 February provided for early elections. It was overtaken within hours: the police withdrew, Yanukovych left Kyiv and then the country, and parliament voted him out of office by 328 to nothing. Russia treated the removal as an unconstitutional coup and seized Crimea within a fortnight. Ukraine signed the Association Agreement in June 2014. Yanukovych lives in Russia and was convicted of treason in absentia in 2019. The square itself has since become a memorial field for the dead of the war that followed.
- Year: 2013 CE
- Category: Political
