If you had known how Maidan would end, would you have come to the protest a year ago?
By Natalya Dvali, Editor
It was a dank rainy Thursday on November 21, 2013. Several hundred people gathered on Maidan Nezalezhnosti; most of them responded to the journalist Moustapha Nayem’s post in Facebook calling upon all those who cared to gather in the center of Kiev after Mykola Azarov's government suspended the process of the European integration of Ukraine. It was how Euromaidan began.
Then there was a cruel dispersal of students by Berkut fighters, skirmishes under the Administration of the President, beating and disappearance of activists all round the city, "titushki", endless meetings, dictatorial laws of January 16, burning tires, Grushevskoho Street and the first victims – Sergey Nigoyan, Mikhail Zhiznevsky, Yury Verbitsky, another attempt to clean up Maidan, snipers’ shots on February 18 to 20, Victor Yanukovych's flight, touching "Plyve Kacha" as a tribute to the heroes of Heavenly Hundred, "green little men" in the Crimea, disappearance of young Crimean Tatar men, Antimaidans in the east of Ukraine, another "deep concern" of the West, war in Donbass, early presidential elections, brought-down "Boeing", Ilovaysk pocket, re-elections to the Verkhovna Rada and endless reports from the front: so many Ukrainian military men and so many civilians killed daily. There is no exact statistics of casualties for the year, but official sources agree that there have been several thousand victims.
If you had known how Maidan would end, would you have come to the protest a year ago? GORDON asked this question to famous politicians, journalists, artists, actors and simple activists – everybody who has actively supported the protest movement from the very first hours.