Ten years ago, violence escalated against demonstrators on the Maidan. Ukraine’s suffering began long before Putin’s war of aggression. A personal review from our reporter.
Ruslana Chasipova, her face painted white, plucks the strings of her double bass wildly and sings into the auditorium of the Grand Théâtre in Luxembourg on this evening at the end of January. The 37-year-old appears to be displaying the same energy with which she shouted from the Euromaidan stage in Kiev ten years ago to the crowd of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians: “Who if not us? When, if not now?”
Then she sang of hope, today of pain.
With her band Dakh Daughters and a mixture of Ukrainian folk and modern music, she was one of those who gave her country its own cultural face. For months in the winter of 2013/2014, Ruslana Khasipova was part of the uprising against authoritarian President Viktor Yanukovych. In February 2014, the president fled to Russia, but what seemed like a victory was only the beginning of a new battle. Just a few days later, Vladimir Putin had Crimea occupied, and shortly afterwards Russian-backed separatists began the war in eastern Ukraine. And eight years later, on February 24, 2022, Putin ordered the invasion. There has been war in the country for ten years.
Khasipova fled like many of her compatriots and was taken in with her children in Normandy. Like that evening in Luxembourg, it is trying to shake up the West, which is now tired of war. But Khasipova herself is exhausted. “I understand that people here have their own problems,” is how she put it in the conversation the morning before the performance. She talks about her five-year-old son: “We both speak Ukrainian to each other – but he already speaks French with his toys.” Like Khasipova, millions of Ukrainians left their homeland. And the longer the war lasts, the less likely it is that they will return.
It’s a long way from tranquil Luxembourg to Kiev: no planes fly to Ukraine anymore, you first have to go to Budapest, followed by: a day on a Hungarian train. A few hours in a dark border town. A night on a Ukrainian train. Many hours in which the farmhouses, fields and rows of trees of Ukraine pass by the window.
February 20, 2014: Stunned by the orgy of violence
Kiev quickly came back to life after the initial shock of war: despite the Russian air raids, you can eat oysters here again and go dancing in clubs – at least during the day. On this windy evening at the beginning of February, there are only a few people on the famous Maidan in the center. At a height of 60 meters, a golden, shining Slavic protective goddess spreads her arms, on the edge stands the chunky Hotel Ukrajina. Behind it, a construction pit has been waiting for years – the symbolism is telling – that a museum of freedom will be created in it.
Ten years ago, on the morning of February 20, 2014, through a window in the stairwell of the Hotel Ukraina, high above the square, I saw demonstrators marching towards the presidential administration, hunched over, hidden behind wooden shields. Then you heard the hiss of shots – and one after another staggered, hit by special forces bullets. When a bullet hit the window through which I was looking down, I cowered in my room, stunned by the orgy of violence.