Euromaidan
Based on Wikipedia: Euromaidan
A Square Becomes a Revolution
In the bitter cold of late November 2013, a journalist named Mustafa Nayyem posted a simple message on Facebook: come to the square. Within hours, fifteen hundred Ukrainians had gathered in Kyiv's Independence Square—known locally as the Maidan—to protest their government's abrupt abandonment of a long-promised deal with Europe. Nobody knew it yet, but they were lighting the first spark of what would become the largest democratic uprising Europe had seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What began as frustration over a broken political promise would grow into something far more profound: a genuine revolution that would topple a president, redraw the map of Europe, and ultimately trigger a war that continues to this day.
The Deal That Wasn't
To understand why thousands of people would spend months camping in freezing temperatures, you need to understand what was at stake. For years, Ukraine had been negotiating an Association Agreement with the European Union—essentially a deep trade and political partnership that would bind Ukraine more closely to the democratic West. The Ukrainian parliament had overwhelmingly approved moving forward with the deal. Most Ukrainians, particularly younger ones, saw it as their country's path toward prosperity, rule of law, and an escape from the corruption that had strangled their economy for decades.
Then, on November 21, 2013, President Viktor Yanukovych suddenly reversed course.
The reasons weren't mysterious. Russia, under Vladimir Putin, had waged a quiet but brutal campaign of economic coercion against Ukraine throughout the preceding months. In August, Russian customs officials had simply stopped all Ukrainian goods at the border—a shot across the bow that cost Ukraine $1.4 billion in lost exports. The message was clear: sign with Europe, and Russia will make you pay.
But there was more than economics at play. According to later accounts, Putin had privately threatened Yanukovych with something far more ominous: if Ukraine signed the European deal, Russia would seize Crimea and large portions of southeastern Ukraine, including the coal-rich Donbas region. It was blackmail on a geopolitical scale.
Yanukovych chose Russia. He announced that Ukraine would pursue "closer economic relations" with Moscow instead of Brussels. The dream of European integration, which had seemed within grasp, evaporated overnight.
From Protest to Occupation
The protests might have fizzled out after a few cold nights. They didn't.
What transformed a demonstration into a revolution was the government's response. On November 30, riot police from the Berkut—a feared special unit whose name means "golden eagle" in Ukrainian—violently dispersed the protesters in the dead of night, beating students with batons. The brutality was captured on video and spread across social media within hours.
The crackdown backfired spectacularly.
By the following weekend, somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 people flooded into central Kyiv. The Maidan transformed from a protest site into something resembling a small city. Volunteers erected barricades from tires, sandbags, and whatever else they could find. Kitchens appeared, serving hot food around the clock. First aid stations staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses treated injuries. A stage hosted speeches, debates, and even musical performances. The square developed its own broadcasting facilities, beaming the revolution to the world.
Perhaps most remarkably, the protesters organized their own defense force. The "Maidan Self-Defense" units consisted of volunteers wearing improvised uniforms and repurposed motorcycle helmets, carrying homemade shields fashioned from wood and metal. Their weapons were primitive—sticks, stones, and Molotov cocktails—but their determination was absolute. They organized themselves into units called "sotni," a word meaning "hundreds" that echoed the military traditions of the Cossacks who had fought for Ukrainian independence centuries earlier.
What They Were Really Fighting For
The movement's name—Euromaidan, a portmanteau of "Europe" and "Maidan"—suggested the protests were simply about joining the European Union. But that framing missed the deeper currents.
By January, as one contemporary journalist observed, the uprising had "grown into something far bigger than just an angry response to the fallen-through EU deal." Protesters were demanding an end to the systemic corruption that had hollowed out Ukrainian society. They wanted basic human rights: the freedom to speak, to think, to protest peacefully without being beaten or imprisoned. They wanted to escape what they saw as two centuries of domination by Moscow.
President Yanukovych had become a symbol of everything wrong with Ukrainian politics. Transparency International, the global anti-corruption watchdog, named him as the world's most corrupt leader—a remarkable distinction given the competition. His government had accumulated staggering wealth while ordinary Ukrainians struggled. His extravagant personal residence, later opened to the public after his fall, featured a private zoo, a galleon-style restaurant on an artificial lake, and a collection of classic cars.
The Maidan became a space where Ukrainians reimagined what their country could be. The word itself—"maidan," borrowed from Persian where it means "square" or "open space"—took on a new meaning. It came to represent the practice of public politics, of citizens gathering to shape their own destiny.
The Crackdown Intensifies
Through December and into January, a tense standoff prevailed. Police launched periodic assaults on the camp but couldn't dislodge the protesters. The government, growing increasingly desperate, pushed through draconian new laws on January 16 that essentially criminalized the protest movement. Wearing a helmet became illegal. Driving in a convoy of more than five cars became illegal. Setting up tents or stages without permission became illegal. The laws were passed in a parliamentary session so rushed that lawmakers didn't bother with a proper vote—they simply raised their hands, and the speaker declared the measures passed.
The protesters' response came three days later.
On January 19, fighting erupted on Hrushevsky Street, just a few hundred meters from parliament. For three days, protesters and police battled in scenes that seemed impossible in a European capital. Fires burned constantly, both for warmth and as weapons. Protesters hurled Molotov cocktails and paving stones at armored police, who responded with rubber bullets, stun grenades, and water cannons that coated demonstrators in ice in the freezing temperatures.
The first protesters died during these clashes. Their portraits were hung on the barricades. They became martyrs.
Meanwhile, the revolution spread beyond Kyiv. In western Ukraine, where pro-European sentiment was strongest, protesters seized regional government buildings. In Lviv, the historic center of Ukrainian national identity, police officers publicly renounced their oaths to the government. Even in Russian-speaking cities of the east and south—Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk—protesters attempted to take over local administrations, though they faced stiffer resistance from both police and government supporters.
The Bloodiest Days
Everything came to a head in February 2014.
On February 18, protesters attempted to march on parliament. Police responded with live ammunition. That day and the two that followed became the bloodiest the Maidan had seen. Snipers, positioned on rooftops around the square, picked off protesters with methodical precision. Video footage showed people collapsing in the open, then others rushing to help them, only to be shot themselves.
Almost one hundred protesters died in those three days. Thirteen police officers also lost their lives. The protesters who fell became known as the "Heavenly Hundred"—a name that would be commemorated in memorials, street names, and the national memory.
But even as the killing intensified, Yanukovych's support was crumbling. Members of his own political party began fleeing or defecting. When parliament finally convened, his coalition had lost its majority. Enough opposition members remained to form a quorum, and they began passing laws at a furious pace: ordering police out of central Kyiv, canceling the anti-protest operations, freeing political prisoners, and restoring the more democratic constitution that had been in place before Yanukovych weakened it.
The Collapse
On February 21, with blood still fresh on the cobblestones, Yanukovych and opposition leaders signed an agreement brokered by European foreign ministers. The deal called for an interim unity government, constitutional reforms, and early elections. It seemed like a managed transition to democracy.
It lasted less than a day.
That afternoon, police simply abandoned their positions in central Kyiv. By evening, Yanukovych and his top ministers had fled the capital, heading east toward Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city. The presidential administration building stood empty. Protesters walked through its corridors in disbelief.
The next morning, parliament formally removed Yanukovych from office and installed an interim government. The revolution had won.
Yanukovych eventually made it to Russia, traveling under armed guard through Crimea. He settled in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where he remained in exile, periodically appearing on television to claim he was still the legitimate president of Ukraine. Years later, a Ukrainian court convicted him of treason in absentia. Among the charges: he had formally requested that Vladimir Putin send Russian troops to invade his own country.
What Came After
The revolution's aftermath proved as dramatic as the uprising itself.
Within weeks of Yanukovych's flight, soldiers without insignia—later confirmed to be Russian special forces—began appearing in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was home to Russia's naval fleet. In a rushed referendum that no international observer recognized as legitimate, Crimea voted to join Russia. Putin announced the annexation in a triumphant speech to the Russian parliament.
Then the violence spread to eastern Ukraine. Armed separatists, backed by Russian weapons, money, and eventually regular Russian soldiers, seized government buildings in the Donbas region. What began as protests evolved into an armed insurgency, then into open warfare. A Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was shot down over rebel-held territory, killing 298 people. A grinding conflict settled over the region, with ceasefires negotiated and broken, lines of contact hardening into de facto borders.
This was the war that would smolder for eight years before exploding, in February 2022, into a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine—the largest military conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
The Meaning of Maidan
What did the Euromaidan mean? The answer depends on who you ask.
For Ukrainians who stood on the square—who endured the cold, dodged the snipers, built the barricades—it was a moment when they seized control of their own history. They had demanded dignity and democracy, and they had won, even at terrible cost.
For Russians, particularly those aligned with Putin's worldview, the Maidan was something else entirely: a Western-backed coup, engineered by America and Europe to pull Ukraine out of Russia's orbit. This interpretation, heavily promoted by Russian state media, would be used to justify everything that followed—the annexation of Crimea, the war in the Donbas, the 2022 invasion.
For Europe, the Maidan was both inspiration and warning. Here were people risking their lives for the chance to join the European project at precisely the moment when many Europeans had grown cynical about it. The largest pro-European rally in history took place not in Paris or Berlin, but in Kyiv—in a country that wasn't even a member of the European Union.
But the Maidan also demonstrated how quickly the post-Cold War order could unravel. The assumption that borders in Europe were settled, that great-power conflict was a relic of the past, that democracy's advance was inevitable—all of these comfortable certainties died on those frozen cobblestones.
The Name That Stuck
There's a curious footnote to the story. The name "Euromaidan" wasn't coined by journalists or politicians. It originated as a hashtag on Twitter, created on the first day of protests by someone who set up an account called @Euromaidan. From there, it spread across international media and into the history books.
Early in the movement, Ukrainian media tried other names: "Eurorevolution," "Ukrainian Spring" (echoing the Arab Spring uprisings that had swept the Middle East). None of them stuck. There was something about "Maidan"—that Persian loanword, absorbed into Ukrainian during the centuries of Ottoman influence, meaning simply "square"—that captured what had happened.
A square in the center of a city had become a revolution. The practice of gathering in public to demand change had acquired a name. Whatever came after—the war, the suffering, the ongoing struggle for Ukraine's survival—would trace back to those cold nights when people came to the Maidan and refused to leave.