Early on the morning of December 25th, the muckraking journalist Tetiana Chornovil drove out of Kiev toward her home, outside the Ukrainian capital. Chornovil, who is thirty-four, had long been an irritant to the government of President Victor Yanukovych, and she is a leading figure in the mass protests that have dominated central Kiev since late November. As Chornovil drove along a stretch of empty highway in the dark before dawn, her car was chased down and forced off the road by a black Porsche Cayenne, whose passengers then emerged and beat her senseless.
The assailants broke Chornovil’s nose and gave her a concussion before throwing her into a ditch. But she had captured a video of the car chase on her dashboard camera, which post-Soviet citizens use to protect themselves against extortion by traffic police. The license-plate number of the Porsche and the faces two of the men who assaulted Chornovil are visible in the footage, which, fleetingly, generated hope among Ukrainians that the attackers could be brought to justice.
And, indeed, arrests were made. But last Thursday, the government declared that the investigation was over, and the office of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General announced that Chornovil’s beating was, essentially, just a road-rage incident. She had provoked the men in the Porsche with her erratic driving, and they had responded with an act of “hooliganism.” This is a relatively minor infraction in the Ukrainian criminal code, but it is also well known to the politically aware as the charge typically levelled by the government against those whom it would rather not prosecute at all. Case closed.
Episodes like this, which have received relatively little attention in the West, express, for many Ukrainians, what is truly at stake in the country’s ongoing political unrest, which is now entering its fourth month. There has, however, been considerable reporting about events on the Maidan—the central Kiev square where crowds first gathered, in late November, to protest Yanukovych’s spurning of a trade deal with the European Union in favor of close ties with Russia. That small protest swelled into a larger movement after November 30th, when the authorities sent in riot police to brutalize the peaceful demonstrators. The protestors are now in control of a significant part of downtown Kiev, around which they have erected barricades against further police incursion.
On January 16th, the government rammed a package of laws through Parliament that essentially criminalize protest, and, on January 19th, the demonstrations, which had until then been peaceful, turned violent. There are photographs of the subsequent street fighting between protestors and police—images of ragged brawlers hurling Molotov cocktails at riot squads, and of priests in full regalia wading through heaps of burning tires. Five protestors have been killed so far and hundreds are missing, and the government seems to have resorted to desperate tactics in an attempt to maintain its precarious grip on power.
What has been lost amid the competing explanations for the chaos in Ukraine is the story that precedes these developments: for more than a decade, Yanukovych has gradually become toxic to huge numbers of his own people. For Ukrainians, the current unrest isn’t about whether the country will once again submit to its traditional hegemon, Russia, nor is it about closer alignment with the E.U., or about putting Ukraine’s underwhelming political opposition into power.
The central issue, for the protestors and their supporters, as well as for many other Ukrainians, is that, since the Soviet Union fell apart and the country became independent, it has been run by a succession of marauding criminals, Yanukovych chief among them. For the country to have any chance at reform, they believe, these “bandits” have to go. This view does not allow for much equivocation or compromise. The energy of the protests comes from those who believe that life in Ukraine has grown intolerable, which may make a negotiated settlement that leaves the current regime in place nearly impossible.
From 1997 to 2002, Yanukovych was the appointed governor of Donetsk province, a Russian-leaning industrial region characterized by a particularly violent and unreformed variety of post-Soviet patronage politics. He then served as prime minister for two years, at the end of the corrupt Presidency of Leonid Kuchma. But Yanukovych first attracted attention outside of Eastern Europe as the goat of Ukraine’s 2004 Presidential election, which he tried to rig. His opponent at the time, Viktor Yushchenko, was dosed with dioxin in an apparent assassination attempt, which left his face permanently deformed. After Ukrainian society rose up against this attempt to usurp power, Yanukovych reportedly favored using the Army against the peaceful protestors who flooded central Kiev. It is not hard to imagine that, in another country, Yanukovych might be behind bars. Some Ukrainians, in fact, have long referred to him as the zek (convict), a reference to the time he served in prison, as a young man, for robbery and assault.
Still, many of his detractors may have been willing to consign these unfortunate incidents to history, had Yanukovych not begun, after his election, in 2010, to systematically outrage many of his countrymen. In 2011, his most prominent political opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, was jailed on trumped-up charges, about which even Vladimir Putin, Yanukovych’s patron, expressed skepticism. Yanukovych also pushed through substantial changes to Ukraine’s constitutional order after assuming office, transforming the country from a parliamentary republic into a centralized regime under a powerful Presidency. This was a radical move for a politician whose base of support was largely concentrated in the country’s Russia-leaning south and far east—places with cultures very different from those of Kiev and western Ukraine.
In the same period, many Ukrainians had the sense that their country was becoming an even more brutal and lawless place. These days, protestors can measure the legitimacy of the government by the increasing number of Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, and Maybachs gliding through the streets of Kiev, carrying the élites, whose fortunes have multiplied under Yanukovych’s rule, past pensioners who subsist on a few hundred dollars a year, past buildings with crumbling façades (from which chunks of masonry fall and occasionally injure pedestrians), and past steep, icy sidewalks that the state lacks the will or the wherewithal to clear.
Violence, much of it politically motivated, is almost never punished in Ukraine. Last spring, in broad daylight in downtown Kiev, a pack of thugs in tracksuits beat up two journalists working for one of the country’s beleaguered opposition news outlets as policemen stood by and watched. This attack was captured on video, which, like Chornovil’s footage, briefly raised hopes that the assailants—“anti-Fascist sportsmen,” as they were described in the residual Stalinist language of the state media—might face justice. Instead, they received pro-forma slaps on the wrist. In 2012, public outrage erupted after an eighteen-year-old woman in the southern city of Mykolaiv was gang-raped, strangled, and burned to death by three men, two of whom appeared to have connections to the ruling party. At first, the local police let the two men go free, but protests eventually forced Yanukovych to intervene and have them arrested—a happier outcome, but one that confirmed that justice was circumscribed by the caprice of the ruler.
Disgruntled Ukrainians can tell these stories for hours, but they suggest that, even before the attack on the Maidan protestors on November 30th, the legitimacy of Yanukovych’s rule was in doubt for many of his constituents. Since then, however, the government’s acts of violent retribution have only become more dramatic. The international media have reported that at least five protestors have been killed, including a young man from Belarus, who was shot during a clash with riot police in late January, and a middle-aged seismologist, whose tortured corpse was found in the woods outside the city. But these stories, however gruesome, may understate the systematic campaign that is under way against supporters of the protest movement. Since the violence on the streets escalated on January 19th, more than a thousand protestors have been admitted to hospitals in Kiev, and police have seized the opportunity to take the wounded directly from their beds. At least thirty-three protestors have simply disappeared as a result: Yuriy Verbytsky, the seismologist whose dead body turned up in the woods, was kidnapped as he sought medical treatment.
Dmytro Bulatov, an organizer of the so-called Auto Maidan movement—in which activists drive up to the houses of officials and élites who are connected to the government and stage peaceful protests at their gates—was kidnapped and held for more than a week. When he was dumped in a forest outside Kiev, on January 30th, his face was covered in blood. Bulatov said that men with Russian accents had literally tried to crucify him, attempting to nail his hands to a door. He has now fled to Lithuania for medical treatment. Another Auto Maidan organizer, Serhiy Koba, fearing reprisal, announced on January 23rd that he, too, had left the country; by February 1st, he was on the Interior Ministry’s wanted list for inciting civil unrest.
Nights in Kiev became even more fraught in late January and early February; gangs of thugs roamed the city, destroying cars. Thirty vehicles were reported to have been set on fire on the night of January 31st alone; another seven were torched the following evening. This vandalism was apparently random—an attempt, perhaps, to spread terror in a capital whose cosmopolitan, Europe-leaning residents largely despise Yanukovych—but a few of the vehicles targeted for destruction belonged to opposition politicians and to Auto Maidan participants.
The government’s escalating violence has encouraged the spread of protests throughout the country, most significantly in Russia-leaning eastern Ukraine, which has long been Yanukovych’s most solid base of support. Reports from the eastward cities of Zaporizhyia and Dnipropetrovsk indicate that many people are afraid to leave their homes because pro-government street fighters—known as titushki, after the name of one of the men who thrashed the two journalists in Kiev last year—have been out on the streets, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the police to violently disperse peaceful demonstrators. In Kharkiv province, also in the east, the governor appointed by Yanukovych declared in a tweet that the authorities would deal with today’s “Fascists”—the opposition—in the same way that Ukrainians had dealt with the invading Germans, in 1941. (Politicians loyal to the regime regularly denounce the protestors on the Maidan as Nazis, terrorists, and okupanty, a reference to the German occupiers of the Second World War.)
On January 31st, the news site Ukrainska Pravda published an official document indicating that Ukraine’s interior minister favors using flamethrowers as a tool in the maintenance of public order. And, this weekend, news emerged that the Ukrainian pop singer Ruslana, the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest winner and a leading Maidan supporter, had been facing threats of violence since January, when she travelled to several European capitals to advocate for sanctions against high-ranking officials in the Yanukovych government. She says that thugs have gathered around her house and followed her car, and she’s been getting phone messages that “they’ll do to me what they did to Dmytro Bulatov.”
A negotiated settlement between Yanukovych and the opposition might be the best means by which to steer Ukraine toward a decent political order, but such an outcome seems unlikely. Talks involving Western diplomats in Kiev, who are attempting to piece together a financial and political deal to end the standoff and provide aid to a new, technocrat-led Ukrainian government, could lead to some resolution. But, the trouble is, for the protestors still behind the barricades in Kiev, there can be no end to the crisis—and, in their view, no future for Ukraine—until the regime departs.
Antigovernment protestors in Kiev. February 8, 2014. Photograph by Alexander Koerner/Getty.
