Last Friday, after days of upheaval left more than eighty people dead, a sense of calm settled on Kiev’s Independence Square, known as Maidan, with the arrival of news that President Viktor Yanukovych had fled the city. The photographer Davide Monteleone set up a makeshift portrait studio beside one of the barricades erected by protesters, posing his subjects in front of a red carpet emblazoned with the guelder rose, one of Ukraine’s national symbols. Monteleone photographed teen-agers, mothers, religious men, and students, all of them protesters who, he says, felt hopeful as the country’s parliament met to consider the next steps of the nascent revolution. As Masha Lipman argued on Monday, however, the transition is far from over. “Many Ukrainians should be celebrating their hard-won victory over a corrupt, degraded, brutal government,” she writes. “They are duly proud of their resilience and self-sacrifice. But moving toward normalcy, democracy, and prosperity will require the art of statesmanship, and it’s far from clear whether Ukraine can muster the skills this would require.”
Photographs by Davide Monteleone/VII.
