Two years after massacre in Kiev, a
promise of peace and freedom unrealized.
The famed White Army General Anton Denikin led his
troops into Kiev in 1919, during the Russian Civil war. In the following
decades, living in exile, he published his memories of the White Army,
recalling his disbelief at the number of Ukrainian forces he confronted in battle.
His diaries and writing expound upon the difference between “Little Russia,” or
Ukraine, and “Great Russia,” an approach that has made them a noted favorite of Russian
President Vladimir Putin. “Where did all these Ukrainians come from?” Denikin
wrote.
His query is
worth remembering now that the European Union seems to be asking the same
incredulous question regarding the hundreds of thousands of people — refugees,
migrants, protesters, and yes, Ukrainians — who have lost their lives trying to
cross its borders over the past several years.
The magnitude of their desperation and depth of their
belief in the European project has too often been greeted with ambivalent
surprise — not at the fact that the Europe those unfortunate thousands sought
does not exist, but that they still thought it did.
It was exactly
two years ago this Saturday that Berkut special police officers opened fire on
protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square, in what became the bloodiest hour of
the Euromaidan Revolution. Over a hundred peaceful protesters, now known
as the “Heavenly Hundred,” were killed in battle at the heart of the city, the
first casualties of what is now a two-year war for freedom from Russian
meddling and for a European future.
They died
wearing EU ribbons, hoping that one day their corrupt government might reform
and Ukraine might be admitted into the ever closer union. Commemorating the
one-year anniversary of the killings in Kiev last year, Ukrainian President
Petro Poroshenko wisely tried to lower the nation’s expectations: “If we stop
the war, everyone will see the changes of Ukraine in a few years.”
Today, the war in the east smolders on, and the second
anniversary of the killings comes during the most turbulent week in Ukrainian politics this year, one
that provides a worrying glimpse into how little things have changed since the
revolution forced out former President Viktor Yanukovych.
The parliament
appears to still be governed by the whims of oligarchs, and the rampant
corruption has even pushed a handful of Poroshenko’s reformers to resign their posts.
The country has been teetering on the brink of financial collapse for over a
year, even more so now that the IMF is threatening to
pull the plug on $40 billion worth of aid.
But what is
most remarkable, if heartbreaking, about all this is that it was only the news
of the failed no-confidence vote in parliament
that turned the world’s attention back to Ukraine, and only for a moment at
that.
“‘News’ is mostly a tool of forgetting,” the
philosopher Zygmunt Bauman writes,
“a way of crowding out yesterday’s headlines from the audience consciousness.”
When the news coming out of Ukraine’s occupied eastern territories is more or
less the same, day after day, one forgets that there was once life there.
The conflict
in Syria has drawn Russia back in from the cold, affording the Kremlin time to
try and regroup economically and militarily. OSCE observers have “circumstantial
evidence” that the separatist republics are re-arming, and it
goes without saying that the Minsk accords have yet to be fully implemented —
separatist and Ukrainian forces have recently been facing
off with heavy weaponry banned under the agreements. Europe should punish
Ukraine for the still rampant corruption in its halls of government, but it
must not do so in the corridors of war.
The two-year
conflict has internally displaced well over 1 million
people and created over 700,000 refugees. For them, and for the thousands who
have lost family members in the conflict, the promise of Europe has already
fallen apart. They were motivated to fight for their country by many of the
same reasons that lead thousands of migrants to risk their lives every day. If
they are forgotten and they, in turn, forget Europe, it will make for a
sinister situation indeed.
Related Post: Where Did "Ukraine" Come From?
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