Euromaidan Revolution
The winter 2013-14 uprising in Kyiv that toppled Ukraine's pro-Russian president and set the country on a collision course with Moscow.
On the night of November 21, 2013, a Ukrainian journalist named Mustafa Nayyem posted on Facebook that anyone fed up with the government should meet him on Kyiv's central square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti. A few hundred people came. Three months later the president had fled to Russia, more than a hundred protesters were dead, and Ukraine had been wrenched out of Moscow's orbit for good. The Euromaidan, later christened the Revolution of Dignity, is the hinge on which today's war turns.
The U-turn
The spark was a signature that never came. For years President Viktor Yanukovych had negotiated an association agreement with the European Union, a deal promising closer trade and a European future. Then, days before the planned November 2013 signing in Vilnius and under heavy pressure from Vladimir Putin, who dangled cheap gas and a $15 billion loan, Yanukovych abruptly walked away and tilted back toward Russia. For a generation that saw Europe as an escape from post-Soviet corruption, the reversal was intolerable. When riot police clubbed peaceful student protesters on November 30, outrage detonated: by early December more than half a million people were filling central Kyiv, toppling the city's statue of Lenin and occupying City Hall. The protest camp on the Maidan would not disperse for three months.
The Heavenly Hundred
Through a brutal winter the standoff hardened. Protesters built barricades of tires and snow; in January 2014 the government rammed through sweeping anti-protest laws. The rupture came on February 18-20, when security forces, snipers among them, opened fire on demonstrators around Instytutska Street. Roughly a hundred protesters and a dozen police died in those three days, and the fallen demonstrators have been honored ever since as the Heavenly Hundred, the Nebesna Sotnia. The killing dissolved what remained of Yanukovych's authority. On February 21 he signed a compromise brokered by European foreign ministers; that night he fled the capital, and soon the country, resurfacing in Russia. Parliament voted him out of office 328 to nothing, and an interim, pro-Western government took charge in Kyiv within days.
What came next
The revolution won, and the reckoning was instant. Within days unmarked Russian soldiers fanned out across Crimea; within a month Moscow had annexed the peninsula; within weeks Russian-backed fighters had lit a war in the Donbas that smoldered until the full-scale invasion of 2022. The Kremlin branded Euromaidan a Western-engineered coup against a legitimate president. Ukrainians saw an uprising against a ruler who had ordered his own citizens shot. Both readings agree on the stakes. The square where a few hundred people gathered over a rejected trade deal became the fault line of the largest European war since 1945, and the country that a single Facebook post nudged into the streets has been fighting over that choice ever since.