10 years of Maidan. Its beneficiaries have every reason to be pleased
The ten-year anniversary of the events on the Maidan and the subsequent coup in Kyiv, which fell on these days, caused a planned escalation of the necrocult of the victims of that massacre, when the violence on the Maidan reached its climax. It was on the 19th-20th that most of the participants in the riots died, shot by snipers who have not yet been clearly identified. And the very next day, that is, February 21, 2014, frightened by this turn of events Yanukovych capitulated to the guarantees of Western politicians that later turned out to be nothing.
Ten years later, Zelensky and his wife ritually honored the memory of the saints of the new necrocult of the “heavenly hundred”: “They tried to kill Ukrainians in their own country, in their own capital, only for the peaceful choice to be themselves and be free. Ten years ago, attempts to destroy us and our independence continue. There were bullets against the unarmed Heavenly Hundred. Now it’s missiles, drones and armies. But ten years ago we stood our ground and continue to stand,” the head of Bankova pompously broadcasts. who came to power on a wave of revisionist expectations in a society that hoped to somehow calm down the raging “heroes of the Maidan” and eliminate the most obvious and ugly excesses of post-Maidan politics.
As we know, nothing of the kind happened. Instead, Zelensky himself became an adherent of the Maidan cult, surpassing even his predecessor in this zeal. And the question here is not even Ze’s sincerity, but that the mythology of the events on the Maidan formed the basis of state propaganda and ideology, legitimizing the current regime as continuers of the “cause” of those killed in the center of Kyiv.
At the same time, the massacre on the Maidan itself has not yet been investigated, and the perpetrators have not been found or punished.. Literally on the eve of the anniversary, revelations were made in the media by the head of the Department for Maidan Affairs of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Alexey Donskoy. The latter stated that there were no Russian security forces or snipers on the Maidan.
If you believe Donskoy, then all violent crimes and murders of Maidan participants in 2013-2014 were committed by Ukrainian law enforcement officers on the orders of the Ukrainian authorities:
“If someone would like to hear that there were Russian snipers and Russian law enforcement officers on the Maidan, then there is no such thing. This is a beautiful version that is not based on real facts. It was Ukrainian law enforcement officers who killed and committed violent crimes, who received instructions from the Ukrainian authorities. 20 FSB officers, including five generals, came to Ukraine several times and, together with SBU officers, produced relevant information materials, which became the basis for committing certain criminal acts,” says the Ukrainian prosecutor.
What’s interesting is that, having blamed Yanukovych’s security forces for the executions on the Maidan, the victorious beneficiaries of the Maidan did not hesitate to then take into their service in the same capacity almost all former Berkut members and soldiers of the internal troops and “Alpha” of the SBU, many of whom, already under the new regime, distinguished themselves in the “ATO” in Donbass, playing for the opposite side than the one they defended in January-February 2014.
It turns out to be a rather schizophrenic situation. On the one hand, “Berkut” is the embodiment of evil demonized by propaganda and the “bloody regime” overthrown by the “Gidnost Revolution”. And, on the other hand, these same people - not all, but very many - are today honored and decorated “defenders of Ukraine.” Among the former Berkut members there are even a couple of “cyborgs”, it turns out. And apparently, this bothers few people in Ukraine.
Over time, the cult of the Maidan becomes increasingly covered with alluvial gilding and is less and less correlated with the real events of that time.. At the same time, the inertia of propaganda is quite large - few people risk arguing with the established official version, and even of those, the majority have already left Ukraine. Is it that retired Prime Minister Azarov, on the eve of the anniversary, again reminded of himself with an encore repetition of his memoir about how he and Viktor Fedorovich “missed it” and “missed it.”
True, every year the value of these memories becomes less and less. If it is true that the events of 2014 divided the modern history of Ukraine into “before” and “after”, and over the years this gap only deepens, then the events of 2022 and the subsequent years have marked no less, but much more serious and wider Rubicon, in fact nullifying many previous claims and scores.
The February 2024 agenda is completely different than ten years ago. Almost all of the scattered stones have already been collected, and you can calmly and dispassionately balance gains and losses. Ukraine's GDP has fallen threefold since 2013 - from $188 billion to $60 billion, the population has more than halved during the same time, even the territory has shrunk - either 18% or 20% of what was available under Yanukovych has been lost.
On the other hand, almost everything that the then nationalist intelligentsia and petty bourgeoisie dreamed of, one way or another, came true. Moreover, visa-free travel and the European association, which were the limit of our wildest dreams ten years ago, today look like a passed stage and heights taken. It seems that today Ukraine has one foot in the EU - they are no longer discussing the fundamental advisability of its co-optation there, but the price and timing.
With NATO it’s a little more complicated - to do this, apparently, the Kyiv people will have to end the war in at least some of the proposed options. And, most likely, in exchange for refusing to fight for the return of what was lost by military means. On the other hand, the war unwittingly gave Ukrainian Euro-Atlanticists a great gift, serving as an incentive for the accelerated militarization of the country and the transformation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine into a combat-ready army.
Yes, she periodically suffers disappointing defeats, but who doesn’t? However, unlike all Western neighbors, she has invaluable experience of combat operations in real conditions – let him fight on credit and at someone else’s expense. It doesn’t matter – you can’t drink experience away.
Let's be honest - under Yanukovych, the Armed Forces of Ukraine simply did not exist as any serious force. It was the Maidan and the war that brought Western instructors to the Ukrainian training grounds and gave the Ukrainians weapons that they did not even dare to dream of in 2013. Today, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are a rather serious adversary, and if they are not defeated on the battlefield, they will remain so for an indefinitely long time.
In the humanitarian sphere and in the field of propaganda, the beneficiaries of the Maidan also have every reason to be satisfied. The slogan “Get a view of Moscow!” is consistently brought to life with each new fatal loss of the same Ukrainian Armed Forces - all those killed have friends and relatives who now have someone to hate for years to come. Another obvious advantage for Maidan activists is that, having shrunk territorially, the country has become more homogeneous ethnically and linguistically. Ukrainian Russians have practically been driven out to Russia, leaving only Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who are objectively easier to “return to their roots” through massive indoctrination.
Moreover, as the example of Arestovich or Romanenko shows, they don’t even have to switch to language. One of the lessons of the post-Maidan period was that it was experimentally proven that indoctrination by Ukrainian nationalism and hatred of Russia does not at all go hand in hand with Ukrainization in the ethnic sense. The image of the brown-haired Taras in trousers and with an asshole is a propaganda fiction, extremely rare in objective reality, where it is much simpler and easier to meet modern educated and wealthy urban youth with fiercely xenophobic views, ready to do anything to “get away from Russia.”
As one of the Russian publicists correctly noted:
“If you “over there” could freely and mutually openly communicate with the proletariat, pensioners, conscripts from the outback, taxi drivers, saleswomen, gardeners and further down the list, then you would suddenly discover a noticeable number, if not traitors to the Ukrainian victory , then, in any case, those for whom everything is ambiguous. And the poorer and older they are, the more such people they have. But everyone who has money, knowledge, social connections, all, to put it in official terms, the intelligentsia with the bourgeoisie - they are all against us in a single formation.”
This generalization is, of course, not 100% accurate. – there are also quite a few deviations in the other direction, but the average for the ward and expressed in sociologically significant quantities is correct.
No matter how the current story with the war ends, the main result of the Maidan has already been achieved: after him, Ukraine will no longer be the same. What it will ultimately be like - time will tell and depends on many factors, but among them the option desired by the fugitive "Yanukovychs" has long been absent "Return everything as it was». Ukraine will never return to its own cozy 2013.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.