For Ukrainians, the War Has Raged for 10 Years
KYIV, Ukraine — They were a ragtag army, fighting with baseball bats, Molotov cocktails and plywood shields. But for Ukrainians, the protesters who faced off with riot police on Kyiv’s main square a decade ago were the first soldiers in a war still raging today.
In the Maidan uprising of 2014, Ukrainians took to the streets to protest the decision by President Viktor F. Yanukovych to forgo closer ties to Europe and instead more closely align with Moscow. In the uprising’s final days, police killed more than 100 protesters.
Their portraits now adorn a wall of honor at St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv. They are displayed first, ahead of portraits of soldiers killed in the eight-year conflict in Ukraine’s east that served as a prelude to Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
This reflects the view that many Ukrainians hold: They have been fighting Russia for 10 years, not two.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came in two phases, Ukrainians point out. The first was a decade ago when Russian soldiers came over the border soon after Mr. Yanukovych was driven into exile, igniting the war in the east. It was a military intervention unacknowledged by Moscow, shrouded in a fog of ruses and denials so improbable that few were deceived. But it nonetheless served to blunt both the Ukrainian and international response.
The war pivoted two years ago to an unveiled effort by Russia to seize territory militarily. As the world observed the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians recalled the anger and resolve that drove the 2014 uprising, as well.
“We have always been fighting Russia,” said Captain Oleh Voitsekhovsky, who protested on Maidan Square, fought in the war in the east and is still fighting today. His view of Ukrainian history, he said, is of a continual struggle against Moscow. “It is just sometimes cold and sometimes hot.”
In its final days, the 2014 uprising nearly collapsed as protesters held only a few hundred square meters of soot-smeared paving stones and had resorted to burning heaps of tires to keep alight a giant bonfire that was holding back riot police.
Police snipers fired into the crowds, leaving bodies scattered on the pavement in Kyiv. The protest ended when security service chiefs and protest leaders cut a deal, and the police left the capital. This left Mr. Yanukovych without protection, and he fled to eastern Ukraine, and then to Russia on February 24, 2014.
In an address to the nation in observance of the 10th anniversary of the sniper shootings, President Volodymyr Zelensky drew a line from the Maidan uprising to the trench warfare today. Ukrainians will fight, he said, “in the squares, on the barricades and today at the front.”
In response to Maidan, Russia deployed soldiers in uniforms without insignia in the Crimea Peninsula and identified them as angry locals or members of motorcycle gangs. The ruse succeeded in slowing the Western response amid discussions of the origins of the mystery soldiers.
By the time Russian tanks rolled across the border two years ago, about 400,000 Ukrainians had already fought the Russians in eastern Ukraine. By sustaining years of low-intensity war in the east, Russia, paradoxically, had prepared the Ukrainian army for a countrywide assault. Many veterans rejoined the army.
“This was a big, unpleasant surprise for the Russians,” Captain Voitsekhovsky said. “We had combat experience. Nothing had to be explained. We took weapons and needed no help.”
The Maidan uprising echoed in Russia’s war plans, too.
In the invasion, Russia sought to quickly capture the capital with columns of tanks, paratroopers and commandos, with the goal of setting up a puppet government. One plan identified by Ukrainian officials would have reinstalled Mr. Yanukovych.
Ukraine is now on the defensive along the entire 1,000-kilometer front, fighting with dwindling ammunition and deep uncertainty over the future of military and financial aid from the United States. But Ukrainians have fought against long odds before.
Sviatoslav Syry, who was beaten by riot police officers as a student protester on the square, was elected to a seat in Parliament and is now fighting in an artillery unit in the Ukrainian military.
Maidan protesters, he told Ukrainian media, were dismayed as the riot police repeatedly stormed the tent encampment on the square in nighttime raids. “By morning, you think maybe it’s all over,” he said. “But inside, there’s already this anger and desire to come back.”