6 Years On, There’s Still No Clarity On the Euromaidan Shootings

21 February 2020 19:36

97 people were murdered during the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, six years ago. 89 criminal proceedings were launched, unified into one comprehensive Maidan case. But not one of the cases has been led to a conclusion, and nearly all the suspects have either fled Ukraine, or have been exchanged as part of a prisoner swap.

British-Ukrainian journalist Bohdan Nahaylo, speaking at a recent airing of the Weekly Wrap-Up, believes this lack of progress is due in large part to a lack of “political will” among the Ukrainian leadership. He points out that many politicians profited from the Euromaidan revolution, and that resolving those cases may bring out unpleasant truths.

“There’s been a lot of conjecture that the actual tragic events were triggered by those interested in manipulating the situation,” commented Nahaylo. “As the years have gone by, there is more and more suggestive evidence that there were people involved that later were defenders of the Revolution of Dignity and were supposedly upholding its values that may have been involved as catalysts, as detonators.”

Nahaylo added that “there were very murky beginnings” to the shootings that took the lives of nearly a hundred people, later immortalized in Ukrainian public memory as the Heavenly Hundred. “Why suddenly did a slaughter occur?” the journalist asked, emphasizing the fact that the Ukrainian public still doesn’t know the chain of events that led to the ex-Berkut officers suspected of shooting protesters to open fire.

“There are questions about who actually started the firing, and what were their motives,” noted Nahaylo. One ex-Berkut officer, Pavlo Abroskin, recently exchanged to the Russian puppet state of the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic”, in an interview with hromadske, denied that he had taken part in the shootings. Yet for the five and a half years Abroskin spent imprisoned, neither he nor any other ex-Berkut officers have provided testimony that may shed a light on that question.

“We still don’t have a clear picture of who stood to lose and to gain, to gain power, from the Revolution of Dignity,” Nahaylo pointed out, adding that a cynical viewpoint could lead an observer to conclude that the Euromaidan revolution simply substituted one set of oligarchs for another.

Six years later, we want to know the truth. No one is trying to take away from the patriotic narrative and the achievements and promise of the Revolution of Dignity. But it’s very important to know at this stage, what actually happened behind the scenes. Because we have to come to terms with our modern history.