On Tuesday night tanks burned in the streets of Kiev, government buildings went up in flames and over two dozen people – including nine policemen -- lay dead.
In the West of Ukraine rebels stormed and occupied the Prosecutor’s office in Lviv and airborne troops are reportedly being mobilized to downtown Kiev.
Ukraine’s Euro-Maidan is no longer a protest movement: it’s a revolution.
"The state has launched a war against its own people," former world-champion boxer and opposition leader Vitali Klitschko told reporters. He is right: after a three month-long standoff with protesters, embattled President Viktor Yanukovych has decided to take back control of his own capital, apparently at any cost.
The biggest question is whether this rebellion against Yanukovych’s rule will escalate into civil war. As Kiev erupted in gunfire and flames and police battered up to 25,000 protesters with stun grenades and water cannons, protesters seized government buildings across opposition-minded western parts of Ukraine.
In the Ternopil region on Tuesday protesters stormed an Interior Ministry building – and government troops refused to fight, putting down their weapons and declaring that the "police is with the people," according to Ukraine's Espresso Online TV.
What’s clear, even as Yanukovych’s crack Berkut riot police mopped up the last pockets of resistance on Kiev’s Independence Square, is that is while Kiev has been subdued, much of the country has become ungovernable. More, its also clear that Yanukovych has given up on talks with the opposition.
Over the previous two months, under intense pressure from the European Union and United States, Yanukovych made some significant concessions. He amnestied all detainees, scrapped a repressive anti-protest law, fired most of his government, even offered all opposition leaders top cabinet posts -- yet still the protests went on.
Storming the barricades is an act of desperation for Yanukovych, and will almost certainly spell the end of his political career. But his nervous neighbours fear that it may spell the end of Ukraine too.
“Lets be blunt - politically speaking, Yanukovych is a dead man walking,” Mark Galeotti of New York University told Radio Free Europe. “What we are talking about now is what the collapse of his personal regime may mean … Once a system starts to crack it can crack in thoroughly systemic ways.”
One flashpoint is Crimea, largely populated by pro-Moscow Russian-speakers, where thousands of Russian troops are stationed at the naval base in Sevastopol. “It could be that this spirals out of control,” says Galeotti.
While the EU and US have been scrambling to broker a compromise between Yanukovych and the opposition, Moscow has been doing exactly the opposite. The protests began in November after Yanukovych abandoned an Association Agreement with the EU and plumped for a $15 billion aid package offered by Vladimir Putin instead.
But Moscow has been slow to release the money until Yanukovych acts decisively against his opponents and forms a new government. As news broke of the storming of the Maidan, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov duly announced that another $2 billion tranche from Moscow’s aid package would be released “this week.”
Russia’s allies have also been at work bolstering the President’s support in heavily pro-Yanukovych areas such as the Donetsk Basin and Crimea. Posters have gone up urging locals to “Stop Maidan!” and warning that the “EU means legalizing same-sex marriage.” The campaign was paid for by Ukraine’s Choice, a group associated with Kremlin-connected politician and businessman Viktor Medvedchuk.
But though it’s tempting to see the battles on Ukraine streets simply as an ideological showdown between Russia and the West, the real picture isn’t so clear-cut. In November the Euro-Maidan protests began as a sea of pro-European Ukrainians enthusiastically waving blue and gold European flags (an inconceivable sight in most actual European countries).
But the protests were soon taken over by ultranationalist groups, including supporters of the right-wing Svoboda party, whose leader Oleg Tyagnibok was once thrown out of Ukraine’s parliament for ranting about the “Jewish-Russian mafia which rules Ukraine.” The highly-organized and violent young men who manned the Kiev barricades wearing military surplus uniforms and carrying shields and armour captured from the police were drawn in part from the ranks of ultra-nationalist football hooligans.
Veteran US cold warrior Senator John McCain – a friend and long-time supporter of anti-Russian Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili – came to Kiev in December and promised the crowds that “the free world is with you, America is with you, I am with you. Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better.”
But Tyagnibok was standing by McCain’s side as he spoke – a sinister reminder that fires of Maidan have forged a strange and potent alliance of pro-European liberals and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.
Ukraine is also not Georgia – Kiev is the heart of medieval Russian civilization and has been a part of Russia, both culturally and administratively, for centuries. The US, and to a lesser extent Europe, have taken a winner-takes-all approach to relations with Kiev, more or less forcing Yanukovych to choose one side or the other.
And, importantly, the EU's association proposal also included various "security policy" provisions that would have subordinated key aspects of Ukraine’s military strategy to NATO. Small wonder that Moscow has fought tooth and nail to claw Ukraine back into its orbit.
Ukraine is certainly split between those whose first language is Russian, who look culturally, economically and in its religious orthodoxy towards Russia, and those in the mainly Catholic west. whose first language is Ukrainian and who look towards Poland and Europe. But – so far – polls have never shown much appetite, even in the east, either for seceding from Kiev or for returning to Russia's fold (though numbers in Crimea come close to even).
And it’s been more than a decade since Russian nationalist politicians last called for a return of Crimea to Moscow’s control. Indeed there is evidence that ordinary Ukrainians fear a breakup of their country above all else: “We are against the Syrian scenario!" read placards held up by pro-government protesters at a recent rally in the industrial city of Makeyevka, in the industrial region of Donetsk.
It’s true that Yanukovych hails from Eastern Ukraine, speaks bad Ukrainian and was backed by a Russian-speaking gang of oligarchs known as the Donetsk mafia. But Euromaidan is less a revolt of Western Ukraine against the East so much as a rejection of Yanukovych’s ineffective and corrupt leadership. It’s a revolt of the young, urban generation against a cronyish post-Soviet business and political elite – and, crucially, that’s a fault line that runs through Moscow as much as it does through Kiev.
“It's an uprising fueled by the young. It features an odd alliance of nationalists and pro-Western liberals. It's taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers and has baffled the regime with its mastery of social media. Its goals are to replace a corrupt authoritarian regime with a more pluralistic and inclusive political system,” says Brian Whitmore author of The Power Vertical blog. “Wait. Are we talking about Russia or Ukraine? Or are we talking about both?
In both Russia and Ukraine it is the post-Soviet generation that has backed mass protest movements most enthusiastically. In the winter of 2011-12 up to 100,000 people came out onto the streets of Moscow to protest against rigged elections and Putin’s return to power.
This generation is “more liberal than that of their parents, aspiring to a more pluralistic, less corrupt, and less authoritarian political system,” says Whitmore. “But, at the same time, they appear to be simultaneously more nationalistic as well.”
The difference, of course, is that Russia is wealthy and stable – certainly compared to Ukraine. For the time being at least the Kremlin is buoyed by oil money, and, importantly, Russia’s business elites are firmly behind one leader.
Yanukoyvch, on the other hand, is flailing as his big-business backers have pulled out. Even the Donetsk mafia, it seems, have decided he’s a lost cause – as well as being bad for business.
The key unknowns, as Kiev clears up the wreckage of Tuesday night’s battle, is whether Ukraine will actually be a governable state. Yanukovych’s crackdown may have driven an irreversible split between Ukraine’s communities - one which only Yanukovych's departure could start to heal.
Yanukovych has never really been President of the Western-leaning, Ukrainian speaking people of the Western part of the country. Now it looks like they could reject the authority of his government altogether.
For time being the debate is less over whether Ukraine’s future lies with Europe or Russia but rather whether it can actually go on as a functioning country – or slide towards a failed state.
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