On 21 February 2024 the Maidan regime reaches its tenth anniversary. Born in blood and lies, the events of that day and the new Ukrainian government it gave birth to have devastated Ukraine, Russian-Western relations, and the metastability of a rapidly changing international order. On this date ten years ago, snipers from several Ukrainian ultranationalist and neofascist groups represented on the Maidan and among the Maidan leadership, along with others from former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s entourage fired on and killed and wounded more than one hundred of their fellow Maidan demonstrators as well as numerous Berkut security forces trying to contain the increasingly violent demonstrations on the Maidan. The shootings sparked even more violence, leading to the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled for his life to eastern Ukraine and was unable to return to Kiev before the Rada took an illegal vote to depose him. Yanukovych would be accused by the West of not just abandoning the presidency, absurdly enough, but also, falsely, of ordering the Berkut police to fire on the demonstrators. Moreover, the overthrow dispatched to the dustbin of history an agreement between Yanukovych and the core of the Maidan opposition brokered and sponsored by Germany, France, Poland, and Russia, with nine other than Vladimir Putin intervening to convince Yanukovych to sign, as testified to by the then Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorkii.
Immediately afterwards, the West’s false portrayal of the Maidan shootings began to unravel, first with an Estonian and EU official caught in a tapped phone call discussing the fact that it was an element from among the Maidan protesters themselves that carried out these terrorist sniper attacks. This revelation was quickly forgotten, covered up and buried in a deep memory hole so to become invisible to Western publics.
Then, foremost of all, Ottawa University political science professor Ivan Katchanovski, himself a Ukrainian, but several others, including myself, exposed in excruciating detail the ultranationalist and neofascist sources of the Maidan snipers’ attacks (see https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper/; Ivan Katchanovski, “The ‘Snipers’ Massacre’ on the Maidan in Ukraine (Revised and Updated Version),” Academia.edu, 20 February 2015, www.academia.edu/8776021/The_Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine, p. 55 or Johnson’s Russia List, #33, 21 February 2015, Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs053/1102820649387/archive/1102911694293.html; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF_-nrSjFNk&fbclid=IwAR0u78fFV8N9IDYWSzHdiyWaBkvHrzZZcnEZOQ9AX61CdebpBGMCTjx5Jr4; https://interfax.com.ua/news/political/640586.html?fbclid=IwAR0K4kGEZPEfsmOQActT7UXn3A3yRBmawO5MuqcYe6OiIEQMa_JbxrZOHuU; ; and https://gordonhahn.com/2017/11/17/foreign-involvement-in-february-2014-maidan-terrorist-sniper-attack/). The Maidan ‘revolution’ was no popular revolt but a violent putch resulting from the dangerous US policy of promoting instability and crises in ‘target countries’ – a practice known as ‘democracy promotion – in pursuit of maximising its global hegemony by, among other things, installing NATO-friendly regimes towards the goal of NATO expansion—in this case to Ukraine— as far east and as robustly as possible towards Russia’s borders.
Having risen on the blood of its ‘own’ backers, the Maidan demonstrators, the new Maidan regime continued the pattern of its formative moment, its formative act. When Crimean and then Donbass separatists repeated the Maidan methodology of the illegal seizure of power but without the bloodshed, Maidan Kiev reacted with violence immediately in both cases. Neofascist Right Sector thugs headed to Crimea to attack ethnic Russians, but were uncovered and had to settle with the 2 May 2014 pogrom in Odessa in which more than nearly 50 peaceful picketers opposed to the Maidan putch were burned to death in the Trade Union Building. Weeks earlier, Kiev declared an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against the Donbass separatists without any attempt to negotiate. Villages were bombed by air power and artillery without cause. As the regime consolidated its hold on the rest of the country, neofascists had virtually free reign to attack, sometimes killing journalists, invade courtroom proceedings and other public venues intimidating the public and the authorities with impunity. At the same time, Maidan Kiev’s forced continued to bomb Donbass civilians from 2014 to the 2022 Russian military intervention throughout the European-brokered Russian-Ukrainian Minsk ceasefire and negotiations, with Right Sector militants bragging to the New York Times about their ceasefire violations and their wishes to see their dogs chew on the bones of Russian children.
If the Maidan regime’s first midwife was blood, its second was a big lie. The false flag operation that it was — pinned on Yanukovych but carried out by some of his most extremist Maidan opponents — gave birth to a regime of lies. Conceived in a lie, the lie had to be maintained. Otherwise, the legitimacy of the Maidan regime and its civilizational choice in the West would be cast in grave doubt. So every year the US State Department and White House commemorates the Maidan ‘Hundred’—those shot on the Maidan by their fellow, albeit most radical protesters. The Maidan regime itself constructed an elaborate memorial to its own victims, around which annual and occasional ritual ceremonies are held to honor ‘Yanukovuch’s victims’. Suspicions were even directed towards Moscow. In immediate aftermath of the Maidan revolt, US ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, disinformed the world, suggesting there was evidence that ‘wet teams sent from Moscow’ rather the beacons of democracy like the Maidan protestors and Saakashvili were behind the slaughter.
During his presidential election campaign President Volodomyr Zelenskiy once alluded to this fact, saying: commented: “People whom came to power on blood are profiting on blood” (www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/02/26/7207718/). One of his opponents in that campaign, a professor at the pro-Maidan Kyiv Myhola Academy retired general Anatoliy Hrytsenko, then in fourth place in most polls with 5-7 percent of the vote, noted: “I propose that one of the reasons that (the snipers massacre) has not been investigated to the end is that someone has feathers on their snout among those who are now in power” (https://gordonua.com/news/politics/gricenko-odna-iz-prichin-pochemu-rasstrel-nebesnoy-sotni-ne-rassledovan-do-konca-u-kogo-to-rylo-v-puhu-iz-teh-kto-seychas-pri-vlasti-705668.html?fbclid=iwar1c9xxnp6k48rqnxrz2c6ki18lrnf7k2fhilbk9t2o0cfkx70ceff4egdw). Hrytsenko was a pro-Maidan politician and Ukraine’s Defense Minister after the 2004 ‘Orange revolution’ under pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko. The expression ‘feathers on their snout’ refers is similar to the expression ‘blood on one’s hands’, implying that someone is guilty of something and those around know it but everyone pretends that it is not so. It is rooted in the idea of a dog or fox who has raided a chicken pen and has feathers on his snout after consuming one of its residents. Upon their master’s entry into the yard, all the the dogs, including the perpetrator, lower their ears assuming an appearance of innocence, bu the perpetrator has ‘blood on his hands’ or ‘feathers on his snout.’
Other lies quickly followed, as disinformation, fakes, and the like became the regime’s modus vivendi. Zelenskiy soon abandoned his then fresh campaign candor about ‘blood on the hands’ of Maidan leaders. Instead, he came to perfect the grand fake, well-equipped to do so as the producer and comic actor for fictions. He offered no reaction when last year a Kiev court acquitted all the Berkut officers accused of firing on the demonstrators. The court’s ruling stated in black and white that the firing was carried out by unidentified shooters from the Ukraine Hotel (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356691143_The_Maidan_Massacre_in_Ukraine_Revelations_from_Trials_and_Investigation; www.youtube.com/watch?v=JChtKpaulOs&feature=emb_title&fbclid=IwAR1KEQC0Uw7TC0zM61UWrpSypm5GiwzTLweXzK7RixEZA4cCeEU7nATfGEA). That building was the headquarters of the Maidan protest movement during the revolt and identified by Katchanovski and numerous videos as the source of snipers’ shots.
Ukrainian and Western lies and deceptions also surrounded the Minsk negotiations and agreement. Beyond constant violations of the ceasefire, Kiev never fulfilled any of the Minsk agreement’s key stipulations, in particular those requiring the Ukrainian side to negotiate directly with the Donbass separatists and pass legislation on autonomy for its breakaway regions. Worse still, after Moscow began its special military operation two years ago, a series of top Western and Ukrainian parties to Minsk — including then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and German Chancellor Angela Merkel — acknowledged that there was little to no intent ever to implement the agreement and that the hole process was a stalling tactic to allow NATO, as it did, to train and arm the Ukrainian military in preparation for war to take back Crimea and Donbass by force.
The false interpretation of all the hundreds of civilian deaths in Bucha in March 2022 as the result of premeditated massacring by Russian forces was a landmark fake designed to sabotage the initialed Istanbul agreement on a ceasefire and peace talks. This Maidan lie — another driven by Western pressure — facilitated two more years of bloodletting.
Given the ongoing Kievan and Western deceptiveness and a hybrid neofascist-oligarchic Maidan regime born in lies, it can be no wonder that since its hijacking by Ukrainian ultranationalists and neofascists in late December 2013-early 2014, the Maidan phenomenon that one U.S. Deputy Secretary of State has spoken of with a quasi-mystical tone — has been little more than a series of lies, falsehoods, and simulacra. Maidan has been the veritable embodiment of our post-modern, post-truth crisis century. A ‘democratic’ regime where the freedom of the press is crushed, political parties are banned, and corruption is truly endemic general practice rising right up to the president himself and his offshore accounts and mansions. Those who claim to be fighting corruption are very often its most prolific practitioners.
The war has highlighted the blood and the lies. Zelenskiy and the military command show absolutely no regard for the lives of their troops, throwing wave after wave against superior force and powerful defence lines in order to gain political points in the West so they can keep the flows of weapons and cash coming in support of the smoke and mirrors Maidan cleptocracy of oligarchs, criminals, and fascist thugs. Phony ‘Ghost’ pilots, fake Russian bombings of maternity wards and railroad stations, fake ‘intelligence’ that Russians are preparing to blow up Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, Ukraine is winning, Putin has already lost, sanctions will dissolve the Russian economy, the Russian army is scavenging microchips from washing machines and sending soldiers to the front with shovels, and trumped up American Russiagates and impeachments with connections in Ukraine and the U.S. Ukrainian diaspora. The hypocrisy and political decadence of the Maidan ‘republic’ is only rivalled by those of its Western sponsors, particularly the United States, which as it rallies ‘the world’ against ‘isolated Russia’, is now the world’s greatest sponsor of war crimes and genocide.
The good news is that all this is coming home to roost, and the big lies are being exposed. But when and how, for God’s sake, will the Maidan hell end for the Ukrainians?
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NEW BOOK
EUROPE BOOKS, 2022
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RECENT BOOKS
MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2021
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MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2018
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.