The Truth about the Euromaidan

[1]

The Euromaidan on December 1, 2013.

5,027 words

In the minds of Anglosphere Russia apologists, what happened at the Euromaidan in 2013-14 was simple: A democratically elected head of state, Viktor Yanukovych, who represented the will of the people, wanted to move Ukraine closer to Russia as opposed to Europe, which prompted the CIA to overthrow him in a coup they backed against the wishes of the Ukrainian people, whom he was serving.

This was not the case, however. As usual the Russian apologists leave out key information, or they simply don’t know it, and therefore end up presenting a very flawed account of these events.

Both Ukrainian liberal and Ukrainian nationalist/fascist publications, as well as foreign publications, agree that one in ten participants in the Euromaidan protests was a “Nazi.” These National Socialists broke into Kyiv City Hall and began spray-painting swastikas and other NS iconography upon the walls of this government building.

Were these National Socialists there to fight for LGBT rights? Hardly. These same people (and the ones present at the Euromaidan were indeed primarily from Lviv, Kyiv, and western Ukraine, though there were eastern Ukrainian NS there as well) were the ones who shut down the first-ever “pride” parade in Kyiv, which was organized in 2012 when Yanukovych was President, proving that the claim that the Euromaidan introduced LGBT politics into Ukraine is untrue. The Kyiv police warned the pride marchers that 500 nationalist Ultras were marching towards the parade, and that they (Kyiv local police) were unwilling to provide protection for them. A few of the pride marchers ended up getting beaten and maced.

To this day, homosexual marriage is constitutionally illegal in Ukraine, once again putting the lie to the idea that the Euromaidan made Ukraine LGBT-friendly. Also, it was the Kyiv local police who cooperated with the nationalists, not the Yanukovych government. These same police often deputize National Socialists to this day to patrol the streets, sometimes officially and sometimes under the table with a wink and a nod. It was such an agreement that led to the rather famous video of Ukrainian nationalists storming a Roma camp and tearing it down in 2018.

There were many, many Ukrainian National Socialists at the Euromaidan, and it cannot be denied that they were the militant edge of the protests. Right Sector, White Hammer, Patriot of Ukraine, C14, Svoboda, and the Social-National Assembly were just some of the NS groups present, and they were always on the front lines, fighting with the police and occupying government buildings.

Why were they so active at the Euromaidan? As I have said before, the underlying motivation of all the nationalists who participated was to support Ukrainian integration into Europe rather than Eurasia. Ukrainian nationalists, whether from decades past or today, as they are waging a righteous defensive war against a foreign aggressor, have always wanted Ukrainian integration into Europe rather than amalgamation into Eurasia.

Let’s go back a bit to the causes of the Euromaidan generally, and not just those that motivated the nationalists.

On February 14, 2010, Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was declared the winner of a close presidential election against Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party, with a final vote count of 48.95% to 45.47%. There is talk of election fraud, as there is with any close election, but I won’t take a position either way. The point is that it was a very close race which was decided by slightly less than 3.5% of the total vote. President Yanukovych then went on to form a government known as “The Azarov Government,” named after Prime Minister Mykola Azarov.

[2]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here [3]

Despite what Putin apologists would like you to believe, Yanukovych (hereafter referred to as “Yan”) did not run on a platform of returning Ukraine to Moscow’s leadership and telling the European/Western world to stuff it, but rather on a rather centrist platform of anti-corruption, economic development, and continuing the decades-long Ukrainian foreign policy objective of European integration, specifically European Union integration, and this is borne out by the actions of the Azarov government for most of its time in power.

In May of 2010, Yan promised that within the next month legislation would be put forward to create a free-trade zone between Ukraine and the European Union, and that he expected the visa requirement for travel between Ukraine and the EU would be abolished. He believed this legislation was a done deal and would be implemented by March of 2011. Free trade and visa-free travel, what does that sound like to you? Sound like the EU? Because it sure did to the Ukrainian people.

There were no riots.

In that same month, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko both stated that EU integration had been and remained a priority of the Azarov government. Delighted by such statements, the European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy, Štefan Füle, stated that “the policies of the Azarov government do not exclude EU integration.”

There were no riots.

On November 22, 2010, the Azarov government agreed on an “action plan” to allow for visa-free travel between Ukraine and the EU. To mark the occasion, Yan travelled to Brussels, where he took a very chummy picture with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. Herman, flanked by Yan and Barroso, happily announced that he was

very pleased that [they] can announce today an action plan for Ukraine toward the establishment of a visa-free regime for short-stay travel. We have also been able to sign a protocol to the current partnership and cooperation agreement permitting Ukraine’s access to the EU programs. And we expressed our satisfaction at the progress achieved in EU-Ukraine relations.

There were no riots.

Finally, on March 30, 2012, the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement was signed by the Azarov government, although it still had to be officially ratified by the EU and the Ukrainian parliament. The agreement basically stopped shy of full Ukrainian membership in the European Union, but was as close as you could get without officially joining it.

There were no riots.

However . . .

By 2012 the cozy relations between Yan’s regime and the EU had soured. Why? Because Yan had begun jailing his political rivals, left, right, and center, with the most high-profile among them being Yulia Tymoshenko. Remember how I said Yan ran on an anti-corruption platform amongst a smorgasbord of other centrist promises? He was about to use that to get rid of his political rival.

The charges against Yulia are an entire book in and of itself, but suffice to say that in May of 2010, just a few months after an election victory of less than 3.5% against Yulia, the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s office began opening a number of criminal cases against Yulia and others of Yan’s political rivals. To make a very long story very short, Yulia had almost every charge in the book thrown at her by the Azarov government. She was found guilty of exceeding her powers as Prime Minister when she had ordered the Ukrainian state-owned natural gas company Naftogaz to sign a deal with Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom in 2009. Yes, Yanukovych was accusing his political rival of dirty political dealings with a Russian state-owned gas company. At one point, Yulia was even charged with multiple murders of eastern Ukrainian businessmen! Those charges were dropped because they were absurd. A bit of Soviet-style over-the-top accusations against political rivals was sneaking back in.

It was the persecution of Yan’s political rivals that soured the EU on his government. This was despite the fact that Yulia herself said that she didn’t want her multiple-year prison sentences and $188 million in fines to prevent Ukraine’s integration with Europe, something she has always wanted and advocated for even more strongly than Yan.

What followed was a rather schizophrenic period in Ukrainian-European Union relations between March 2012 and November 2013. EU officials boycotted events in Ukraine, such as the 2012 UEFA Championships (which were boycotted by EU government officials, not the national teams, as these events are generally accompanied by bureaucrats chumming it up).

Still, the EU expressed hope and commitment to further Ukraine-EU integration, but with one new caveat, as expressed by the December 10, 2012 statement by the EU Foreign Affairs Council:

The European Union reaffirms its commitment to the signing of the already initialed Association Agreement, including a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area, as soon as the Ukrainian authorities demonstrate determined action and tangible progress in the three areas mentioned above, possibly by the time of the Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius in November 2013. . . . [These three areas are] [e]lectoral, judiciary, and constitutional reforms in line with international standards are integral parts of it and commonly agreed priorities.

There was the catch that soured Ukrainian-European Union relations after they had been going so well for years — not Yan reaffirming his non-existent promises to his voter base that he intended to return “the” Ukraine to Moscow’s benevolent rule, as some Anglosphere nationalist commentators would have you believe, but rather his refusal to let his political prisoners out of jail.

In February of 2013, Ukraine’s ambassador stated that the Azarov government would reject any and all EU preconditions for signing the Association Agreement (AA). However, on February 22, 2013, a resolution was approved by the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) 315 to 34 that “within its powers the government of Ukraine would ensure that the EU Foreign Affairs Council recommendations of December 10th, 2012 would be implemented.” The same day, Yan promised to “do his best” in this regard. Yan was also simultaneously in negotiations with Russia to “find the right model” under which Ukraine could join the Eurasian Customs Union, however — an economic bloc of the Eurasian Economic Union which can be extended to non-members. Essentially, Yan was making the same deals he was in 2010-12, but in reverse: economic integration leading to full membership, but this time replacing a European Free-Trade Zone with a Eurasian Customs Union and replacing the European Union with the Eurasian Economic Union/Commonwealth of Independent States.

But all hope was not lost, and the Ukrainian people were on the edge of their seats. For years, since before Yan had even been elected, Ukraine had been edging closer and closer to the European Union. Then, during the first years of Yan’s presidency, concrete steps had been made toward realizing it. But now it all looked to be at risk. And why? Did economists of the Azalov government publish papers about how economic union with Uzbekistan, Armenia, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan would provide more benefits than economic union with Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and the rest of the European Union? Did Yan address the nation and declare that the Ukrainian people are brothers with the Russian people, and must move closer to their Moscow brethren? No. Yan had shifted from a pro-Europe to a pro-Asian position because Europe had asked him to free his political prisoners. And they were political prisoners, unless you believe Yulia really did murder several businessmen during her time in government.

It’s pretty clear what Yan was thinking here. If you know the politics of the Asiatic provinces of the former USSR, as well as that of Belarus and Russia since Putin came to power, you know that once a leader becomes head of state, it’s a position for life, and sometimes even a hereditary one. Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan are all clear examples of this. Since Belarus began holding “elections” in 1994, Lukashenko has been the only President of Belarus, and it seems quite clear that Putin is not going to retire anytime soon, and that his successor will be his chosen heir and nothing less. Clearly, what Yan was angling for was the wealth of the West and the political dynamics of the east. He wanted Ukraine to be rich like France and an authoritarian regime like Kazakhstan. I am not supporting democracy over authoritarianism here; I am just dissecting what Yan was clearly trying to do. After he barely eked out an election victory, he started jailing all his political opponents while trying to facilitate Ukrainian economic integration with the EU. He wanted to eat his cake and have it too.

And by the way, after Yulia told the EU they should not let her imprisonment prevent Ukrainian integration, she then told them that she would prefer them withdrawing their demand that she be released from prison so that it could proceed. She was facing years in prison and $188 million in fines, and she had the most powerful political-economic-military alliance in human history, the EU and NATO (NATO was not part of these negotiations, but the two go hand-in-hand) advocating for her release — but she told them to drop it (they didn’t). Yulia is no National Socialist; she’s a center-Right pro-European liberal democrat, but I think that’s an admirable example of self-sacrifice for the nation, something any nationalist should admire.

The stage was set for the final showdown regarding the Ukrainian people’s future, and whether it lay with Europe or Asia. Remember that we are still in the year 2013, the year which began with a showdown between European and Asian integration, and the year that would end with the beginning of the Euromaidan.

That’s right: After years of negotiation and political drama, by September 2013 the only party in Ukraine opposed to integration with the European Union was the Communist Party of Ukraine. Even Yanukovych and his cabinet unanimously approved the draft of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement. Ukrainians from Lviv to Donetsk were preparing for and expecting European integration within a few months.

The long and winding road that had begun with the Ukrainian government declaring in 1993 that their primary foreign policy objective was joining the European Union was less than nine days away.

[This decree is] to suspend the process of preparations for the conclusion of the Association Agreement between Ukraine, on the one part, and the European Union, the European Atomic Energy Community and its Member States, on the other part, and to suspend the decision of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine dated September 18, 2013 on the preparation for the signing of the draft association agreement between Ukraine, on the one part, and the European Union and its member states, on the other part.

Just like that, the Ukrainian people had the rug pulled out from under them. Over 20 years of Ukrainian foreign policy aimed at European integration vanished in one cabinet decree. Goodbye Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Stockholm. Hello Nur-Sultan, Yerevan, Tashkent, and Bishkek.

Hello Euromaidan.

This timeline has mostly followed foreign policy between the EU and Ukraine, only briefly touching on domestic issues. I will not delve as deeply into those; suffice to say the Ukrainian people were getting fed up with Yan. Political leaders who had received over 12 million votes in the very election that brought Yanukovych to power were being held in prison, charged with murder, fined millions, and generally persecuted by the government.

Corruption in Ukraine reached an all-time high. According to Ernst & Young, a $40 billion a year revenue agency specializing in assurance, tax advisory, strategy consulting, financial advisory, and financial law, Ukraine in 2012 was one of the three most corrupt countries in the world, along with Brazil and Colombia. And remember, this was a country that was jailing the most prominent members of its political opposition for corruption!

All in all, things looked pretty dark in Ukraine in 2012-13. The one light at the end of the tunnel was that European integration was constantly being talked about on the news, and in a serious and concrete way: not pundits talking from the sidelines, but the Ukrainian government creating actual legislation and agreements with the European Union.

Nobody voted for this change; not the millions who voted for Yan, nor the millions who voted against him. Not even the Communists ran on this platform. The only people who wanted this were Yanukovych, his fantastically corrupt family and cronies, and Vladimir Putin, who is not a citizen of Ukraine, who cannot vote in Ukraine, and who cannot run for office in Ukraine, but whose billions in bribes mattered more to Yanukovych than the will of the Ukrainian people.

In the West, when the will of the people is blatantly ignored by politicians who are simply bought by oligarchs, the response is mostly grumbling on the Internet. In Ukraine, the response was a revolution. The shame here is the West’s. The glory is Ukraine’s.

[4]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here [5].

The Euromaidan began on November 21, 2013, the very day that the Yanukovych cabinet suddenly shifted away from Europe and towards Russia. (The Maidan is the central square of Kyiv that was the focal point of the protests.) The subsequent events of February 2014, which resulted in the collapse of the Yanukovych regime, is called The Revolution of Dignity. For the sake of simplicity, I will simply talk about the Euromaidan. Ukrainians from all across the political spectrum turned out in the hundreds of thousands to protest their government’s abrupt U-turn.

Certain commentators in our community want you to believe that Yanukovych was elected by the Ukrainian people so that he could move Ukraine towards Russia, but nothing could be further from the truth. Since 1993 the Ukrainian government’s primary foreign policy objective has been joining the EU, and this objective was even pursued by the Yanukovych regime itself.

As the Euromaidan began, the Communist Party of Ukraine denounced it as a Western coup to overthrow the democratically-elected government — but this didn’t make any sense. On the day that the Euromaidan began, everyone in the West believed that the Yan regime was about to finalize the AA on their end, and that the EU would then finalize it on their end. Thus, as of November 20, 2013, the United States had no reason to plan and execute an anti-Yan revolution/coup. People like Victoria Nuland and other outside actors only showed up later. Yes, the Euromaidan “coup” canard was just baseless Communist agitprop, but it has now become a cornerstone of Russian propaganda and has somehow eluded fact-checkers and simple common sense to be repeated by the likes of Patrick Buchanan and Tucker Carlson.

Certain political commentators want you to believe that the event in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians engaged in protests and riots against the government and in which over 100 of them were killed was all orchestrated by Victoria Nuland and George Soros, and that all the above history has nothing to do with it. I want to see more convincing evidence than that of a Jew who has his fingers in literally every Western country also having his fingers in Ukraine, however. Explain to me the specifics of the operation that got hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to engage in violent demonstrations against their government. I am not expecting those of you who believe this to produce a CIA casefile, but if you want me, or anyone who knows the history of Ukraine, to believe that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians filled the streets because Victoria Nuland and George Soros were passing out cookies, you need to provide a concrete narrative of events like I just did.

I’ve mentioned the role of the National Socialists in the Euromaidan, but I would like to briefly mention some of the organizations who fought against it as well. While Right Sector, Svoboda, C14, Social-National Assembly, Ukrainian National Assembly/Ukrainian National Self Defense, White Hammer, Patriot of Ukraine, and various nationalist Ultras were forming the Maidan self-defense units, they were fighting not only the Yanukovych government but also the various organizations who had supported Yanukovych and opposed European integration from the start: Red Sector, the Communist Party of Ukraine, Russian Bloc, Progressive Socialist Party, Labour Ukraine, People’s Democratic Party, Ukraine-Forward!, The Night Wolves, and the hired mercenaries of the Yan regime known as Titushki.

Remember, in September 2013 the only party in the entirety of Ukraine with seats in the Rada that opposed European integration was the Communist Party of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Communist Party then called on all Communists and Left-wing movements around the world to condemn the Euromaidan and do what they could, where they could to fight it. That is when foreign antifa volunteers from across the world began popping up in Ukraine. They are still at work, fighting with the separatists in Donbas.

I find it ironic that certain Putin apologists in the Anglosphere nationalist community will rightly deride groypers for turning away from race to favor cultural phenomena like Christianity, but then will turn around and suggest that Ukrainian nationalists should surrender to the foreign invasion so they can be integrated with Asia. And yes, that’s what Yanukovych was attempting. What’s the difference in principle between groypers saying “based Latinos, at least they are Christian” and faux-fascists saying “based Eurasian Economic Union, at least they don’t have trannies”? Aren’t both of these statements abandoning race as the highest loyalty in favor of cultural values?

I guess it’s because their racial-political consciousness only goes back to the 1920s, or maybe the 1770s-1860s at the most. However, those of us with a racial-political mind stretching back thousands of years know that our race used to dwell from Scotland to India, and even beyond into East Asia. Now we only call Europe and the newly-taken territories of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa home. Yes, there are Europeans in South America, and there are Caucasoids — if not quite Europeans — in the Caucasus, but only the aforementioned lands are truly the “homes” of the white race. That is because whites in Asia disappeared due to race-mixing and outright genocide by the vast Asiatic hordes, the hordes that Kaiser Wilhelm II dubbed the “Yellow Peril” and that Adolf Hitler wanted to push back behind the Urals for good.

You who suggest “Ukraine should just surrender to Russia like real nationalists” are advocating that Ukraine join Asian economic integration, which will lead to political integration, which will in turn lead to cultural integration and race-mixing, which will lead those same Asiatic hordes into the very heart of our modern Europe — so deeply that they would border Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia! Europe already has enough problems with migrants from Africa and the Middle East.

In closing, Euromaidan was a genuine, organic revolution of the Ukrainian people, with some outside opportunists from both East and West who tried to influence the outcome. The pro-Maidan nationalists were fighting so that Ukraine could be part of Europe, not Asia. If you still think Russia/CIS/Eurasia is the lesser of two evils, and if you think one of the most racially pure countries in the Western world should be subsumed into the Asiatic world — now by military conquest — I don’t know what you are, but you don’t have the white race’s best interests at heart.

Postscript

I will make one final point about the Euromaidan. Let’s talk about the sniper attacks that took place there.

The most well-known incident of the Euromaidan took place on February 18-20, 2014, when unknown assailants opened fire on the Maidan and killed 21 anti-Yanukovych protesters on the spot. The final death toll for February 2014 was 108 anti-Yanukovych protesters and 13 police officers. In total, 112 anti-Yanukovych protesters and 18 police died as a result of the Euromaidan revolution. This, by the way, is why Yanukovych scurried away in the dead of the night in a helicopter. He knew how serious things were getting and what would happen to him if the Ukrainian people got their hands on him.

In Ukraine, these 112 dead anti-Yanukovych protesters are known as “The Heavenly Hundred.” In what is perhaps one of the most sickening examples of Russian bootlicker propaganda, aspersion is cast on who exactly was pulling the trigger on the protesters. They either slyly imply or outright state that it was not actually pro-Yanukovych security forces, but Western agents who wished to topple Yanukovych by shooting the protesters.

The idea of a false flag is not an absurd one on the face of it, but it requires evidence. Let’s examine the facts, starting with the Hrushevskoho street riots from January 19 to February 17, 2014. But specifically, let’s look at the shootings on January 22-25.

The origin of this propaganda about a false flag is Oleh Tatarov, who was the Deputy Chief of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s Main Investigative Directorate under Yanukovych. He claimed that

the theory we are looking at is the killing was by unidentified persons. This is an official theory, and the unidentified persons could be various people, a whole host of them. . . . It could have been motivated by disruptive behavior, or with the aim of provocation.

The evidence he offered was that the cartridges and weapons used in the shootings were not police issue.

However, medics on the ground who were pulling bullets from the bodies posted pictures of them online, and they were identified as Dragunov Sniper Rifle 7.62x54mm and 9x18mm Makarov bullets, both of which are most definitely state-issued. The Dragunov Sniper Rifle was produced in the Soviet Union in 1963 and is widely used in Eastern Europe militaries even to this day, and 9x18mm Makarov cartridges are chambered in so many Soviet state-issued firearms that it would be quicker to list those which don’t chamber 9x18mm Makarov cartridges.

Also, pictures emerged during the Euromaidan of large bullets being pulled from bodies that can best be described as looking like very tiny goblets with a thicker stem ratio. On January 25, 2014 these were identified by the Armament Research Services, a specialty arms and munitions consultancy in Perth, Australia, as specialized 12-gauge armor-piercing shotgun slugs designed for stopping vehicles, piercing armor, and breaking down doors. These specialist slugs were most likely developed and produced by the Spetstekhnika (Specialized Equipment) Design Bureau, a facility located in Kyiv and associated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

When it comes to determining who had a motive in opening fire on the anti-Yanukovych protesters, that is clear, but here’s a statement that Russian nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky made to Rossiya, Russia’s TV news channel, on January 31, 2014 nonetheless:

Today our client in Kyiv, the honored Viktor Federovych Yanukovych, he will show you the heat when the Olympiad ends. You will know what is Yanukovych. Right now he got sick just in case, but later it will be announced, “Spare no bullets!” And we will give bullets, instead of money we will give bullets!

When paired with all the footage of Yanukovych’s security forces firing at the Euromaidan protesters, and the fact that Yanukovych’s security services were spreading misinformation and doubts about the shootings while specifically using the phrase “this is an official theory,” it becomes clear who was opening fire on the anti-Yanukovych protesters.

To make a long story short, on February 18-20, the security forces opened fire on the Euromaidan protesters more than once, and as a result over half of the total casualties of the Euromaidan occurred in three days.

Russian bootlickers want you to ignore all the evidence and Occam’s Razor and make you think that Western provocateurs did it, but that obviously makes no sense. By February 2014, an anti-Yanukovych pro-Western revolution had already been underway for over three months and involving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. There was no need to incite or provoke the Ukrainians into opposing Yanukovych, since they were already doing so with their very lives. To send Western operatives into Ukraine to murder dozens of Ukrainians was all risk and no reward for the West. The risk was that if their guys were caught, they would weaken or even lose a giant pro-Western revolution, not to mention lowering support for the West and giving Yanukovych a golden propaganda opportunity to advocate again for Ukrainian integration with Asia.

Adapted from James A’s Rants and Presentations channel on Telegram. You can follow his channel here [6].

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

[7]If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.