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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Ukraine’s Cautious Hope in the Mornings After Maidan

It will be difficult returning to the daily grind of American partisan politics, after observing Ukrainians give everything just so that one day their country’s system of government would be mature enough for the only fights to be petty partisan games akin to the charade between Democrats and Republicans. The collapse of the despotic regime […]
Ukraine Maidan

It will be difficult returning to the daily grind of American partisan politics, after observing Ukrainians give everything just so that one day their country’s system of government would be mature enough for the only fights to be petty partisan games akin to the charade between Democrats and Republicans.

The collapse of the despotic regime of President Viktor Yanukovych—some are calling this the Maidan Revolution, named after where it started in Independence Square—should cause everyone to pause and appreciate the fundamental freedoms and liberties that enable the partisan bluster and, at times, extreme ideological rhetoric that plague America’s body politic today.

The very idea that Ukrainians would give their life for something that most Americans take for granted was inspiring to say the least.

I will never forget watching a husband console his weeping wife as they learned their son had become a martyr for freedom. The image of her wrapped in the arms of her husband—his eyes revealing his true emotion despite attempting to maintain composure.

Then there is the Greek Catholic priest, who confessed to me that his own faith was challenged as he performed last rites for 15 freedom fighters murdered by regime snipers.

“Seeing the eyes of these fathers and kids was the hardest,” the Rev. Theodos Iveshkiv told me before he prayed at a vigil in the scorched and bloodied no man’s land between the opposition and government barricades during a ceasefire early Friday.

I was embedded for three days with Self-Defense, a volunteer force that is part militia and part constabulary.

Armed mostly with baseball bats and homemade wooden clubs, and wearing everything from surplus military garb to motorcycle and snowmobile helmets with flak jackets, the volunteers of Self-Defense were often little older than high school or college age. Some in the press portrayed Self-Defense and the other activists, who spent much of the last three months in Independence Square, as militant and nationalistic, as if that’s a bad thing. Predictably, Moscow and its surrogates called them fascists leading a “brown revolution,” a not-so-vague reference to Adolf Hitler.

In reality, I found those on the front lines to be the complete opposite.

Sure, there were hard-right elements, but there were also leftists as well as an assortment of liberals (in the classical sense), conservatives and non-ideological everyday Ukrainians. I met management consultants with firms such as Bain & Company, doctors, university graduates and others. Together, they wanted the freedoms and liberties they thought they were promised first with the demise of the Soviet Union and then with Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004.

Simply put: This was no Marxist revolution. Rather, it was probably something closer to the Glorious Revolution in Britain, which was the fuel for the Founding Fathers of our own American Revolution.

“This is a revolution with dignity,” one foreign diplomat, not authorized to speak to journalists, said during a meeting with a senior Self-Defense leader after Yanukovych fled the capital of Kiev.

His statement could not have been truer as I explored not only the presidential administration’s buildings, but also an extravagant palace not unlike Versailles. Thousands of Ukrainians would also descend on these sites to walk about, and see the full consequences of Yanukovych’s time in power.

The subway was running on time. Planes were landing and departing from the airport. Shopkeepers and restaurateurs were open for business. There was no rioting, looting, or destruction of property. (The only exception was yours truly, who managed to get on the unsecured wireless internet connection at the Yanukovych’s palace.)

While it is unclear how the former political opposition, broadly aligned in a unity coalition, will perform between now and the new elections expected in May, one thing is certain.

The thousands upon thousands of activists who descended onto Independence Square want more than just new parties in government.

They want a new Ukraine.

And that could be a major problem, as the freedom fighters have serious questions about whether the country’s current political class can truly deliver the sort of far-reaching changes needed.

Dennis Lennox is director of external affairs for Justice Fellowship and also writes a column for The Morning Sun of Mt. Pleasant, Mich.. Follow @dennislennox on Twitter or Instagram.

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