Dressed for combat, Kyiv protesters return with a reborn defiance – Regina Leader
Revolutionary fervour returned to Kyiv’s Independence Square Sunday as the city defied Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats of war.
The stretch of the city centre known as the Maidan filled once more with determined Ukrainians chanting slogans and calling for change.
But the scene had changed drastically in just 24 hours.
A week after president Viktor Yanukovych fled from his post, the square had become a focus of mourning for the victims of the revolution. However, after the Kremlin’s menacing demands, demonstrators clutching flowers were outnumbered by men in fatigues.
The early threadbare crowds swelled through the day as thousands gathered to demonstrate a reborn defiance.
Around the main stage, clusters of recruiting stations for radical action groups were doing brisk business.
A guard in green and black combat clothing and a ski mask at the entrance of a boutique commandeered by the protest group Right Sector explained the newfound sense of purpose. “We’re on a war footing,” he said as a glamorous young woman stepped out of the upmarket shop and embraced him warmly.
Scores of young men lined up at the doorway to sign up for “self-defence squads” run by Right Sector.
Olexy Stepankho and Sergey Kikich, two lawyers, stood at the head of the line declaring their readiness to do their bit.
Neither was part of Ukraine army’s official reserve, so they were looking to join Right Sector instead.
“We are prepared to mobilize to go wherever we are sent to defend our country,” Stepankho, 29, said. “Russia is treating Ukraine like a joke, but this is not a joke. We did not overthrow the government to come under occupation from Russia.”
Russian press reports on the Maidan protests have seized on the swelling ranks of Right Sector as a threat to the Russian-sympathetic population of eastern Ukraine.
Russia Today republished a tweet from one of the group’s supporters directed at eastern Ukrainians: “Expect to be seeing us – scum.”
But Kikich said the revolutionaries would not attack their own countrymen.
“We respect Crimea and other eastern cities,” he said. “We want the country to come back together, not fall apart.”
On a gloomy afternoon the main speakers, including Vitali Klitschko, the former boxer, and Mikhail Saakashvili, the anti-Putin former Georgian president, rallied cheers by vowing to resist the Kremlin. A group of foreign residents was cheered as they arrived flying flags of dozens of nations. At the head of the procession was a man carrying a set of bagpipes. Nigel Thwaites, a British businessman who has lived in Ukraine for four years, said the country had jumped from an internal struggle into an international crisis.
“The propaganda against what is happening here is immense,” he said. “What is happening in Crimea has frightened people to an unimaginable extent. We are here to show support for Ukraine in the hope that it finds a way to get out of this situation.”