60 Seconds on Earth: This is what Kyiv’s Maidan looks like now
Repairs have begun, but much of Kyiv’s main square remains a memorial to those who died in protests.
KYIV, Ukraine — It’s a vast open-air museum, a moment of history frozen in time as if nobody wants to touch anything or clean anything up, just yet.
Maidan, or Independence Square, is also a mausoleum to the "heavenly hundred" who died in these protests.
Everywhere you look there are photographs of the dead, framed by flowers. People walk around speaking in hushed tones, looking stunned, snapping pictures with smartphones.
I hadn’t been to Kyiv or Maidan until Wednesday.
A week ago GlobalPost sent me straight to Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border where pro-Russian protests have turned violent. The region would likely be the next place Vladimir Putin might invade if he decided not to stop at Crimea.
Eastern Ukraine feels like a separate country from Kyiv.
Donetsk, like the capital, has wide boulevards, parks and a cosmopolitan cafe scene. But stray into the villages and towns of the Donbass coalfield and it’s a gray world of barren plains, Soviet-style housing blocks and smoke-belching, century-old steel plants.
It’s also a world away politically.
People speak Russian, not Ukrainian, and have strong links to the former motherland. While some in Donetsk cheered the toppling of Viktor Yanukovych, many see the new order — or, in their view, new lack of order — as a threat to their way of life. One vocal section of the population is calling on Russia to annex the east.
Since a pro-Russian mob attacked a pro-Kyiv demonstration on March 13, killing a 22-year-old protester, groups who support what happened in Maidan have gone quiet, frightened to voice their opinions in public.
Even the flags are different from in Kyiv. The yellow-and-blue national flag of Ukraine became a symbol for the Maidan movement, and it's conspicuously absent in Donetsk.
Instead, pro-Russian protesters have stormed government buildings and hoisted Russian flags. Red Soviet hammer-and-sickles flutter above their seemingly permanent protest camp in downtown Lenin Square.
I’d had a pretty one-sided view of the country, to say the least. So on a layover in Kyiv I got a taxi downtown with my camera and took a walk through the towering barricades, past the ripped up paving stones protesters and riot cops hurled at each other.
I’d seen the battles on TV, the snow and the fire, and knew the death toll.
But to get a real sense of the divide between east and west Ukraine, I needed to smell the gasoline and see people crying as they left bunches of carnations on piles of burnt out tires, all amid a sea of yellow and blue flags. And to see how delicate the balance is in this country right now, even without a Russian invasion.
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