The Square That Wouldn’t Empty
A hundred thousand people on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square in Kyiv—and the government couldn’t clear them. Viktor Yanukovych had issued a ban on demonstrations. The demonstrators arrived anyway, pitched their tents, and stayed. What began as outrage over a shelved EU association agreement had become something harder to define and harder to stop.
The agreement had been pulled under pressure from Russia after years of negotiations. Ukraine had been close to signing—and then suddenly wasn’t. That’s the kind of reversal that looks, from the outside, like a political maneuver, but feels, from the inside, like a betrayal. The students understood it that way. Two major Kyiv universities, Mohyla Academy and Taras Shevchenko University, shut down because their students weren’t coming to class. They were on the square.
A 23-year-old student named Alina Rudenko had spent five nights on the Maidan. She said something that stuck: normally, Ukrainians don’t care about politics. Most people are too busy surviving materially, too cynical about politicians on any side. The people who usually show up at demonstrations, she explained, are elderly women bused in by parties. They get one euro per hour from the parties to attend.
This time was different. This time the students came on their own.
The protests had a hashtag—#EuroMaidan—and the coordination that comes with one. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle visited the square alongside opposition politician Vitali Klitschko, which was either solidarity or theater depending on your disposition. The mood evoked the Orange Revolution of 2004, when mass protests over election fraud forced a new vote and brought the pro-European Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency. Whether history would repeat was still an open question.
What pulled me in wasn’t the political mechanics—it was Ivan Bandura. He’s a designer based in Kyiv who went to document the protests on his Flickr page, just a person with a camera moving through the crowd. His photographs caught the moments between the dramatic ones: people breaking into the national anthem with tears on their faces, pensioners holding photographs silently above their heads, children shouting, students shouting, shop windows shattering. The granular texture of a city mid-rupture.
There’s something specific about a designer choosing to document this rather than simply participate or simply watch. You notice different things when you’re looking for the frame. Bandura seemed to understand that the image of a grandmother holding a photograph in the cold would outlast any political communiqué. Ukraine was in the middle of something, and he was standing inside it with his camera, and that felt like the most honest thing anyone could do.