The Barricades Don’t Care About Your Coffee

In Kyiv in January 2014, while most of Europe was inside keeping warm, the Maidan protests were becoming something that no longer looked like protest. Masked demonstrators were throwing Molotov cocktails at Berkut—the interior ministry’s riot police, whose name translates to "golden eagle" and whose methods were not golden at all. Buildings burned. The government called it a threat to the country. That word, "threat," doing a lot of work for a president who had just cracked down violently on his own citizens for wanting closer ties to Europe.

Vitali Klitschko—still primarily known as the boxer at that point, though he was becoming the face of the opposition—put out a video appeal asking people to come to Kyiv. You’re needed here so that Ukraine wins and not Yanukovych, he said. Something stirring and strange about it: a man who’d made his career being hit in the face asking people to go stand in front of riot police. Not so different, maybe.

I followed all of this from a warm room, watching footage of burning tires and crowds in the dark, feeling the particular guilt of the comfortable observer. You know that feeling—you’re watching something that matters enormously and you’re not there and you’re not going, and the coffee in your hand starts to feel like an accusation. The protests eventually toppled Yanukovych. The war that followed would take another decade to fully arrive. None of that was visible yet in the smoke over the Maidan.