Independence Square, January

January 2014, and Kyiv looked like something from a century we were supposed to have outgrown. Molotov cocktails arcing into riot police. The city center turned to smoke and broken glass. At least two protesters shot dead overnight.

Prime Minister Mykola Azarov blamed the demonstrators, as governments always do when their monopoly on violence gets challenged by people with bottles. The responsibility for the casualties rests with the organizers and participants of the mass unrest, he told a cabinet meeting. Then: They are criminals who must be held accountable for their actions. Whatever you make of the politics, that’s not the language of anyone preparing to de-escalate.

The protests had been building since November, when Yanukovych backed away from an EU association agreement under pressure from Moscow. What started as a pro-European demonstration in Independence Square—the Maidan Nezalezhnosti—had hardened into something rawer: a confrontation about what kind of country Ukraine was going to be, and whether that was for Ukrainians to decide. By January, the answer being proposed by the government was that it was not.

Watching it from a distance had that particular quality of witnessing something you know is going to matter. The photographs were extraordinary—fire in the dark, the shadows of riot shields, that strange beauty violence in public spaces always produces, which is itself a kind of horror. You know it won’t fix anything to keep looking. You look anyway. The dread doesn’t go anywhere. And of course it didn’t end there—Yanukovych fled in February, Crimea was annexed in March, and the consequences of those weeks in Kyiv are still accumulating a decade later in ways nobody in January 2014 was fully prepared to imagine.