Kyiv Is Burning and Nobody Is in Charge

Russian journalist Ilya Varlamov went to Kyiv to see the Euromaidan protests up close, and what he found wasn’t a revolution with a clear center—it was a street war without a commander. Many different groups are taking part in the fighting, he wrote, but one thing is clear: they are all standing against Viktor Yanukovych. They are letting their rage out now—after all those years of corruption, of the police state, of stupidity. He described an eighty-year-old man approaching the young men in gas masks to ask for a Molotov cocktail. They told him he’d never throw it far enough. He said: give me one anyway, I want to show these bastards they can’t treat me like this.

That image keeps sitting with me. Not because it’s heroic exactly, but because of what it says about accumulated humiliation. You don’t send an eighty-year-old to a street battle over ideology. You send him because he’s been waiting his entire life to throw something at someone who deserves it, and this is the first time the opportunity has felt real.

Varlamov noted that the crowds trusted nobody from the established opposition—not Vitali Klitschko, not any of his allies. The people on the street weren’t there to install someone new. They were there to remove Yanukovych, which is a structurally different project. Each of them has their own vision of Ukraine’s future, he wrote. These battles are real. But unfortunately Yanukovych is too far away, so the Berkut and soldiers have to stand in for him. That’s the bitter geometry of every uprising: the man you actually want to reach is somewhere else, and the people absorbing the violence are just doing a job for a salary.

In the center of Kyiv, black smoke rose over the Maidan. Burning barricades, gutted cars, empty buildings. Explosions somewhere in the distance, fireworks mixed into the smoke, the whole thing lit up in colors that had no business being beautiful. Five people had already died. The photographs looked like a film set—the destruction too complete, the lighting too dramatic—except people kept walking into frame anyway, an old man somewhere near the front asking for something to throw.