Watching Kyiv Burn

By evening the protest camps were on fire. Security forces in Kyiv had received the order to clear the Maidan, and by the time the operation was underway at least nine people were dead—demonstrators and police both—bodies showing bullet wounds. Russian photographer Ilya Varlamov was documenting it in real time; I sat in a warm room watching his images load on a laptop screen and felt something I don’t have a clean word for.

The Euromaidan protests had been running for months by this point—hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in the streets demanding closer ties with Europe and the removal of President Yanukovych, who had abruptly reversed course on an EU association agreement under pressure from Moscow. The government had been responding with escalating force for weeks, and Tuesday brought the escalation to something that looked from the outside like open warfare: explosions at the square, tent camps in flames, the parliament building encircled by the opposition.

What I keep thinking about is the gap between what was happening there and what else happened today. I wrote about Sailor Moon coming back on TV. I watched a video of Jimmy Fallon doing the Running Man. And simultaneously, in the same sliver of the same Tuesday afternoon, people were dying in the streets of a European capital for the right to decide which direction their country faces. That gap doesn’t resolve. You just sit with it, the warm room and the burning tents on the same screen, and you don’t know what to do with that.