One Bullet Each

Golineh Atai, an ARD television correspondent in Kyiv, was tweeting from her hotel balcony on February 20, 2014, asking who was giving the orders to the Berkut riot police—and then stopped going out on the balcony because her hotel windows had bullet holes in them. Protesters are searching for snipers in our hotel. Bullet holes in the stairwell. She counted more than ten bodies in the lobby below.

A reporter for the Berliner Zeitung watched from his hotel window as a group of twenty to thirty protesters advanced carefully toward a delivery van with three snipers lying on its roof. The men fired into the crowd. An AP journalist standing behind a barricade heard a shot and then a scream behind him—someone had been hit, and he didn’t know if the man survived. A cameraman on another barricade took a bullet.

Doctors confirmed what the pattern of wounds had already made clear: the snipers were hunting, not panicking. Each person was shot with a single bullet, said Dr. Dmitri Kashin to the Interfax news agency. The opposition accused the government of ordering its security forces to fire on its own citizens. The day became one of the bloodiest of the Euromaidan uprising, and the images from Kyiv’s Institutska Street are among the most harrowing documents of that winter.

I remember following this in real time and feeling something cold settle in—not just the horror of the images but the procedural clarity of what was happening. Single bullets. Deliberate aim. Someone had decided that morning that this was an acceptable action. That decision was made by human beings who woke up, had breakfast, and went to work.