Maidan Two Years Later: It Couldn't Be Any Worse

The AntiMaidan is a broad movement to prevent the spread of regime change techniques from Ukraine to Russia. On the second anniversary of the coup in Ukraine it came out with this statement:

 “The 2014 Kiev coup is often called the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan. It was President Yanukovych’s hesitancy to sign the association agreement with the EU that supposedly was the main reason for a three-month  confrontation between the authorities and the opposition. The association agreement with the EU wasn’t promising so much as to trigger something like that. Indeed, time has shown that the Ukraine was merely a pawn in the West’s game against Russia.   

Today, the prospects for European integration raised in ‘Independence Square’ are not only not being considered in Brussels: they don’t even exist, just as the former Ukraine doesn’t exist any more. The artificially formed territorial entity will continue to collapse in an irreversible process that will throw hundreds of thousands into misery. More than 8,000 people died during the military operation against the people’s republics in the Donbass that rose against Kiev, with 2.5 million becoming refugees.       

Two years ago, Ukrainians gathered in Kiev had very different images of the future. “We’ll have good jobs because the European Union will give us money to modernize production”. “They will invest”. “I want my children to be able to get on plane to London or Paris”. “We’ll be able to travel around Europe and participate in its projects”. But things turned out quite differently.

Here are some figures. In 2013 before Maidan, the inflation rate was 0.5%. By the end of 2015, it was 39.5%. According to The Washington Post, real inflation reached 272%. The severing of commercial ties resulted in a serious production slump; imports were reduced by 33.9%, industrial production decreased by 16.6%. Many millions of people are now below the poverty line as a result of rising utility rates, the crash of the hryvna and massive unemployment.     

As for Ukrainians’ trust in Poroshenko, it is at 17% -  3% lower than Yanukovych’s in January 2014.   

These  statistics represent  a small portion of the consequences of the civilian catastrophe, whose initiators still rule the Ukraine.” 

Сomments Nikolai Starikov, Russian politician, historian and co-chair of the Anti-Maidan movement:

If the Yanukovich government had succeeded in stopping the anti-democratic actions of the opposition in Kiev in 2014, it would have gone down in history as a riot, and many people would still be alive. This answers the  question whether the authorities should use force toward citizens who challenge the Constitution. 

The most important conclusion of Maidan is that today no one except Ukrainian politicians, who play to the gallery, can guarantee the continuing existence of the Ukrainian state. Any country that experiences chaos, a civil war or loss of territory after a coup will struggle, but the Ukraine tragedy is a dire warning for the world. Today, some people want to implement a similar scenario in our country. The ‘Orange’ - or ‘Maidan’ -technique consists of manipulating people’s minds, and can lead to the overthrow of any government in any state under any leader, at any moment. 

Given this danger, I think the Anti-Maidan movement underlines the need for social structures that can thwart of efforts to ‘Maidanize’ other states as in the Ukraine”.