History will always remember February 18, 2014 as the day the Ukrainian people rose up and ousted President Viktor Yanukovych after the president decided to forcefully end months of protests. Protestors at the time were railing against Yanukovych's decision to break away from an association agreement with the European Union in favor of the Russian Federation.
After the initial altercation between protestors and riot police left at least 82 dead and over 1,100 injured, protestors began rioting and pushing for Yanukovych's ousting. Then on February 22, the Ukrainian Parliament impeached Yanukovych, forcing the disgraced president to flee Kiev for eastern Ukraine where he enjoyed the most political support.
Over the next few weeks, tensions have since increased, putting Russia and the United States at odds as Russian troops are deployed in parts of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. The situation is still in development, but it's getting progressively worse.
Over the next several days, I will be posting the transcript of my discussion on March 5 with Professor Victoria Somoff about the crisis. Professor Somoff is a native Ukrainian before she migrated to the United States, and she is a professor of Russian literature and culture at Dartmouth.
JS: Why do you think the Ukrainian Crisis ignited now as opposed to earlier when Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych signed the deal with Russia?
VS: This started November after a very specific particular event, namely after Yanukovych, the now-ousted President of Ukraine, rejected an association agreement with the European Union. A lot of preparation went into that agreement for his signature, and he attended the summit in Vilnius and there was an expectation that he would sign.
At the last moment, he rejected that proposal. He did not sign the agreement. It wasn’t just a random accident. It indicated very clearly his choice for Ukraine’s future. Not only did he not sign the agreement, he immediately started negotiations with Russia. Russia promised him home investments in the Ukrainian economy, Russia promised to lower gas prices. It was a clear choice on the part of Yanukovych and his Government where Ukraine was going to go. With Russia, with Putin’s regime, and not with Europe. This choice people opposed and that’s when people took to the streets protesting this specific decision and demanding the renewal of negotiations with Russia.
That’s how it all started. And Yanukovych’s response was exceptionally inadequate. He was ignoring the protests for a while. It seemed like he was trying to wait them out, and then at a certain point, he started using the riot police and brutally and violently tried to clear the protesters from the streets of Kiev, which just increased and intensified the protests. More people came out and now, at that point, it became less about the agreement, less about the demands about to sign a particular agreement and more about the Ukrainian peoples’ demands to remove Yanukovych and his regime from power for being an inadequate, incapable government, having new elections, a return to the Constitution of 2004 and other issues that were larger than the association agreement. The agreement has much more of a symbolic significance.
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