A group of Kyiv students is setting up an improvised picnic on the parapet of a fountain on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti. They cut rough slices of brown bread, and top it generously with fish in tomato sauce from a freshly open can. More cans are stacked in the bed of the non-working fountain, waiting to be opened.
One of the students in the group holds up a poster, offering free food and coffee for anyone who needs it.
“People just bring us food, and we simply lay it out,” says Kseniys Chirva, one of the volunteers in the group. They have only been at it for about 10 minutes, but their picnic service is getting popular.
“We have only just met 20 minutes ago right here, on Maidan,” says Oleksandr Chagayev, another student.
Asked how long they will stay, he grins and says: “Till the last client leaves.” Chirva raises her hand, and shouts, mimicking a McDonald’s restaurant: “Free till!” They all roar with laughter.
The group is completely independent, acting on the spur of the moment and without any outside coordination. But there is an organized group of volunteers on Maidan Nezalezhnosti – just like nine years ago during the Orange Revolution when people carried food and warm clothes to the city’s main square and volunteered their time and money to coordinate the activity of the protesters.
Yegor Sobolev, a civic activist, is coordinating the volunteers who have a base under Maidan Nezalezhnosti’s stella. “We have thousands of volunteers by now,” he says.
People offer their help to guard the site, clean the mess, cook in the kitchen, find places to stay for those arriving from outside Kyiv and organize rotation of those who play music and give speeches round the clock, among other duties.
“Some cool businessmen showed up today and set up wi-fi here, it has been working perfectly since then,” Sobolev says. Another group is setting up a new sound system, which he said is “super-cool.”
There are other groups of volunteers whose activities rotate around the stage at the European Square, the second site that is running around the clock in Kyiv. There, the activities are coordinated by three oppositional parties, as opposed to civic activists, though.
Sobolev says that EuroMaidan volunteers will have a new activity to tend to as of Monday, Nov. 25. They will go to students in universities and out into the streets giving out leaflets and explain to people that it’s important to keep the momentum going – at least until the Eastern Partnership summit on Nov. 28-29, where Ukraine hoped to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union.
The nation’s government unexpectedly backed out of the deal on Nov. 21, citing pressure from Russia.
“On the (Nov.) 28, we want to show the Europeans at the summit that there is a lot of support in Ukraine for an association. And on Nov. 29, we went to either celebrate or decide how to remove this government, which could not carry out the will of the people,” Sobolev says.
Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]
