When Anatoliy Motyl, 55, lights up a cigarette, his hands tremble badly. The man is one of the EuroMaidan fighters who survived February clashes that claimed the lives of some 100 protesters.
While most of his comrades returned to their home
cities, Motyl and a few others stay at Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv. After
risking their lives on the barricades, the men are not satisfied with the new government
and are ready to continue the protest. The survivors launched Arkada
Maidan Self Defense Unit on Feb. 21.
“We called it Arkada because this word was written on
a concrete brick we were hiding behind from the snipers on Instytutska Street.
I will always remember this word,” commander of Arkada unit Mykola Tokar, 26,
told journalists on March 31.
Motyl and Tokar talked to the press this week for the
first time since the clashes.
Tokar shared his feelings from Feb. 18,
the day when police also killed protesters. “There was a moment when we thought
we were not going to live till morning, but we did, thanks to Kyivans,” Tokar
said. “People were bringing tires and fuel all the time. Incredible people.”
But when the morning came and Tokar thought that the
worst part was over, “the worst was only coming.”
When just a day after the sleepless night, early in
the morning on Feb. 20, riot police
started backing off from their positions at Instytutska Street, the protesters pushed
forward.
“But it was a trap and we walked right into it. There
were snipers working around,” Tokar says. When Tokar saw the first
people falling, he went to rescue the wounded and ended up getting a hand
injury from a grenade himself.
Motyl was fighting alongside with Tokar. He arrived to
Kyiv from Lviv early on Feb. 20
and went straight to Instytutska Street.
“We were sitting behind the metal shields trying to
decide how to rebuild the barricade and I will never forget the temperature
under those shields,” Motyl said. “It was super hot around, fires were very
close and the guys were singing.”
Motyl recalls how he lost consciousness and woke up to
see someone giving him a glass of milk. “I looked around. I have never seen so
many glasses of milk in my life before,” he smiles sadly.
Motyl’s worst memory comes from later in the day, when
he saw a woman running down Instytutska Street and shouting that three more
people were dead or injured up the street.
“I found a doctor and dragged him by the hand to the
highest barricade where people were being killed. There I saw our guys. They
were trying to wake up their killed comrades. They didn’t realize they were
dead or didn’t believe,” he said, and started crying.
“We started bringing down the bodies, I was helping
with one. We carried him down on the shield while his hand was dragging on the
ground. I couldn’t stop looking at that hand. His skin wasn’t even normal
color, it was gray,” Motyl said.
It is at this point when Motyl begins to cry.
Both Motyl and Tokar have families waiting for them.
Motyl’s youngest son is six and Tokar’s is just one year old.
“Some day they will understand what this was for,”
Tokar says.
Arkada Unit is not going to give up any time soon.
Both men still wear bulletproof vests, expect attacks
any moment, and say their main mission is to “turn Maidan into an honest and
inspiring place it was before Feb. 18.”
“Now there are many drunk people there, units commanders
are selling out to the new authorities and people are start to losing faith.
But we are not letting Maidan down,” Tokar says firmly. “The country that our
comrades died for will take a lot more fighting and we will fight.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be
reached at [email protected]
