While Ukraine still mourns the victims of EuroMaidan anti-government protests in Kyiv, four Moscow-based designers and web programmers launched Remember Maidan, a website that commemorates the activists killed in the clashes between police and protesters. The team members are Russians and had nothing to do with Ukrainian protests, but thought "it was important to show the real death toll."
“We
aimed to show the size of the tragedy and our own views have nothing to
do with it,” the lead designer Boris Morozov (mostly known as Boris Verks) told Kyiv Post.
The designer said he and his friends were shocked to
find out that even the people who didn’t participate in the protest were getting involved in rough disputes about interpreting the events.
“But human death is a general tragedy, nor matter what the political preferences are,” designer explained.
The website lists dead victims on both sides – civilians and law enforcers – starting Jan. 22, when the first death took place. The total toll is 115 confirmed victims as of Feb. 26. The victims are listed by days to help see how the violence escalated and number of deaths jumped up in February.
The number is higher than the official count of Ukraine’s Health Ministry, which counted 100 victims as of the latest report.
To get the number of victims, Morozov and his friends congregated information from the Health Ministry, volunteers working for Euromaidan SOS and open sources online.
For the website background, the friends used photos provided by Ukrainian and foreign photographers and the sound recordings taken at Kyiv streets during the protests. The website is available in English.
“It was
important for us to help more people find out truth in this information
chaos,” Morozov said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
