The Kyiv Post newspaper really wanted today’s issue to be different. Our small, dedicated and overworked team has been living and breathing EuroMaidan so much since November that readers started to complain. Give us something else to read, many told us. So this week, we planned to publish several stories that had nothing to do with the nation’s deepening and ongoing political crisis and the anti-government protests.
But then we scrapped those plans and those stories. Somehow light feature stories about musicians or movies didn’t fit the mood.
If there’s such a thing as a death holiday, Ukraine is having one now.
Since Feb. 18, at least 75 people, according to the Health Ministry, have been killed in violence. Most of them were protesters. But at least 13 of these victims were police officers. All were human beings with families, loved ones and political views. Nearly 50 were killed alone on Feb. 20.
Laughing, drinking or having fun seem out of place.
The streets in central Kyiv are filled with people, but the city still looks like a ghost town of closed businesses.
In the blocks surrounding the Kyiv Post’s offices on Pushskinska Street, in the heart of the center, it was hard to find a working business. Not the restaurants, nor the jewelers, nor the pharmacies, nor the malls, nor the clothing stores were open. A scattered street kiosk here or there was working, but not even those workers looked happy.
Some business owners felt the need to explain the reason for their closing. Some put up signs on the front doors citing “technical reasons” or declaring a “sanitary day.”
But many others simply put the “closed” sign out, abandoning any pretense of normal times. There was no real need to explain.
Businesses are closed for any number of reasons: their employees couldn’t get to work because the metro wasn’t working, Kyiv city officials asked them to close because of the threat of violence between police and protesters or the coming of the long-rumored final police crackdown, or because they feared that anti-government protesters would take over their stores – a realistic fear since the demonstrators control several buildings in central Kyiv.
A friend of mine and former Kyiv Post colleague, Stefan Korshak, said that he had evacuated his wife and two children to the countryside. “Partly, this was because of the violence in the center. But also partly, this was because there are no dance or aikido classes to distract our little monsters, er, children for the upcoming long weekend, and it’s not at all clear school will start on Monday (Feb. 24).”
Banks closed early. Big lines appeared at automatic tellers too. “As for gasoline, it is on sale but long lines for that too. This was the case in the city and in the countryside,” Korshak said. “As to violence, despite what happened today, in our neighborhood things were quiet, very much like a weekend.”
It looked like “many people are bailing out of Kyiv” to the countryside or another city, if they could, the same way as the Korshak family.
My friend is an astute observer, and he sized up the situation this way: “Here is a popular TV station owned by Ukraine’s richest man, the metals magnate Rinat Akhmetov. It is called Ukraina TV. Akhmetov used to be a close ally of President Viktor Yanukovych, but recently he’s taken to making public statements about the unacceptability of violence and the importance good ties with the European Union, even at the expense of Russia,” Korshak said. “Cynics have suggested this is because steel sells for much more in Europe than Russia. The point is, these days, the news reporting on Ukraina TV is surprisingly even-handed and even critical of the government. It wasn’t before. And that means that in the Donbas (eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, Yanukovych’s political base), where there was an information blockade like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s Russia, the region’s biggest and most popular TV station is now airing images of dead and bloody protesters followed by Berkut (riot-control police) shooting Kalashnikovs. If those images continue, people are going to get angry at the government even in the Donbass – and the government already is running low on loyal regions and cops willing to stand up to irate citizens. Heck, the fake Kyiv mayor that Yanukovych appointed (Volodymyr Makeyenko), because he made the previous mayor a scapegoat for shooting protesters in January, quit Yanukovych’s party today as well. The regime is cracking, you can see it.”
In the meantime, the city with closed businesses and full morgues and hospitals is in the midst of urban warfare, with protesters building higher barricades in the center, and expanding their perimeter, as politicans continue to dither.
If the Yanukovych regime indeed cracks and breaks up, fewer people will be sad with each passing day and each increase in the death toll. Greed, intolerance and extremism are indeed evil and destructive traits.
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected]
