Aghast at the rise of Donald Trump and the slow disintegration of the European Union, many Ukrainians may certainly wonder about the legacy of Maidan. Foremost in the minds of many revolutionaries who sought to topple the unpopular government of Viktor Yanukovych was the overarching need to bring Ukraine into line with supposedly western standards of modernity. Yet, if anything, recent developments have served to underscore that the West is hardly a paragon of modern, pluralistic and tolerant values. Indeed, as Ukrainians seek to make due on the promise of Maidan, they may ask themselves whether the West is worthy of political or social emulation at all.
Such ironies were on vivid display recently, when I conducted my second research trip to Ukraine. The country is in the midst of Maidan’s third anniversary and during a ceremony in Kyiv, government officials, protest veterans and others placed flowers at a monument to the “Heavenly Hundred” martyrs who had been killed in clashes with the Yanukovych government. The celebration was marred by the ongoing escalating war in the east where Russian-backed separatists hold sway. Indeed, at one point demonstrators even ransacked a branch of a Russian bank. Hoping to soothe the nation and mollify fraying tempers, President Petro Poroshenko assured Ukrainians that Kyiv would never return to its Moscow-dominated past and was moving toward European modernity.
