Many believe that it was a young man from Lviv, Volodymyr Parasiuk, who prompted Viktor Yanukovych to cut and run as Ukraine’s president.
Volodymyr Parasiuk of Lviv may have issued the ultimatum on Feb. 21 that convinced Viktor Yanukovych to flee the presidency and Ukraine.
Parasiuk, who participated in the EuroMaidan protests as a commander of one of the people’s self-defense units, ran on to the stage of Kyiv’s Independence Square on Feb. 21. He interrupted speeches of opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko, Oleh Tyahnybok and Arseniy Yatseniuk, who came to the main square to announce that Yanukovych has agreed to early presidential elections – but only in December.
The crowd booed and Parasiuk seized the moment.
“There is no way! No way that Yanukovych will rule Ukraine for the whole year. Tomorrow at 10 a.m. he must go,” Parasiuk said. He threatened that he and his unit would attack with weapons if the opposition leaders did not demand Yanukovych’s resignation as president by 10 a.m. on Feb. 22.
Yanukovych might have been watching and listening to the live video stream, because he fled his palatial Mezhyhirya palace late on Feb. 21.
Russian news agencies say that Yanukovych now plans to hold a press conference on Feb. 28 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where he has evaded an arrest warrant and evidently sought political asylum, while still claiming that he’s Ukraine’s president.
Parasiuk addressed “our politicians that are standing behind my back,” he said. “My brother-in-arms from Yavoriv, Lviv Oblast, were shot dead. His wife and a little child lost a father. And our leaders shake hands with this murderer? What a shame! We all have reached this crucial moment. We have given politicians the chance to become ministers, presidents and they don’t want to fulfill our only demand: Out with the criminal!”
Parasiuk said people are tired of talking and do not want any more negotiations.
“Seventy seven people died and they keep negotiating. I beg you! Support this suggestion. I tell you from my unit, where my father is with me. If by 10 a.m. tomorrow, opposition leaders do not officially demand Yanukovych to resign, we will take weapons and attack! This I swear,” he said and left the stage.
It only took a few hours for Parasiuk to become a celebrity hero of the EuroMaidan revolution that toppled Yanukovych.
Men started coming up to the Music Academy building on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, where his civilian defense unit was located, to shake his hand. Women sought pictures with him and his autograph.
He gave some interviews to journalists before becoming overwhelmed with the attention.
“I couldn’t even imagine that something like this would start, I just did what I felt I should have done,” he told Observer newspaper. “But do not assign any achievements to me. I am not a hero! Heroes are those who died, our heavenly hundred. I am just a tiny grain of sand compared to them.”
Parasiuk is 25, unmarried and works as a cameraman, despite his master’s degree in economics.
His whole family is with him in Kyiv. “My mother, my dad, my sister, her husband and their 4-month-old daughter and 5-year-old son. We all live in an apartment of a Kyiv professor in the city center, she just let us in so that kids would be fine,” he said. “I am a simple man, nothing outstanding,” he smiled shyly and looked down, while being interviewed on Hromadske TV.
He refused interviews because they take “too much time,” he told Observer newspaper on Feb. 26. “I understood that half of the time I just talk about ‘how it was,’ while the situation in the country is still very complicated and we have to continue fighting.”
He told journalists, however, that he and the rest of EuroMaidan will hold Ukraine’s new government accountable. He complained on Feb. 26 on Independence Square, for instance, that the new Interior Minister Arsen Avakov “should have been getting criminals in prison from the first day, but hasn’t. My unit and I say: ‘Tomorrow there should be a different interior minister.’”
But this time, Parasiuk’s words had no effect. On Feb. 27, parliament approved Avakov as the nation’s top cop. He posted his reaction on his Facebook page: “If five days is not enough for a minister to arrest criminals that do not even hide, five years would not also be enough for him,” he wrote.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected]
