The sun was shining as families walked down the street in Kiev, passing trees festooned with paper angels and flowers dotting the ground. Children clutched red carnations and candles, placing them beside a series of stark portraits running along the wall.
The black-and-white images showed young and old faces: Ivan Horodniuk, 29, choreographer; Vladysym Zubenko, 22, railway worker; Bohdan Kalyniak, 52, entrepreneur; Antonina Dvoretska, 62, pensioner.
These are the ‘heavenly hundred’ – pro-democracy protesters slaughtered on this spot eight years ago in mysterious shootings before Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
Galina, a 68-year-old pensioner, brought tulips to place before the memorials to five men she had seen murdered in news footage
Galina, a 68-year-old pensioner, brought tulips to place before the memorials to five men she had seen murdered in news footage, saying she came every year because ‘it felt like I lost my own sons’.
These brutal events – which I reported on in 2014 and recalled yesterday as I walked alongside those who came to mark the massacre – were the start of Moscow’s war on Ukraine that continues to this day.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky visited with his wife Olena to lay flowers, saying the victims gave their lives ‘for the right to live in an independent state, in the family of European nations’.
His words were a sobering reminder of what is at stake in the struggle between democracy and dictatorship as Russian forces mass on Ukraine’s borders and Boris Johnson chillingly warns that we might be on brink of ‘the biggest war in Europe since 1945’.
The West’s rhetoric over Ukraine might often sound inflammatory. Yet yesterday’s commemorative events serve as a tragic warning of what Russia’s brutal President Vladimir Putin can do.
But even after five weeks in Ukraine, visiting 12 cities and frozen trenches on the frontline, I find it hard to see through the fog of this weird war, let alone to discern what might be in Putin’s malevolent mind regarding his menacing military machine.
Some things, however, are clear.
We know Russia invaded Ukraine eight years ago resulting in a war that has left 14,000 people dead – and still directs events in the breakaway Donbas ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, including with it military forces.
Britain, although still facing fierce criticism over its failure to tackle dirty Russian money, has become rather popular as a result in Ukraine
We also know that the
