As a teenage activist he learned that even if you were trampled and dispersed you could still set something going. Small acts of defiance could grow
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskHe had been there for several nights, sleeping in college lectures rather than miss anything. But on that night, the 30th, something odd started to happen. The stage they had set up for speeches was being taken down. People began to shout, and suddenly hundreds of riot police burst into the square, laying about them with sticks.
Ukraine after the revolution was still not the country he wanted it to be. Corruption flourished there. Businessmen were in cahoots with the government, illegality was covered up and bribes were passed round freely. For civic activists, as he soon became—having realised how his bright, direct gaze could galvanise people—it was a dangerous place. Those who spoke out faced rough treatment, foot-dragging courts and no police investigations.
Early protests were mild, with pipers, fiddlers and himself with a megaphone encouraging a straggling band of citizens, some with their dogs, to block the road that ran by the park. But he also confronted the thugs in high-viz who guarded the building site, got pushed away and had his phone smashed. High-ups from the building company threatened to break his back and make him disappear. They began to watch his house, so for a time he moved out.
Soon enough, however, another war intervened; or perhaps it was all one war, to build a better, purer and more beautiful Ukraine. On the first day of the Russian invasion, he volunteered. Before proper volunteer units were even formed he had made his own in Kyiv, naturally called “Protasiv Yar”, and went shopping to buy small drones to spy out Russian military positions.
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