A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
Protesters throw Molotov cocktails at Ukrainian troops during the Maidan protests on January 19, 2014. (Mstyslav Chernov / Wikimedia Commons)
In 2014 Ukraine, great power gamesmanship, righteous anger at a corrupt status quo, and opportunistic far-right extremists toppled the government in the Maidan Revolution. Today’s crisis in Ukraine can’t be understood without understanding Maidan.
It’s January. A defiant crowd of protesters, a jumble of bodies where far-right extremists rub shoulders with everyday people, wants the head of the elected president. They chant anti-government slogans, occupy government buildings, and carry arms — some of them makeshift melee weapons, some of them hunting rifles and Kalashnikovs. By the time it’s all said and done, the demonstrations will lead to the death and hospitalization of both protesters and police.
It’s not the Capitol riot in Washington that so horrified Americans and foreign observers in 2021. This was the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution (or Euromaidan), which right around this time eight years ago actually succeeded in toppling the country’s elected government, sending then president Viktor Yanukovych fleeing for his life to neighboring Russia.
Nearly a decade on, the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, as it’s known in Ukraine, remains one of the more widely misunderstood episodes of recent history. Yet understanding it is critical to understanding the ongoing standoff over Ukraine, which can largely be traced back to this polarizing event — depending on who you ask, an inspiring liberal revolution or a far-right coup d’état.
Great Power Groundwork for Rebellion
Like today’s Russia-NATO tensions more broadly, at the heart of the Maidan protests was the push by some Western governments, especially the United States, to isolate Russia by supporting the integration of peripheral parts of the former Soviet Union into European and Atlantic institutions — and Moscow’s pushback against what it saw as an encroachment on its sphere of influence.
In 2014, the man forced to navigate these tensions, Viktor Yanukovych, was taking his second crack at the Ukrainian presidency. He had first been ousted after the 2004 Orange Revolution that followed widespread charges of vote-rigging in the election that brought him to power. Before running again six years later, Yanukovych had worked to rebuild his reputation, becoming the country’s most trusted politician.
By 2010, international monitors had declared the most recent election free and fair, an “impressive display” of democracy, even. But once in power, Yanukovych’s rule was again marred by widespread corruption, authoritarianism, and, for some, an uncomfortable friendliness to Moscow, which had made no secret of its backing him in the previous election. The fact that Ukraine was starkly divided between a more Europe-friendly West and Center and a more pro-Russia East — the same lines that largely determined the election — only added to the complication.
Yanukovych was in a tricky spot. Ukraine relied on cheap gas from Russia, but a plurality of the country — not, crucially, an absolute majority — still wanted European integration. His political career was caught in the same bind: with his party formally allied to Vladimir Putin’s own United Russia party, his pro-Russia base wanted to see closer relations with its neighbor; but the oligarchs who were the real reason he had gotten anywhere near the presidency were financially entangled with the West, and they feared competition to their grip on the country from across the Russian border. All the while, two geopolitical powers in the form of Washington and Moscow hoped to use these cleavages to draw the country into their respective orbits.
So, for four years, Yanukovych toed a fine line. He pleased his base with symbolic and cultural measures, like talk of unity or cooperation with Moscow in key industries — even if much of it went nowhere — along with more serious steps like making Russian an official language, rejecting NATO membership, and reversing his pro-Western predecessor’s move to glorify Nazi collaborators as national heroes in school curricula.
His biggest sop to Moscow, though, came early in his term, when he struck a deal letting the Russian Black Sea Fleet use Crimea as a base until 2042, in exchange for discounted Russian gas. Its hurried passage was marked by fistfights and smoke bombs in the Ukrainian parliament.
For all the charges then and since that he was a Kremlin puppet, though, there was a hard ceiling to Yanukovych’s eastward turn. His noncommittal stance on joining a Russian-led customs union of former Soviet republics, even when Putin dangled the prospect of even cheaper gas prices, frustrated Moscow. So did his outright rejection of Putin’s proposal to merge the two nations’ respective state-owned gas giants, effectively handing Moscow control of the Ukrainian pipelines it used to ferry almost all of its gas exports to Europe. In turn, Moscow refused to renegotiate the hated and one-sided 2009 gas contract between the two that had been struck by the last Ukrainian government.
Meanwhile, Yanukovych worked with and publicly encouraged Western involvement in updating Ukraine’s natural gas infrastructure and insisted again and again that “European integration is the key priority of our foreign policy.” He kept working toward European Union membership, and to that end pursued a free trade agreement with the EU as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan the West urged him to take.
That financial lifeline came with a heavy price familiar to the many poor countries that have turned to the West for bailouts: the elimination of tariffs, a wage and pension freeze, spending cuts, and the end of gas subsidies to Ukrainian households. The grim potential of such Western-imposed austerity, on display for all to see in Greece at the time, was presumably worth it to Yanukovych if it kept Moscow’s nose out of his business.
It was all this that led the liberal Brookings Institution to describe Yanukovych’s foreign policy as “more nuanced” than his pro-Russian leanings had first suggested. It was also what wound up sealing his fate.
To halt this drift to the West, Putin performed a one-man good-cop, bad-cop routine, offering Yanukovych a no-strings-attached loan the same size as the IMF’s, while squeezing him with what amounted to a mini–trade blockade. With the EU failing to offer anything that would match the catastrophic loss of trade with Russia that Ukraine was looking at, Yanukovych made the calculated choice to go with Moscow’s offer. In November, he abruptly reneged on the EU deal, sparking the protests that would topple him from power.
Axis of Convenience
While the deal’s rejection was the spark — with protesters crying “treason” and chanting “Ukraine is Europe” — the protests were about much more. As one Kyiv resident told the press, “If the deal is signed now, I won’t leave the protest.”