Euromaidan

Euromaidan was a wave of protests in Ukraine that began on 21 November 2013, after President Viktor Yanukovych's government unexpectedly halted plans to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Centred on Kyiv's Independence Square, the Maidan, the movement grew into a broader revolt against corruption and abuse of power. After deadly clashes in February 2014, Yanukovych fled the capital and parliament removed him, events that were quickly followed by Russia's annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine and the EU had initialled an association agreement in 2012, though EU leaders warned they would not ratify it while concerns about democracy persisted, including the jailing of the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Russia opposed the deal and in August 2013 halted Ukrainian imports at its border, a move widely read as opening a trade war. On 21 November the government suspended preparations to sign, citing falling industrial output and ties with its eastern neighbours. Russia, for its part, offered loans of US$15 billion and lower gas prices with no reform conditions attached. Yanukovych attended the EU summit in Vilnius on 28–29 November but did not sign.

The first rally, on the night of 21 November, drew about 1,500 people after a journalist called for it on Facebook. Students joined in growing numbers. Early on 30 November riot police violently cleared the square, and the anger this caused brought hundreds of thousands into the streets on 1 December. Protesters built a fortified camp on the Maidan, with kitchens, medical posts and a stage, guarded by volunteer self-defence units. Police tried to clear it again on 11 December. Their demands widened to the resignation of the government and of Yanukovych himself, the release of detainees and an end to corruption.

Ukraine was divided. Polls in December 2013 found roughly 45 to 50 per cent of Ukrainians supporting the protests and a similar share opposed, with strong backing in Kyiv and the west and much less in the south and east.

On 16 January 2014 parliament passed sweeping restrictions on protest, which opponents called the "dictatorship laws". Clashes on Hrushevsky Street from 19 January left three protesters shot dead, and activists went on to occupy regional government buildings, mainly in western Ukraine. The worst violence came on 18–20 February, when protesters advancing on parliament were fired on by riot police and snipers. Almost 100 protesters and 13 police officers were killed in those days. In 2015 the prosecutor's office of the International Criminal Court concluded that violence against protesters had been actively promoted or encouraged by the authorities.

On 21 February, with mediators from the EU and Russia, Yanukovych and opposition leaders signed a deal for a unity government, constitutional reform and early elections; the Russian representative did not sign. Many protesters rejected anything short of his resignation. That evening police withdrew from central Kyiv and Yanukovych left the city. On 22 February parliament, after many members of his party had defected, voted to remove him and set early elections. He later reached Russia, where he has lived in exile, and in 2019 a Ukrainian court found him guilty of treason. His removal remains contested: the Russian government has described it as an unconstitutional, Western-backed coup, while the protesters and Ukraine's new authorities saw it as a popular revolution.

The protests killed more than 100 people in total, among them 108 protesters and 13 police, and injured some 2,500. Within weeks of Yanukovych's fall Russia annexed Crimea and pro-Russian unrest spread in the east, the beginning of a conflict that eventually escalated into the Russo-Ukrainian war. The February climax is often called the Revolution of Dignity, and Euromaidan has been called Europe's biggest democratic mass movement since the Revolutions of 1989. It remains a founding moment in the recent history of Ukraine.

Our 2010 map shows Ukraine's borders a few years before the protests, as they had stood since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.