by Stefano Caprio

Regardless of its leaders and its political and cultural expressions, Ukraine must be rebuilt not only in terms of its cities and houses, as imagined by the Great Real Estate Developer who has ascended to the throne of the American empire. It must be rebuilt as a border crossing between resentment and hope, between Russia and the rest of the world.

The end of the war between Russia and Ukraine is approaching, at least as a necessary truce due to exhaustion on both sides, and also due to the surreal announcements of the new American president Donald Trump, who dreams of the Palestinian Gaza Beach on one side, and the treasure island of rare Ukrainian earth on the other.

We are now approaching the third anniversary of the Russian invasion, which according to Putin would have reached Kiev if it hadn't been for the deceitful promises of European leaders, who promised Ukraine's surrender if the Russians had been a little patient.

And we are in the crucial month of the end of winter, never so warm in the northern lands, to the point that you can almost take a dip in the Arctic to the delight of the Russians, who see the melting of the ice barriers to world domination.

We are in the ‘hot’ month of the Ukrainian revolts, the ‘month of the Maidan’ , reminiscent of the events of 2014, when between 22 December and 22 February the Spetsnaz Berkut, the Soviet-heritage team of the Ukrainian services still led by the Russians, systematically opened fire on demonstrators in Kiev's central square, killing over a hundred people, an event that is remembered every year in Ukraine as the real beginning of the Russian war.

The memory of those who spent the winter not only in Kiev's Maidan, the ‘free square’ according to the original meaning of the term, but also in those of all the cities of Ukraine, cannot be erased.

We collect the stories, photographs and comments of that month of Memoriz, so as not to lose the spirit of those days in the face of the tragedies that have followed in the years up to the present day.

Some time has passed, the war has transformed from a hybrid to an incandescent one, and therefore settled and trench-like, but the Kremlin's aims have always remained the same: to re-swallow the Ukrainian ‘Little Russia’, the ‘agricultural belly’ of the fertile lands that feed Great Russia, which are now also tempting to America because of the precious minerals they contain.

The Euro-Maidan of 2014, after all, in turn recalls the Maidan of 2004, the ‘Orange Revolution’ that took place between November and January in all the Ukrainian squares, in the first clash between the Kremlin candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, and the pro-Western former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko. In the run-off, the Kremlin-backed ‘Party of Regions’ of Donetsk ‘corrected’ about 750,000 votes in favour of Yanukovych, sparking mass protests in Kiev's Maidan Nezaležnosti, or ‘Independence Square’, with demonstrations that lasted several weeks.

The ‘revolution’ began on 21 November 2004, when it was announced that Yanukovych had won with 3% more votes than his opponent. The western and central regions, including the capital Kiev, supported Yushchenko, while the ‘vassal of the Kremlin’ was supported by the eastern and southern regions, now ‘annexed’ by Putin's war.

Many European politicians tried to act as mediators, including the Polish president Aleksandr Kwasniewski, the NATO secretary and European commissioner Xavier Solana, the Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus and the former president of Poland Lech Walesa.

On 3 December 2004 the Supreme Court of Ukraine recognised the invalidity of the elections, due to interference in the media and the violation of many other rules, and the elections were repeated on 26 December, when Yushchenko won with a 7.8% margin.

In those days, masses of half a million people gathered in Maidan Square for about two months, pitching their tents in the snow, as happened ten years later, again against Yanukovych, who became prime minister after the poisoning of Yushchenko, and who had refused the agreements with the European Union.

More than twenty years have passed, and what could have been done at the time to stop the war was neither sufficient nor understood, dragging Europe and the whole world into a redefinition of the political, economic, cultural and religious equilibrium. Much more than Ukraine's independence was at stake on the Maidan, and the tragedies of the last three years have made this clear to everyone.

In 2004 it was possible to avoid open clashes and casualties, which instead occurred in 2014, and became mass tragedies in 2022. The Kremlin did not forget the protesters' demands, and in 2014 it had no qualms about ordering the direct shooting of people in front of the cameras in the square of one of Europe's central capitals, on live television, even overcoming the hesitations of Yanukovych himself, who was trying to avoid direct confrontation.

Now the deposed president is spending his retirement in a villa on the outskirts of Moscow, together with his fellow sufferer Bashar Assad, who was also forced to flee Syria. Yanukovych's youngest son, Viktor Viktorovich, drowned in Lake Baikal in Siberia in 2015 in mysterious circumstances, as did several other people linked to the deposed president, while his other son, Aleksandr, now earns billions by selling coal from the mines of Donbass, the Russified region of which his father was governor at the beginning of his political career.

The reconquest of Ukraine has been one of Vladimir Putin's political aims since the beginning of his presidency, a quarter of a century ago, while he was busy putting out the fires of the civil war in Chechnya and bringing order to the Caucasus, the first region he had to deal with and which was showing the instability caused by the end of the Soviet Union.

What they needed was the money, accumulated thanks to the oil business with the West, which allowed the conflicts to begin thanks to the reserves accumulated in the early 2000s, which are now running out just in time to divide the territory with the new American president, a ‘practical man’ welcomed by the Kremlin.

Trump's special envoy for the Ukraine crisis, Keith Kellogg, has begun to say that once the war operations have ceased, Volodymyr Zelenskyj should call presidential and parliamentary elections, and so we go back to 2004, with the game of the parties pleasing to Moscow, in times when interference and manipulation are even easier and more systematic, thanks to new technologies.

After the first Maidan in 2004, the Russians managed in various ways to ‘buy’ the government and the president, the speaker and the vice-speaker of the Verkhovnaja Rada and the parliamentary majority, to the point of appointing a leadership of the Ukrainian army totally under Moscow's control; yet Ukraine then shook off the master's chain.

However, we can't forget how closely the two peoples are linked, in reality the two faces of the same people, heirs of ancient Rus', as the Russians like to repeat, leaving out the fact that the Ukrainian part has always been oriented towards the West, despite all the attempts to keep it tied to Eurasian East.

From the Kremlin the accusations of ‘Western invasion’ are repeated obsessively, blaming the Americans and the Europeans, the British and NATO, when the conflict is inherent in the very soul of Russia, in its history and its culture, and also in its religion that cannot in any way be separated from the Christian and Western world, no matter how much it tries to reformulate itself in militant and exclusive Orthodoxy, also in opposition to the other Orthodox Churches starting from the patriarchate of Constantinople, which even in these days has reaffirmed the ‘irreversibility of Ukrainian autocephaly’, proclaimed in January 2019.

The Russians no longer know who to blame, the only ones missing are the Martians and the Reptilians, who will soon enter the geopolitical scene, given the intention of Trump and his sponsor Elon Musk to colonise Mars as well. And who knows, maybe one day even that will be proclaimed part of the ‘Russian world’, if only for its warlike title.

The real adversary is still the Ukrainian people, who are showing that it is possible to live the legacy of ancient Kiev without imperial pretensions, but as part of the Europe of different peoples and cultures, of Greek, Latin, Saxon and Slavic Christians, as it has been formed over the centuries.

Putin's propaganda fails to overcome two absolutely taboo expressions, that of ‘war’, replaced by ‘special operation’, and that of Ukraine itself, the title of ‘border’ that they don't want to recognise, using the epithets of ‘uchronazists’ or the definition of malorossy, the ‘little Russians’, so as not to admit that there is a people equal to and opposed to themselves.

The Ukrainian people, exhausted and disorientated, themselves heirs to the thousand contradictions of the Soviet pretensions of grandeur and isolation from the world, are today the true bearers of a new hope for the future of Europe, of the West, of universal peace. Leaving aside its leaders and its political and cultural expressions, today very much conditioned by the conflict with the Russians, Ukraine must be rebuilt not only in terms of cities and houses, as imagined by the Great Real Estate Developer who has risen to the throne of the American empire, who only sees holiday villages and residential complexes as hope for the future.

The inner Ukraine within each person's soul must be rebuilt, a border crossing between resentment and hope, between Russia and the rest of the world, because a world that excludes peoples and the millions of people who make them up cannot be built, whatever their faults and claims, their stories and tragedies. Ukraine is the prophecy of a world without borders.

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• Ukraine
• Maidan
• Russia
• Kiev
• Putin
• war
• Trump