• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Ukraine Marks Third Anniversary Of Euromaidan

RFE/RL November 21, 2016

Thousands of Ukrainians have marked the Day of Dignity and Freedom, a holiday commemorating the 2013 beginning of the Euromaidan protests that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych.

Government officials, Maidan protest participants, and ordinary citizens are holding ceremonies in Kyiv on November 21, and placed flowers at a monument to the "Heavenly Hundred" -- protesters who were killed in clashes with security forces during the protest.

Many rallied on the capital's Independence Square, also known as Maidan, chanting: "revolution, revolution," and denouncing Russian intervention in Ukraine.

There was also a series of minor scuffles in the evening as groups of rival demonstrators faced off on the streets and there were brief clashes with security forces.

In a speech made earlier in the day, President Petro Poroshenko called on the nation to unite and stand against the Russian "threat," insisting that the former Soviet republic would never revert to its Moscow-dominated past.

"The Revolution of Dignity put an end to our Russian-Soviet past and the post-Soviet period," Poroshenko said. "It has separated our Ukrainian and European world from the Russian world."

Commemorations were being held in other cities as well.
The Euromaidan movement began when protesters gathered in central Kyiv after Yanukovych announced he was postponing plans to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union and would seek closer economic ties with Russia.

Three months later, in February 2014, Yanukovych fled to Russia and was removed from office.

Russia then illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, and an ensuing war between Kyiv's forces and Russia-backed separatists in the country's east has killed at least 9,600 people.

With reporting by AFP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-euromaidan- third-anniversary/28130367.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.