Yevhen Nyshchuk is only on rotation here for a few days. Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, Nyshchuk, a theater actor, has been fighting in a drone unit deployed in the Sumy region in the east of the country, after serving in the suburbs of Kyiv and in southern Ukraine. On Thursday, February 15, seated in an artists' box at Kyiv's Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, he silently looked at photos of himself in various roles.

Ten years earlier, during the winter of 2013-2014, he was the "Voice of Maidan," addressing the crowd of demonstrators who had taken over Kyiv's central Maidan Nezalezhnosti ("Independence Square") during the Revolution of Dignity. On the night of February 18, 2014, "Maidan was reaching its highest level of intensity," he recalled. Deadly clashes had broken out, followed by an attempt by the security forces of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to disperse the protesters, who had been occupying the square for the past three months.

"We gave up nothing," recalled Nyshchuk, smiling for a brief moment. "We fought for our values and for our dignity, and this victory confirmed the desire for independence in a nation confronted with Russia's imperialist ambitions."

'All those dead in the streets'

Three days later, on the night of February 21, 2014, Yanukovych fled to Russia, where he still resides. Ivan Sautkin, a filmmaker who helped create the Ukrainian documentary collective Babylon'13, which aimed to cover the protests in order to counter the regime's propaganda, remembers a bitter victory. "Sure, we bought a few bottles of alcohol and all drank together," he said. "But all those dead in the streets... it was very painful and traumatic."

However, the joy of the pro-European Maidan demonstrators was short-lived. Very soon, "little green men," Russian soldiers without insignia, took possession of Crimea, a disguised operation that would lead to the annexation of the peninsula through a sham referendum on March 16, 2014. Then the war in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine began, triggered by violent demonstrations by Ukrainians who were opposed to the new government in Kyiv. Eight years later, in February 2022, Vladimir Putin justified the invasion of all of Ukraine, claiming, he said, to eliminate threats coming from the "neo-Nazi regime" that had taken hold in Ukraine after the 2014 coup.

For all Ukrainians, the Maidan Uprising marked the beginning of a decade of war with Russia. On November 21, 2023, the anniversary of the start of the demonstrations sparked by Yanukovych's refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU), the current President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of a "first victory" against the invader. Vitaliy Deyneha, the founder of a leading military charity, Come Back Alive, established in the wake of the revolution, also considers that the 107 demonstrators killed at Maidan were the first victims of the confrontation with Russia. "This is where it all began," he said.

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