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“What happened on Maidan changed us. It changed Ukraine… ”

Kiev doesn′t feel like the capital of a country at war. The cheap cafés in the streets around the Opera and behind the Golden Gate are full of chat and laughter. The noticeboards outside the University building on General Bibikov Boulevard (as I prefer to call it) are thick with posters for reggae concerts, dance performances, shamanic tea-drinking, free yoga classes, an out-of-town trance festival. True, the expensive shopping malls downtown are almost deserted as the Ukrainian gryvna has lost half its value since the outbreak of fighting. And a few weeks ago local authorities distributed leaflets informing residents of the location of their nearest bomb-shelters: Vladimir Putin reportedly boasted that his troops could be in Kiev win two weeks.

Nonetheless, after the burned tyres were cleared from the Maidan in March, and the last of the tent city which had grown up there over the winter had been packed up, the capital quickly returned to an almost eerie normality. The busy MacDonald’s at one end of Maidan re-opened (even as their brother MacDonald’s in Moscow were being closed down by sanitary inspectors, apparently as punishment for US support for sanctions). At the other end, on the steep street leading up to the Hotel Ukraine, a makeshift memorial has sprung up. The hundred-odd protesters killed during Berkut’s attempt to crush Euro-Maidan between 20‑22nd February 2014 were mostly shot by snipers firing from the hotel, which stands on a commanding hill overlooking the square. They are referred to as the Heavenly Hundred. Families and friends have brought photographs of the victims, and votive candles, and miners’ helmets and ribbons. One elaborate memorial even incorporates a steel riot shield and army helmet of one of the fallen into a carved granite headstone.

“What happened on Maidan changed us. It changed Ukraine. After many centuries of distrust — or rather, trusting only your family and not any other institution — Maidan emerged as the first instance where Ukrainians really experienced cooperation. And civil society.” Yulia Mostovaya is a formidably forthright, refrigerator-shaped lady who edits the Zerkalo Nedeli magazine. We sit on the terrace of a fashionable cafe as she fiercely sucks down Vogue Slims and double espressos. The waiters serve her as gingerly as if she was a washed-up sea-mine that might explode at any moment.

“The Maidan didn’t really disperse. It continues today in a huge wave of civil activism, anti-corruption activism, volunteers fighting on the front lines. The government is insignificant compared to this, it is weak and full of compromise. This young generation have lost the habit of paternalism. The older generation were used to having everything decided for them. The new generation does things for themselves.”

Mostovaya sees scepticism creeping into my eyebrows.

“Listen,” she says, stabbing a cigarette in the air for emphasis. “In 1993, I met Madeleine Albright [then US Secretary of State]. She asked me, ‘What is the difference between Ukraine and Russia?’ I answered that if you offered a Mercedes and a million dollars to a Russian and Ukrainian with the condition that their country would have to give up their nuclear weapons, a Russian would refuse. And a Ukrainian would accept. That’s because a Russian can spend his life a drunk loser. But he feels great because he is a citizen of a country that sent a man into space. He identifies with his country. Its part of who he is. But we Ukrainians were never interested in the power of our government. We lived for so many generations under foreign powers — Turkish, Russian, Austrian and so on — that the people never trusted or liked those in power. Thats very different from Russia. In Russia power is sacred. It has been sacred for centuries. In Russia the climate is harsh. You have to rely on the collective to survive. You need a whole village to eke a life out of the soil. Here the land is so fertile you don’t need anyone else. We are a nation of smallholders, not a nation of villagers. Here we are free, while Russians were serfs. They remain serfs in their souls. That is why we will win in the end.”