UNITED NATIONS, June 1. /TASS/. Russia will hold an informal meeting of the UN Security Council dedicated to issues relating to the situation in Donbass and the Maidan events, the Russian mission to the UN said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Arria formula meeting (informal discussion with participation of civic society) on June 2 will be dedicated to "circumstances of Maidan and its consequences in Donbass." "The aim of this meeting is to give direct participants and witnesses of the Maidan events and the Donbass conflict as well as representatives of academia and political circles an opportunity to share information about Maidan and the events which were provoked by it," the mission’s statement reads.
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov, former members of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament) Oleg Tsarev and Vladimir Oleynik as well as British reporter covering Donbass events Dean O’Brien and French journalist Anne-Laure Bonnet are among those invited to attend the meeting.
Protests in Kiev’s central Maidan Nezaleznosti, or Independence, Square broke out in late 2013, when then-President Viktor Yanukovich put off signing an association agreement with the European Union in order to examine the deal more thoroughly. This move sparked mass riots, known as Euromaidan, that eventually led to a coup in February 2014, ousting Yanukovich from the presidency and forcing him to flee from Ukraine.
During the standoff in Kiev, radicals placed a tent camp in the Independence Square, seized a number of administrative buildings in the center of the city and set up the so-called ‘self-defense forces,’ which plunged into open fighting with law enforcers. In a period from February 18 to 20, 2014, more than 80 people were killed in Kiev. Hundreds were wounded. Twenty died later in hospital. Later, Yanukovich and Azarov’s government fled the country almost in full. The events can essentially be classified as a coup.