MOSCOW, November 21. /TASS/. The Ukrainian Maidan protest movement that took place ten years ago in Kiev put an end to the country’s history as an independent state, Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry's special envoy for the crimes of the Kiev regime, told TASS.
On November 21, 2013, a week ahead of the anticipated signing of the association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union at an Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius, the then Ukrainian government announced it was "suspending the process" of signing the agreement. This provoked mass riots in central Kiev that ultimately resulted in a three-month standoff, commonly known as "Maidan," on Kiev’s central Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Protesters seized a number of administrative buildings and set up the so-called armed "self-defense" forces which plunged into open confrontation with law enforcement agencies.
"On this date, November 21, ten years ago the peaceful existence of independent Ukraine ended. And an independent Ukraine ceased to exist, at least partially. After that there were only upheavals, unarmed and armed conflicts, political assassinations, the military operation in Donbass, bloodshed and the gradual degradation of everything the inhabitants of this country hold dear," the diplomat said.
According to Miroshnik, to see the standoff not as a large-scale orchestrated machination, but as the will of the Ukrainian people, is a "fantastic display of political short-sightedness." "At the moment when [Ukrainian journalist, later Verkhovna Rada deputy] Mustafa Nayem allegedly spontaneously called on people to 'go to the Maidan for coffee,' brigades of militants were already settling in the Dnepr Hotel on Kiev's European Square and unloading weapons and equipment for the rallies," he said.
The diplomat pointed out that the Maidan led to the paralysis of state management and law enforcement mechanisms, and this was "followed by a coup d’etat, which was immediately legitimized by the US authorities, who suggested thinking of it not as the country transitioning under external control, but a 'victory for freedom and dignity.’ This very quickly however, turned into colonial dependence and disenfranchisement."
"After the Maidan, the country devolved into something no one could have imagined: lustration, destruction of monuments, prohibition of the native language, war between the closest Slavic peoples, prohibition of canonical Orthodoxy. Ten years ago a script was written for Ukraine that brought it to this state. As soon as its resources are exhausted, it is unlikely that its current "scriptwriters" will be interested in it, and it will no longer be able to exist on its own. Then a new stage of this territory and the remnants of this people will begin, and they will enter it far from where they were before the military stage that began with the Maidan in 2013-2014," Miroshnik concluded.