How the coup d'état began in Ukraine #4

I continue my story about the events of the so-called Euromaidan in Ukraine.

Events on December 12 – 31, 2013.

So, in the previous part we talked about the attempt of the security forces to liberate the center of Kiev from protesters on the night of December 10-11.

 The attempt was unsuccessful; after some advance by the security forces, the opposition brought a significant number of its supporters (tens of thousands) to the Maidan of Independence and stopped the advance of government forces. After almost 11 hours of confrontation, the security forces retreated to their previous positions.

 By the morning of December 12, Euromaidan participants had restored the previous barricades and actively began building new ones.

 It must be said that the height of the barricades in some places reached four meters. The fortifications were built from car tires, wood, and construction waste bags filled with snow. On top of this, the barricades were reinforced with snow and watered to form an ice monolith.

People flock to Kiev en masse. The bulk are from Western and Central Ukraine, but there are also opposition supporters from the eastern regions.

 At the same time, in Kiev’s Mariinsky Park (next to the Verkhovna Rada and the Ministry of Health), as well as on European Square, mass open-ended rallies of the so-called “Anti-Maidan” begin, organized by the Party of Regions.

On December 13 alone, 2 thousand people from Kherson, 400 residents from Krivoy Rog, 1 thousand residents of Sevastopol, 3.5 thousand residents of Chernigov, 300 residents of Kirovograd, 1 thousand residents of Zaporozhye were sent to a rally in support of the authorities. They were also joined by 10 thousand Party of Regions activists from the Dnepropetrovsk region and 20 thousand from the Donetsk region.

On December 13, at the initiative of the authorities, a round table “Unite Ukraine” was held, to which the authorities also invited opposition leaders.

   Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Vitaliy Klitschko and Oleg Tyagnibok took part in the round table meeting. During it, they conveyed to Viktor Yanukovych the demands of participants in anti-government protests. Among the demands were the release of detained protesters and the closure of criminal cases against them, as well as the punishment of the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vitaly Zakharchenko, and other law enforcement officers responsible for the use of force against peaceful demonstrators. Another demand of the protesters is the resignation of the government headed by Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov.

Opening the meeting of the national round table “Unite Ukraine” chaired by the first President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk, Viktor Yanukovych said that he was outraged by the “radical actions that took place on the Maidan both on the part of provocateurs and on the part of security forces, who did not always behave adequately.” . He stressed that the provocateurs, whose actions led to the forceful seizure of a number of administrative buildings in Kiev, must be punished: “The perpetrators must be punished, and people who were there by chance - participants in this action by accident - both on November 30 and on other days - must be amnestied "

 It is worth noting that the words of the President of Ukraine, where he spoke disapprovingly of his security forces, shifting the blame for mass clashes onto them, caused a very mixed reaction among the security forces.

In addition, during the Round Table, Viktor Yanukovych announced the introduction of a moratorium on any forceful actions until the Verkhovna Rada considers all the risks posed by the Association Agreement with the European Union in its current form. He also proposed that the Verkhovna Rada vote on December 17 for an amnesty for those detained during mass protests in Kiev and called on the opposition to use the Verkhovna Rada as a platform for negotiations in order to find ways out of the current political crisis and finalize the Association Agreement.

 However, at the end of the meeting, opposition leaders said that the authorities did not meet any of the demands. Thus, attempts made by Viktor Yanukovych to reduce pressure on the authorities by holding a round table with opposition leaders and removing high-ranking officials involved in the forceful dispersal of the November 30 rally were unsuccessful.

As a result, the confrontation between supporters and opponents of the Ukrainian government reached its peak on December 14-15. The opposition and the ruling Party of Regions brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets; for the first time, two parallel rallies were held in Kiev - Maidan and Anti-Maidan.

 However, in those days there were no serious clashes.

 On December 15, at the next “People's Assembly”, in which, according to some sources, up to 200 thousand people took part, opposition leaders reported that they had information about the preparation of a forceful dispersal of Euromadan and called on supporters not to go home, but to “defend the ideals of democracy ».

The US State Department warned that it would closely monitor the situation in Kiev and called on Ukrainian authorities to refrain from using force against peaceful protesters. The State Department expressed disappointment that the government-opposition roundtable was “unproductive.” Two US senators flew to Kiev - Republican John McCain and Democrat Chris Murphy.

 On December 15, the American senators spoke on the Maidan.

Participants in the rally on Independence Square demanded that Viktor Yanukovych not sign an agreement on Ukraine’s accession to the Customs Union during his visit to Moscow, scheduled for December 17.

 Both the American side and opposition leaders actively fanned the information wave about the upcoming “betrayal of the national interests of Ukraine by Viktor Yanukovych” associated with the redirection of the foreign policy and economic vector to Russia.

 About 200 supporters of European integration picketed the Boryspol highway leading to Boryspol airport under the slogan “Yanukovych, turn the plane to Europe.”

A meeting of the Russian-Ukrainian Interstate Commission chaired by Viktor Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin took place in Moscow on December 17.

   Following the negotiations in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would place part of its reserves from the National Welfare Fund in the amount of $15 billion in securities of the Ukrainian government, “taking into account the difficulties of the Ukrainian economy, associated largely with the global financial and economic crisis, in order to support of the budget of Ukraine."

Putin noted that this decision was not associated with any additional conditions, and the issue of Ukraine’s accession to the Customs Union was not discussed at all.

 However, the opposition did not agree with the agreements, saying, among other things, that Yanukovych did not make public the “secret paragraphs” of the agreements.

For example, Vitaliy Klitschko demanded to make public the conditions under which the documents were signed in Moscow and suggested that the agreement to allocate $15 billion to Ukraine was signed on the security of the country’s strategic facilities.

 And White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the agreements concluded in Moscow do not take into account the demands of participants in anti-government protests.

 It is obvious that it was important for Western representatives and opposition leaders to disrupt the signed agreements at any cost and interrupt the re-orientation of Ukraine towards the CIS countries.

The following days, the opposition and the authorities made various statements, their supporters on the streets strengthened their positions. From time to time in Kiev there were clashes between protesters and Anti-Maidan supporters and security forces, including along the perimeter of opposition-controlled territories.

 On December 19, the Verkhovna Rada voted to exempt from criminal prosecution all Euromaidan activists accused of organizing unrest and opposing security forces in the period from November 21 until this decision came into force.

On December 22, at the next “People’s Assembly,” the creation of a public organization, the People’s Association Maidan, was announced. The co-chairs of the Council of the Maidan association were Oleg Tyagnibok, President of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy Sergei Kvit, Vitaliy Klitschko, Yuriy Lutsenko, singer Ruslana Lyzhychko, Yulia Tymoshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk. A number of Russian oppositionists also took part in the rally - Ilya Yashin, Konstantin Borovoy and other Russian public figures.

On December 23, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signed a law adopted by parliament on December 19 exempting all arrested participants in peaceful protests from criminal prosecution.

 On the night of December 24-25, the famous Ukrainian journalist and Euromaidan activist Tatyana Chornovol was beaten on the Boryspol highway. Government supporters and security forces were immediately blamed for the attack.

 This attack immediately began to be widely discussed in the media and promoted as much as possible on social networks.

On December 29, at the next “People's Assembly,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk called on people to continue protests and not leave the Maidan. Yatsenyuk voiced the main points of the opposition action plan for January 2014: “Our first task is to bring to justice the bandits who beat civilians, beat Tatyana Chernovol, beat Euromaidan protesters and set fire to their cars in different cities.” According to him, after the holidays the opposition intended to demand the creation of an investigative commission to investigate the actions of law enforcement agencies against the protesters. Yatsenyuk said that a single opposition team would be formed in 2014: “We are preparing for victory in the next presidential elections in Ukraine. In 2014, we are forming a single team of changes, a team of three opposition forces, ... a team that is capable of making Ukraine a European state.”

In addition, Arseniy Yatsenyuk emphasized that during the New Year holidays the protesters did not intend to leave the building of the House of Trade Unions, where the Headquarters of the National Resistance, the press center, the medical service, and the kitchen for the rally participants were based. This situation continued until the New Year.

  In general, talking about this period, it is worth noting the active work of the West and the opposition to use leaders of public opinion for their own purposes. And it didn’t matter who it was: a famous politician, a musician or a notorious opposition supporter who was shown on TV channels.

 The example of Tatyana Chernovol is indicative in this sense.

 She became involved in the events on the Maidan back in November 2013, when Chernovol broke the glass of an SBU bus and entered it, after which the bus was seized by radical nationalists.

On December 1, 2013, it was Chernovol who led a group of protesters who seized the building of the Kiev City State Administration. According to her, Maidan participants simply needed a building where they could “warm up, sleep, go to the toilet”

And so, after Tatyana Chernovol became famous, as they say “by word of mouth,” on the night of December 24-25, 2013, she was beaten by two unknown men. Chernovol herself called this either the personal revenge of Viktor Yanukovych, or the revenge of the head of the Kiev “Berkut” Sergei Kusyuk, whom she (in her own words) had hit in the liver the day before.

And immediately information hysteria develops around the attack on Tatyana Chernovol. Heavyweights are coming into play - even the US State Department expressed concern about violence against Euromaidan journalists, emphasizing that “the brutal beating of Tatyana Chernovol is particularly alarming.”

 On December 27, Tatiana Chernovol was visited at the hospital by the ambassadors of France, Sweden, Belgium, Lithuania and representatives of diplomatic institutions of the United States and Canada.

And on December 26, MP Sergei Pashinsky said in a TV commentary: “She was under surveillance, including electronic surveillance, which only our special services can do. She was followed, she was intercepted, she was blocked. This is a whole gangster special operation.”

 The culprits were immediately announced and of course they were government service employees.

Now we can see how, step by step, the collective West and the opposition carefully molded supporters of the government into monsters, murderers and outcasts. During the Maidan period in Kiev, a comprehensive media manipulation of public consciousness was carried out. Corporate Western and liberal domestic media brainwashed Ukrainian citizens and the whole world.

 Everything that happened on the Maidan, around it and in connection with it was presented as the most important news of the day, hour, minute. The rest of the events were not even relegated to the background, but much further.

Newspapers and magazines were filled with interviews with all sorts of Maidan leaders: from front-line politicians like Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Vitaliy Klitschko to the most notorious centurions of the “hundreds of self-defense.” Publications competed in drawing maps of the area and counting the number of people who attended the rallies. Every now and then touching stories appeared about how people from the provinces found their social and personal happiness in the tent city. Account numbers for collecting money in favor of the Maidan and addresses for collecting food and warm clothes were published.

Internet television has become extremely popular. Especially Gromadskoye TV (public television), an online resource launched on November 22, 2013. Just after the public refusal of the Azarov government to sign the agreement on European integration.

 The resource immediately gained an insane number of subscribers and supporters. Streams, boorish interviews, mistakes, slips and outright misinformation have become the style of work and the main content of the work of Gromadskoye TV. Nevertheless, the whole country watched GTV with literally bated breath.

And all these media, media platforms, social networks and bloggers - this entire media community was used by the organizers of the Maidan for their own purposes.

 It was with their help that they formed the necessary images, brought the necessary messages into the minds, created new heroes, or simply rallied people with information.

In general, the call to go to the Maidan to protest against the country’s leadership’s refusal to sign the enslaving association agreement with the EU served as a signal for actions to discredit the current president and prime minister. And according to the canons of information warfare, if nothing happens and there is a risk of the event moving into the stage of stagnation and fading, a catalyst is needed that will allow it to move to the next stage. The most effective means for this is violence.

 And the “savage beating of the they-are-just-kids” on the night of November 30, 2013 and the attack on Tatyana Chornovol became precisely such catalysts at the beginning of the Maidan.

 And again, according to the strict laws of information warfare and “color revolutions,” as soon as the situation begins to stabilize, a catalyst is again needed.

 The events on the Maidan already in 2014 demonstrated this just like in a textbook.