Photo credit: Hromadske
Katya Gorchinskaya, Foreign Policy: He Killed for the Maidan
Here's why my news organization decided to shed some light on a dark moment in Ukraine's revolution.
My television station had a murderer on air last week — a self-confessed one. Ivan Bubenchik was calm and collected, his demeanor was open, and he spoke confidently of his actions on February 20, 2014, like he had known exactly what he was doing. After all, he was on the good side of the Euromaidan revolution, which was raging in Ukraine at the time, and which eventually swept a corrupt president out of power.
In telling Bubenchik’s story, we were breaking a taboo — it was the police, the popular narrative goes, that were the murderers. The protesters were heroes. But Bubenchik’s words were chilling. “To create a word of mouth effect, you have to shoot two or three [police] commanders,” he said to the camera. “I only picked two. And after that, there was no need to kill anyone else, so I aimed at the legs.”
Bubenchik said he was trying to scare the police away — they had started to dominate the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev’s central Independence Square, where the anti-government protesters had been camped for months. His tactic worked perfectly. His first sniper shot killed an officer, his second wounded another. The rest of the riot police scattered and ran up the hill away from the square.
This was two days before the end of the revolution. President Viktor Yanukovych had not yet fled to Russia, fearing betrayal of his faithful friends in the government. But the revolution was already in its final — and deadly — stage. 39 people had already been killed. Most were protesters killed by the police or by hired thugs. Some 2,000 more people had been wounded — again, mostly protesters, but also a handful of policemen.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: I am not surprised by this revelation .... at the height of the Ukraine revolution my cousins's daughter was assisting protesters wounded by police sniper fire, and she told me at the time that many protesters were also armed and were firing back. It was when the firing started to intensify, that she and the other women were told to pull back to a safer area. Will Ivan Bubenchik's admission that he killed police officers during the height of the Ukraine revolution change anything .... sadly no. The simple fact is that most Ukrainians do know what happened during this time .... that both sides were killing each other.
Hat Tip to Jay for this link.
