One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya S… - Anna Reid

Being ‘Ukrainian’, for the hordes of patriotic young people manning a starburst of new charities and campaign groups in the capital, is not about what your surname is or what language you speak. It is about making a moral choice, about wanting a decent country and being a decent person. They are proud that the Ukrainian journalist who initiated the Maidan is Afghan by background, and that the first two demonstrators shot dead by police were ethnically Belarussian and Georgian.

A protest camp on Kyiv’s central square, known as the Maidan, turned into a permanent, festival-like city within a city, swelling to a million people on weekends. In January 2014, the police began a violent crackdown, which climaxed with the killing of 94 protesters and 17 police officers. When the crowds still refused to disperse, Yanukovych fled to Moscow, and the contents of his luxurious private compound—Hermès dinner services, chandeliers the size of small cars, a stuffed lion—went on display in Ukraine’s National Art Museum.

...a new round of horror was visited on Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruled western part of the country—the first time Russia had ever controlled this territory. Two years later, however, the Wehrmacht marched in anyway, and two years after that, the Red Army returned. Both armies deported or arrested the Lviv intelligentsia—a rich mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—as they arrived and killed political prisoners as they departed.