Third Maidan in Ukraine Very Different from Both of Its Predecessors, Milshteyn Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 8 – Many talk about the protests in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities  as the beginning of a third Maidan, as if it were in most respects similar to its to predecessors in 2004 and 2013; but in fact, it is very different from them and they in turn are quite different from each other, Ilya Milshteyn says.

            The first Maidan, which has been christened the Orange Revolution was “a nomenklatura revolution in the course of which one elite occupied the place of others” and thus was a “state-forming” event. The Ukrainian people who came into the square had a leader and they and he had the active support of European politicians (graniru.org/opinion/milshtein/m.277616.html).

            The second Maidan a decade later was very different. Because of the disappointment of the Ukrainian people with what happened after the first, its participants acted as a mass group and refused to accept those who offered themselves as leaders.  The revolution, concluded by Yanukovich’s flight, was “a revolt against the entire system of state administration.”

            “But to the extent that the country could not exist in a state without some center of  power, it emerged that the destruction of the Heavenly Hundred was followed by the return of politicians from among those who had triumphed a the time of the Orange Revolution” a decade earlier.

            According to Milshteyn, “today’s Maidan is different from its two predecessors” in three important ways.

            First, the third Maidan is not a revolt against an established elite because Vladimir Zelensky and his associates “with rare exceptions form an absolutely new force in the country.”  Second, this is not a domestic Ukraine clash. It is taking place with a hybrid war in the background, a clash which has lasted already for more than five years” and Zelensky may have won the election before he promised to end it.

            And third, this is “a Maidan as warning,” a declaration by the people that they want their president “to refrain from negotiations with Russia on conditions which are like capitulation and betrayal.”  This is something entirely different from Maidan-One and Maidan-Two and reflects fundamental changes in the Ukrainian nation.

            What makes it new, Milshteyn says, is that “for the first time in the entire history of contemporary Ukraine, the issue of its existence has arisen.” Ukrainians are worried that Zelensky in his pursuit of peace may have given away too much, and they are committed to resisting him if he has.

            That the Ukrainian president may have is suggested by his slowness in publishing what he has agreed to and his apparent naïve expectations that he can win the elections in the Donbass just as he won them in the rest of Ukraine. Ukrainians are worried and angry, “but they feel perplexed more than any other emotions.” They have something to lose and fear that possibility.

            And that is a reality that Zelensky must face as he tries to navigate further.