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Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence through which NPR’s worldwide crew shares moments from their lives and work all over the world.
The Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Sq., has been the guts of political change in Ukraine for greater than twenty years. Whereas visiting NPR’s crew masking Ukraine — correspondent Joanna Kakissis and producers Hanna Palamarenko and Polina Lytvynova — I went again to the sq., the place history-making information occasions have drawn me for over twenty years.
Reminiscences flooded again of two people-power revolutions in opposition to Kremlin affect.
In 2004, nobody knew if police would hearth on protesters. As an alternative, a cop climbed on stage, knelt, and kissed the flag. Lots of of 1000’s erupted in cheers and tears. A decade later, riot police snipers opened hearth on demonstrators carrying wood shields and European Union flags: unarmed males, extremely, working in direction of the bullets, leaving 40 useless, however turning the political tide. The president fled to Russia. These weeks noticed college students, pensioners, veterans, docs and academics stand in freezing temperatures round large levels, educating politicians that this was not a crowd to guide, however one to observe.
These revolutions helped pave the best way for the unlikely rise of comic Volodymyr Zelenskyy. First he broke character to name for peace, then turned president, and later morphed right into a wartime chief nicknamed “Churchill with an iPhone,” recording defiant movies simply steps from the sq..
Driving away from the sq., I noticed Zelenskyy filming at a Maidan memorial for troopers and volunteers — together with Individuals — killed since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. I considered stopping to ask for an interview, however the second belonged to him — and to these he was honoring.
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