Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly collection during which NPR’s worldwide workforce shares moments from their lives and work world wide.
The Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Sq., has been the guts of political change in Ukraine for greater than twenty years. Whereas visiting NPR’s workforce protecting 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.
Recollections flooded again of two people-power revolutions towards Kremlin affect.
In 2004, nobody knew if police would fireplace on protesters. As an alternative, a cop climbed on stage, knelt, and kissed the flag. Lots of of hundreds erupted in cheers and tears. A decade later, riot police snipers opened fireplace on demonstrators carrying wood shields and European Union flags: unarmed males, extremely, operating in the direction of the bullets, leaving 40 lifeless, however turning the political tide. The president fled to Russia. These weeks noticed college students, pensioners, veterans, medical doctors and academics stand in freezing temperatures round big levels, instructing 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 People — 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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