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I wasn’t here when they died.
That’s something I carry with me every time I walk past the memorial on Instytutska Street, where the flowers never seem to fully dry out, where the photographs look back at you with eyes that belonged to people who believed something enough to die for it. I didn’t arrive in Kyiv until January 31, 2022 — eight years after the blood had soaked into the cobblestones of the Maidan. Eight years after Viktor Yanukovych ordered his security forces to murder Ukrainians in the streets of their own capital for daring to want to belong to Europe.
I was somewhere else when it happened. Most of the world was.
But I’m here now. And every year — sometimes multiple times a year — I stop at that memorial. I look at those names. I say them in my head, or sometimes out loud, quietly, the way you might speak at a gravesite. And I think about what the Heavenly Hundred — Небесна Сотня — mean. Not just to the people of Kyiv. Not just to Ukrainians everywhere, from Lviv to Toronto to Sydney to Houston. But to the idea of what a human being will sacrifice when they decide that enough is enough.
This is their story.
A President Who Sold His Country
To understand why they died, you have to understand the man who killed them.
Viktor Yanukovych did not come to power accidentally. He was a product of the Donbas political machine, twice convicted of crimes in his youth — robbery and assault — before those convictions were mysteriously expunged. He was Moscow’s man in Kyiv, elected in 2010 in a vote that was competitive enough to appear legitimate, but whose outcome was precisely what the Kremlin ordered.
For years, Ukrainians had been negotiating an Association Agreement with the European Union. It wasn’t membership. It wasn’t NATO. It was a trade agreement, a framework, a signal that Ukraine was orienting itself westward, toward rule of law, toward accountability, toward a future that looked more like Warsaw than Moscow. Polls showed broad popular support. Civil society had spent years building toward this moment.
On November 21, 2013, Yanukovych pulled the plug. Under direct pressure from Vladimir Putin — who was dangling cheaper gas prices and a three-billion-dollar loan — he suspended negotiations with the EU. Just like that. A decision made in a back room, traded for Russian money, and announced to a country that had not been consulted.
The students came to the Maidan first. They always do.
The Square That Became a Country
The Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Independence Square — sits in the heart of Kyiv like a heartbeat. It had seen revolution before. The Orange Revolution of 2004 had brought hundreds of thousands into these streets after the fraudulent election of Yanukovych that time, too — the Ukrainian people forcing a re-run that brought Viktor Yushchenko to power. The Maidan had memory. It knew what protest looked like.
But what began in late November 2013 was different. Larger. Angrier. More determined.
When the riot police — the Berkut — moved in on November 30th to violently disperse the students who had gathered peacefully, something broke open in Ukrainian society. Parents who had watched their children beaten on live television came to the Maidan. Workers came. Veterans came. Priests came and stood between protesters and police. Farmers drove their tractors to Kyiv.
By December, a tent city had formed. By January, it was a fortress.
The protesters erected barricades from tires, sandbags, snow packed into blocks, anything they could find. They kept fires burning through the brutal Ukrainian winter. They organized kitchens, medical stations, a library. They sang. They prayed. On the stage in the center of the square, speakers addressed the crowd in Ukrainian — a language Yanukovych’s government had spent years trying to marginalize.
This was not a riot. This was a civilization asserting itself.
The Orders Came From the Top
What happened in February 2014 was not spontaneous violence. It was a decision.
Yanukovych and his inner circle — with Russian advisors present, with the full awareness of Moscow — made the calculation that the protest could be broken by sufficient force. Snipers were positioned on rooftops around the Maidan. The Berkut was given live ammunition. Interior Ministry forces were deployed with orders that amounted to: clear the square, whatever it takes.
On February 18th, the killing began in earnest.
On February 20th, it became a massacre.
Snipers fired from elevated positions into crowds of protesters. People who ran to help the wounded were shot. Medics were targeted. The killing was methodical, professional, and aimed at breaking the will of a movement by demonstrating that no one on that square was safe.
By the time Yanukovych fled to Russia — on February 21st, one day after the worst of the bloodshed, his courage as reliable as his loyalty — more than a hundred people were dead.
The world called them the Heavenly Hundred. Небесна Сотня.
Say Their Names
I need you to sit with these names. Not scroll past them. Not let them blur into abstraction. These were people.
Serhiy Nihoyan was nineteen years old. An ethnic Armenian from the Dnipropetrovsk region, he had become one of the most recognizable faces of the Maidan, reading Taras Shevchenko’s poetry on camera in the weeks before his death. He was shot on January 22nd, 2014 — the first protester killed by live fire. Nineteen years old, reciting the national poet, dying for a country that wasn’t even the country his grandparents had come from, but that he had chosen to be his.
Mikhail Zhiznevsky was twenty-five, from Belarus — another man who crossed a border to stand on the Maidan because some things matter more than your passport.
Roman Senyk was forty-three. Yuriy Verbytsky was fifty. A seismologist, a scientist, a man who probably spent his career measuring tremors in the earth, killed by a tremor in human cruelty.
Vasyl Moisey. Dmytro Chernyavsky. Oleksandr Badzha. Serhiy Bondarchuk.
Read them. Say them aloud if you can. The consonants cluster differently in Ukrainian, the vowels carry the weight of a language that survived centuries of suppression. These names are a kind of defiance in themselves.
Oleksandr Bryhinets. Serhiy Didych. Ivan Dovhan. Oleh Druh.
Some were young men in their twenties. Some were middle-aged fathers. Some had driven through the night from western Ukraine, from Lviv and Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, from places where the memory of Soviet oppression sits differently in the body, where the desire for European integration wasn’t abstract but ancestral.
Serhiy Kemsky. Andriy Kotyk. Volodymyr Kishchuk. Viktor Khomyk.
Some were from the east — from the cities and regions that Russian propaganda would later claim “didn’t want” to be part of Ukraine, “didn’t want” Europe, “didn’t want” the Maidan. The dead had a way of making liars of propagandists.
Oleksandr Klymenko. Oleh Kovtun. Serhiy Kokurin. Yuriy Kovalenko.
Oleksandr Kostyuk. Serhiy Kot. Mykola Kryukov. Vasyl Kryshtal.
Oleksandr Kvashnin. Serhiy Lysenko. Serhiy Marchenko. Volodymyr Martynets.
Volodymyr Melnychuk. Serhiy Myronchuk. Roman Naprienko. Volodymyr Naumenko.
Oleksandr Plekhanov. Andriy Rybak. Vasyl Serhiyenko. Serhiy Shapoval.
Mykola Shudrya. Mykhailo Zhiznevsky. Serhiy Zhyzhneuskyi. Andriy Zhytnyk.
Serhiy Zhulynskyi. Mykola Yakovenko. Volodymyr Yakymets. Andriy Yavorskyi.
Roman Huryk. Ustym Holodnyuk. Nazar Voytovych. Volodymyr Parasyuk.
Yuriy Dyakovsky. Bohdan Solchanyk. A university lecturer. Thirty-three years old. He had a career, a mind, a future full of students who would have learned something important from him.
Yaroslav Mudryi. Taras Slobodian. Andriy Movchan. Viktor Chmil.
Volodymyr Chornyi. Mykola Dzjavulskyi. Yuriy Lytvynchuk. Serhiy Varetskyi.
Volodymyr Melnyk. Oleksandr Khrapachynsky. Vasyl Aksyonov. Serhiy Baydovsky.
Oleksandr Hrytsenko. Volodymyr Topiy. Vasyl Zhuk. Mykola Mykhaylov.
Serhiy Didyk. Serhiy Yakymchuk. Volodymyr Boyko. Vasyl Mohylko.
Mykola Havryliuk. You may have seen his photograph without knowing his name. He was the man stripped naked by the Berkut in the bitter January cold, forced to stand in the freezing air while officers mocked him. His image went around the world as a symbol of the regime’s sadism. He survived that night. He did not survive February.
Oleksandr Zadorozhny. Yuriy Pasichnyk. Oleksandr Scherbak. Viktor Shvets.
Serhiy Siryk. Serhiy Tabala. Mykola Tkachuk. Serhiy Zakharchuk.
Yuriy Zelenyuk. Roman Zvarych. Serhiy Zakharov. Yuriy Kharchenko.
Serhiy Hrytsyk. Oleksandr Kapinos. Viktor Hurov. Serhiy Knysh.
Volodymyr Salo. Mykola Kyselyov. Serhiy Kolesnyk. Yuriy Lytvyn.
Volodymyr Nazarenko. Serhiy Nikitin. Vasyl Petrov. Serhiy Popyk.
Mykola Ryabokon. Serhiy Serhiyenko. Oleksandr Shvets. Serhiy Titarenko.
Volodymyr Velychko. Serhiy Vovk. Mykola Voronyuk. Volodymyr Yakymchuk.
Yuriy Zubko.
What They Mean Now
Yanukovych is in Russia. He has been there since the night he ran, taking what he could carry and leaving his gilded absurdity of a presidential estate — the private zoo, the galleon restaurant on an artificial lake, the golf course, the petting zoo with ostriches — for the Ukrainian people to walk through in stunned silence and photograph as evidence.
He was convicted of treason in absentia in 2019. He lives under Russian protection. He occasionally surfaces to give interviews suggesting that everything that happened to Ukraine since his departure is Ukraine’s own fault.
Putin, who enabled and encouraged and almost certainly coordinated the massacre, went on to annex Crimea within weeks of the Maidan’s victory, then to unleash a war in the Donbas that killed fourteen thousand people over eight years, and then — on February 24, 2022, just weeks after I arrived in Kyiv — to launch a full-scale invasion aimed at erasing Ukraine as a nation.
The connection is direct. It is a line drawn in blood from Instytutska Street to Bucha, to Mariupol, to Bakhmut, to the apartment buildings of Kharkiv and the port of Odesa and the villages of Kherson that were liberated and then shelled and then partially liberated again. The Maidan’s revolution did not cause the war. The war was Russia’s answer to the Maidan’s revolution.
The people who come to the memorial now — and people come every day, I have never passed it when there were not fresh flowers — understand this. They understand that the Heavenly Hundred, Небесна Сотня, were not just martyrs for European integration. They were the first casualties of a war that Russia had already decided to fight. They died at the beginning of something that the rest of us are still living through.
What I Think About, Standing There
I was not here when they died. I say that again not to flagellate myself but because I think it matters to be honest about the limits of one’s witness.
But I am here now. I have been here through air raid sirens and missile strikes and the particular silence of a city that has learned to hold its breath. I have stood in Bucha. I have talked to the families of prisoners of war. I have watched Ukraine build drones in converted factories and defend itself with a ferocity that continues to astonish people who never bothered to understand what Ukrainians are made of.
And when I stop at the memorial on Instytutska Street — with its photographs and its flowers and its eternal flame and its weight — I think about what it means that these people came to a square in winter and refused to leave.
I think about Serhiy Nihoyan reading Shevchenko. I think about Bohdan Solchanyk, who had papers to grade. I think about all the Serhiys — there are so many Serhiys on that list, a name so common in Ukraine that its repetition becomes its own kind of elegy — who came from their cities and towns with no particular expectation of dying, only an expectation that their presence mattered.
I think about what it costs to be the first. To stand in front of a regime that has already shown it will use force, and to stand there anyway.
And I think about the fact that Ukraine is still here. That the language is still spoken. That the flag still flies. That the country that Yanukovych tried to sell, that Putin tried to erase, that a hundred years of Russian imperial ambition tried to absorb, is still on every map.
Небесна Сотня. The Heavenly Hundred.
They are not only in the memorial on Instytutska Street. They are in every Ukrainian soldier defending a treeline in the east. They are in every volunteer. They are in every artist I’ve filmed in the years since I arrived, making music and theater and poetry under conditions that would have silenced most people. They are in the stubborn, furious, elegant refusal of an entire civilization to disappear.
I go to that memorial and I think: they knew something. Before the rest of us understood what was coming, before the full shape of Russia’s war became visible, they knew something about what was at stake.
They paid with everything they had to say: this country is worth defending.
Eleven years later, in the middle of a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, their answer still echoes off the cobblestones.
Chris Sampson is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is Editor-in-Chief of NatSecMedia and the author of “Hacking ISIS.” He has reported from Ukraine continuously since January 2022.
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