I arrived in Kiev in late February 2014. Moscow's man Viktor Yanukovych had fled the country, but the new Western-backed government hadn't yet been installed. The worst of the violence was over, but there were still bloodstains and trails of flowers on the Maidan. News had arrived that masked gunmen were seizing control of Crimea, but Moscow hadn't formally annexed the peninsula yet, and it would be several months before the Kremlin-backed insurgency in Eastern Ukraine flared up in full. Here are a few scenes from those days between the climax of the revolution and the tenuous new order that followed.
Activists and critics of the Yanukovych government had camped out on the Maidan for months before the violence erupted in February. When things got hot, they fashioned barricades out of wood and old tires, welded together makeshift Czech hedgehogs, turned a metro entrance into a Molotov cocktail factory, and converted the nearby McDonalds into a "psychological first aid" center. Paving stones were torn up and stacked in neat piles for use against the police. I remember in particular the acrid commingling of gas generator fumes, woodstove smoke, and burnt rubber. The removal of the encampments would eventually become a politically sensitive issue for the new government.





