The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine

This book analyzes the Maidan massacre of the protesters and the police during the “Euromaidan” mass protests in Kyiv in Ukraine on February 20, 2014. This massacre is crucial case of political violence in Ukraine and the world because it led to the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and ultimately to the start of the civil war in Donbas, Russian military interventions in Crimea and Donbas, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and conflicts of Russia with Ukraine and the West which Russia escalated dramatically by launching the illegal invasion and war with Ukraine in 2022.

This is the first scholarly book which analyzes comprehensively the Maidan massacre in Ukraine. It is based on more than 10 years of my research of this massacre and trials and investigations of this mass killing.

I am a Ukrainian and Canadian political scientist. I teach at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Previously, I was Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the State University of New York at Potsdam, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Kluge Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. I received my Ph.D. from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University under the direction of Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the greatest political scientists and political sociologists.

My academic publications include 4 books, 12 book chapters, and 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as this book and two forthcoming books concerning the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins and modern Ukraine that will be published by major American and British academic presses. I am one of the most cited political scientists who specialize primarily in politics and conflicts in Ukraine. My research-based publications, interviews, and comments appeared in more than 3,000 media reports in over 80 countries.

I am a life-long supporter of liberal democracy, human rights, and peace in Ukraine and was one of the first to publicly call for the European Union accession of Ukraine. I attended in 1988 the first small opposition rally in Kyiv in some 80 years since Ukraine became Soviet. I was born in Western Ukraine and educated in the Kyiv National Economic University, Central European University, and George Mason University. I faced expulsion from the university in Kyiv in 1990 and was prevented from pursuing graduate education in the Soviet Union because my undergraduate thesis, which was in Ukrainian, was based on theories of Max Weber and Western economists and concluded that the Soviet system was bound to collapse.

I presented my studies of the Maidan massacre at the following academic conferences: The Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association in San Francisco, September 3–6, 2015, the 22nd Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in Columbia University, New York, May 4–6, 2017, the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston, August 29–September 2, 2018, the Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956 conference by the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies in Uppsala, Sweden, September 13–14, 2018, the Virtual 52nd Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, November 5–8 and 14–15, 2020, and the virtual 10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies, August 3–8, 2021.

Parts of my open-access articles in Russian Politics, Cogent Social Sciences, and Journal of Labor and Society peer-reviewed journals, a forthcoming open-access Routledge book, and, with publisher’s permission, my article in Canadian Dimension are republished in this book with updated, revised, and greatly expanded content. Most of the book content was previously not published. I received no outside financing for my research of the Maidan massacre, with the exception of small travel and publication grants and crowdfunding making my articles open access. I am grateful to all those who supported my academic study of this crucial massacre that changed Ukraine and the world.