Bloodier than Occupy, Kiev protests sowed seeds of real change

For Daria Mykhailova, the story appeared to end as logically as it had begun.

Winding down after a day of studying on November 21, 2013, Mykhailova scrolled through her Facebook feed to find, nestled between posts documenting the minutiae of her friends' lives, an unusual note from Hromadske TV reporter Mustafa Nayem, a call to arms of sorts: "Let's meet at 10.30pm near the monument to independence in the middle of the Maidan."

Earlier that day, President Viktor Yanukovych had backed down from an agreement to associate more closely with the European Union. Mykhailova, like many Ukrainians, was outraged.

"For years, we were working towards Europe," she says. "Within one day, everything had changed." There was nothing else for her to do. "I just felt I couldn't stay at home."

Mykhailova and hundreds of others converged on Maidan Nezalozhnosti, the central square in Kiev, in a protest that would balloon to include hundreds of thousands of people and spread to Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi in the west and elsewhere in Ukraine.

From that night through to February last year, the student of international relations at Taras Shevchenko University set aside her books and learned about politics as it unfolded in vivid real time on the square, an alternative universe filled with sulphur dioxide from burning tyres, Berkut riot police and twenty- and thirty-somethings in improvised body armour. Armed with Facebook, HK$80 mobile phones and punchy hashtags such as #ridetomaidan, the teenager, born three years after the Soviet Union's collapse, learned how to coordinate buses and housing for hundreds of protesters from out of town.

Then, on February 22, the president suddenly fled. And with the same clarity of mind that she had had when she arrived, Mykhailova left the square.