My wife Maria and I were returning to Ukraine after two years. But those protestors who had homes and jobs to return to had done so the rump stayed, with nowhere-or nowhere better-to go, living a paramilitary fantasy surrounded by the relics of the winter’s heroics, neat piles of cobblestones and tires, pop-up cafes for beer, and souvenir stands hawking anti-Putin propaganda: the Russian leader with a Hitler moustache (“Putler”), or doormats and toilet paper printed with his face or that of ousted Ukrainian president Yanukovich. (And a man in a Darth Vader costume, possibly the same one who had attempted to run for the presidency.) Bums and drunks were part of the Maidan from the beginning, one member of “Maidan Self-Defense” told me, riff-raff brought in by the government to discredit the protests. What began, just a year before, as an Occupy-style student protest against the scrapping of a vague agreement of “cooperation” with the European Union, had curdled into a quasi-military camp for lean, dirty men in camouflage pants, sketchy and borderline homeless.

It was a city going about its summer business, but with a creepy sore at its heart: The Maidan Nezhalezhnosti, Kyiv’s central square, and the surrounding streets remained blocked off by a dirty tent city, makeshift memorials to the “Heavenly Hundred” shot by government snipers at the height of the protests that winter, and the rotting remains of the barricades.

Franz nicolay