Quite the jump from my previous post, “600 days,” right? But I’m noting a slightly different anniversary. We’ve just passed the 10th anniversary of the protests/demonstrations that took place in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) in Kyiv that could be considered the start of all this. The demonstrations never ended and became the catalyst of the “Euromaidan” revolution. That revolution lead to the ousting of then-President and Kremlin puppet Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russian support of separatist proxies in Luhansk and Donetsk (during which time Mariupol was first attacked with rockets), and ultimately, the full-force invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

I was in Kyiv around the time all this started. I wasn’t there for the first few days of the protests — they started on the 21st, and I think I arrived the 24th or 25th — but I remember walking through and around the Maidan area in those following days. (I was staying in an apartment just down Khreshchatyk Street, a nice place that provided bath slippers with their logo embroidered on.) Even fairly late at night there would be people in some sort of assembly area making speeches to virtually no one. I walked passed busses with police in riot gear parked just down the side streets near the square. I recall that it was too bad those people had to just sit in the busses for so long in that cold weather.