It's taken a decade, but the events of Ukraine's Euromaidan are finally having their day in court.

The revolution that pushed the country's pro-Russian president out of office, and which Russia tried to quash with armed intervention in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, looks today like a crucial link in the chain of events that led to Russia invading Ukraine in 2022.

As a Kyiv court found on 18 October 2023, in its final days, Ukraine's Euromaidan protest was not a peaceful gathering, but an uprising against tyranny.

The Ukrainian police did not suppress the protest, but killed in senseless rage as they shot at protesters.

The country's former ruler Viktor Yanukovych may have nothing to do with these deaths, but the Kremlin encouraged violence and took advantage of the situation for aggression against Ukraine, the court found.

The verdict

It is 18 October 2023. Two strong-looking bearded men with shaved heads in their 30s - one in a tight purple jumper, the other in a baggy dark sweater - turn away from the TV cameras and dodge questions from journalists in the courtroom.

Whispering with the lawyers and among themselves, the two men wait until Kyiv's Svyatoshinskyi District Court finishes printing a copy of the verdict against each of them, some 1,714 pages each. It took three jurors and two judges the last 11 months to compile it. Head judge Serhiy Dyachuk reads the final conclusion over the course of 20 minutes. The defendants have waited eight and a half years for this verdict, half of which they spent in prison.

Both men, Serhiy Tamtura and Oleksandr Marinchenko, were arrested a year after the mass shooting of protesters on Kyiv's Instytutska Street on 20 February 2014 and accused, along with three others, of being involved in it.

As Dyachuk reads out the verdict, we find out that Tamtura, the one in the purple jumper, a former sniper of Kyiv's special Berkut police company, is acquitted. His colleague Oleksandr Marinchenko is found guilty of exceeding official authority with the use of weapons. But the court decided he had already served his sentence while awaiting trial.

The punishment for the other three defendants is much more severe. For abuse of power, the mass murder of some protesters and the attempted murder of others, Berkut officers Pavlo Abroskin and Serhiy Zinchenko were each sentenced to 15 years in prison. The deputy commander of Kyiv's Berkut regiment, Oleh Yanishevskyi, was given life.

However, these three men were tried in absentia. At the end of 2019, the Ukrainian security services handed over all five former Berkut officers to the self-proclaimed "People's Republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk as part of a sizable prisoner exchange.

A couple of months later, two of them returned to Kyiv: Tamtura and Marinchenko decided to defend themselves in court. By that time, the court had established none of the protesters had been killed with these men's rifles.

The Black Bird Marked with Yellow

The special unit where both Tamtura and Marinchenko served is an elite squad within the Berkut, a special Ukrainian police group created in 1992 to fight armed gangs and maintain order at public events.

For most of the Euromaidan events, Berkut officers "were on standby" - guarding government buildings or police bases, and covering for colleagues. Berkut officers received firearms on the evening of 18 February and took up a position near Kyiv's central Maidan square, but Tamtura and Marinchenko told the court they did not leave their vehicles until the morning of 20 February.

Both described how they woke up that morning between 8am and 9am when "some chaos began around them". By that time, from the side of the Maidan protest, shots had been fired at Ukrainian law enforcement for more than an hour, the court found. After three police officers were killed, and 39 wounded, the security forces decided to retreat up Instytutska Street.

"It looked like a panicked retreat. Which made it possible to understand that there was really shooting and aggressive actions going on," Tamtura explained in court. "It's not for nothing that so many law enforcement officers were running away from the Maidan."

Protesters also moved up Instytutska, which runs up a hill from Maidan square to Ukraine's parliament, central government offices and the presidential administration. There were 400 metres left before the turn to the presidential administration, but many protesters recalled that they only wanted to regain control of an old barricade near the exit from the Khreshchatyk metro station. Tamtura, in his own words, did not have time to see the whole picture when he was deafened by an explosion of either fireworks or firecrackers. Interior ministry soldiers took him behind a concrete barricade another 50 metres up the street. A couple of hours later, the ambulance took the policeman to the hospital; he had given his rifle to a friend.

A paramedic later recalled this moment in court: Tamtura allegedly asked to be taken to the hospital because "he didn't want to shoot at people and carry out a criminal order". Tamtura himself claimed that the conversation went differently: "She said that on TV they're saying you've been given criminal orders: 'How can you follow them?!'.

"I simply said: "If I had received such an order, I would never have carried it out."

Marinchenko also hid behind a concrete barricade for some time, and then, together with his Berkut colleague Yevhen Pronoza, moved to a neighbouring two-story building. From the window on the stairs, both policemen allegedly watched Instytutska Street until the next morning, leaving only to go to the toilet. The court stated that Marinchenko's "tactical interaction" with Pronoza, who killed at least one protester and injured two others, was a criminal abuse of his authority as a police officer.

Marinchenko himself told the court he had not seen any shooting all day: neither from Pronoza, nor from other law enforcement officers, nor even from the protesters. But 11 protesters were killed in the first 20 minutes of the confrontation in Instytutska Street on 20 February. Over the next two and a half hours - another 36 died. None of those killed were armed, and 80 Euromaidan protesters were injured.

Know your rights

The Kyiv Berkut is responsible for shooting most of these people. Black-clad soldiers wearing yellow armbands, the same as those worn by Tamtura and Marinchenko, fired indiscriminately at the crowd and aimed at orderlies with stretchers under the lenses of dozens of television cameras - images that have come to symbolise the events.

However, everyone's faces were hidden under balaclavas. For years, police witnesses refused to identify even the Berkut commander, Dmytro Sadovnik, who is readily identifiable because of his prosthetic right hand.

In court, a secret witness identified Yanishevskyi, the deputy commander who, that morning, dressed in blue camouflage, had ordered law enforcement to withdraw from Maidan and was recorded on video unarmed with his face uncovered. But 15 minutes later, wearing a balaclava and carrying a Kalashnikov, Yanishevskyi led a detachment in black uniform to the October Palace, just above the square. One of the fighters' masks slipped off his face: a portrait examination identified Pavlo Abroskin by his facial features, though in court he denied it was him. Zinchenko was identified because he was the only left-handed person in the unit.

The Berkut officers drove protesters away from the October Palace, before killing four and wounding eight more. Then, a Berkut officer, Mykola Simisyuk, died from a bullet in the head and another officer received a non-fatal wound. After this, Yanishevskyi, Sadovnik (who had just arrived from the capital's police department) and the officers who remained with them staged a massacre the court would later call "an arbitrary deliberate deprivation of life, an unmotivated indiscriminate use of weapons".

Ukrainian prosecutors claimed Yanishevskyi and Sadovnik received the order to shoot protesters from the leadership of Kyiv police. The two denied both the existence of orders and the shooting itself. And their lawyers argued they had the right to use weapons without any orders - in order to protect their own lives and those of colleagues.

A lawyer acting for the victims, Evheniya Zakrevska, countered that the police "did not have that right".

"There were no situations that made it possible to kill 48 people and injure 80 people. There were no such circumstances provided for by law," she said in her closing statement.

Instead, Zakrevska argued, Berkut officers, who had excellent combat training, opened fire on unarmed citizens that day because they "hated the protesters".

A terror attack?

Tamtura was the only one pleased with the verdict. Marinchenko is appealing, seeking a full acquittal.

But on 18 October, Marinchenko's lawyer, Oleksandr Goroshinskyi, merely smiled at journalists sitting in the court corridor. "We are glad that our clients are free," he said.

Standing next to them, Goroshinskyi's partner in protecting the Berkut officers, Stefan Reshko, and Yuri Aksenin, a tall man with a long Cossack forelock, are glaring at each other. The latter is the son of a Euromaidan protester, Vasyl Aksenin, who died from wounds received on Instytutska Street.

"We're not done yet," Aksenin snaps at the lawyer.

"We are also not satisfied with the verdict at all," Reshko answers.

Aksenin heads the Family of Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred, a campaign group named after the protesters who died. Like many victims, he had been counting on a life sentence for all five Berkut officers - as demanded a year ago by prosecutors Ihor Zemskov and Oleksiy Donskoy.

The prosecutors argued that, on the morning of 20 February, the five accused and two dozen other Berkut officers acted as a well-coordinated combat unit. Together, Zemskov and Donskoy claimed, they should be responsible for the killings and injuries of protesters. Even if some of them, such as Tamtura and Marinchenko, did not shoot their weapons.

"I'm disappointed," Zemskov sighs after the verdict was announced.

"Don't lose heart, we'll appeal," Donskoy reassures him.

Donskoy has been investigating the executions at Instytutska since April 2014. He has experienced many failures since then: witnesses refused to testify, examinations were sabotaged, suspects escaped, materials disappeared from the case files, politicians intervened, and he himself was suspended from his post several times. But this verdict could turn into a real failure for the entire special prosecutorial department that deals with Euromaidan affairs, which Donskoy has been leading for the last three years. And the issue is not only the impunity of Marinchenko and Tamtura.

The jury and judges of the Svyatoshinskyi court refused to recognise the brutal execution on 20 February as an "act of terrorism" and "dispersal of a peaceful rally". They acquitted Abroskin, Zinchenko and Yanishevskyi of those charges. Yet Donskoy and his team have been describing the last days of Euromaidan for nine years in precisely those terms: Ukrainian law enforcement officers beat demonstrators and shot at them, wanting to intimidate them and force them to stop protesting.

Of course, a terrorist attack requires organisation, which means orders from the very top - Yanukovych and the security forces close to him. The court will consider the relevant charges against Yanukovych, the leaders of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the ministers of defence and internal affairs, the commander of the internal troops and the entire top team of Kyiv police in absentia.

Three days before spring

For years, the Berkut defence counsel has claimed the shootings on Instytutska Street cannot be examined without reference to the first shots fired at law enforcement by protesters. Lawyers for their victims argued in response that the shooting of protesters was a natural response to the forceful dispersal that the police began on 18 February. Yet the events of the final three days are also difficult to understand outside the context of the entire Euromaidan protest.

By the end of the 16th week of rallies in the centre of Kyiv, the original trigger for the protest had been, if not forgotten, then clearly relegated to the background. Instead of a protest against the Ukrainian government's refusal to approve an Association Agreement with the EU, protesters were demanding a change in the leadership of the country, and even the entire political system. The authorities, however, did not surrender.

In the Ukrainian parliament, the government coalition adopted a package of repressive laws against participants in street protests; Yanukovych's Party of Regions brought its supporters to the capital to take part in "anti-Maidan" protests; the mercenary agents of the titushki, its street muscle, attacked and kidnapped opponents in collaboration with the Ukrainian police.

The Euromaidan protesters also formed self-defence units, and their three-day confrontation with the police in January ended with the first killings of protesters. Human rights activists and historians later called this moment a turning point. For many participants, the peaceful protest transformed into a quest for revenge for the death of their comrades, and trust in the leaders of the parliamentary opposition was sharply shaken.

Still, the political leaders of Euromaidan and the Ukrainian government came to a shaky compromise on 17 February. In exchange for the repeal of repressive laws, amnesty and the release of hundreds of detainees, the protesters agreed to dismantle some of the barricades in central Kyiv and leave occupied administrative buildings, including the mayor's office.

Opposition leaders once again tried to limit Yanukovych's power: through a rollback to Ukraine's 2004 Constitution, with a 'strong' parliament and a 'weak' president. But without the support of the parliamentary coalition, amendments of this level could not even be brought up for discussion. In order to put pressure on MPs, on the morning of 18 February Euromaidan protesters launched a "peaceful offensive" outside parliament. Columns of protesters holding political banners covered self-defence units carrying shields and batons.

Roman Titik, protesters

That morning, the police did not allow the demonstration to pass to parliament. There, in Kyiv's Mariinskyi Park which skirts the parliament building, an Anti-Maidan camp run by titushki had been set up. In response to protesters' attempts to break through the police cordon, flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets were fired at the protesters. Euromaidan supporters threw cobblestones, firecrackers and Molotov cocktails at the police, and set fire to the Party of Regions office next door. A security guard died inside due to carbon monoxide poisoning.

"They weren't fights, but battles," recalled Roman Titik, who participated in a protesters' self-defence unit, in court in January 2017. "Activists attacked law enforcement officers, then they launched a counter-offensive. We also decided to 'make some noise' and pulled ahead, but not everyone supported that. That's why I had to retreat."

Protesters who finally broke into Mariinskyi Park clashed with the titushki. The police and internal troops joined in: protesters were sprayed with a water cannon, and they shot with hunting buckshot from pump-action shotguns. This is where the first protesters died. For the first time, law enforcement officers were shot.

After another couple of hours of fierce fighting the protesters were pushed back to the Maidan, and people died in the crush on the barricades. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and the SBU announced an ultimatum: demanding they stop their resistance before 6pm. But protesters were drawn to the centre and by evening there were already 30,000 of them. There were about 7,000 members of law enforcement, who declared an "anti-terrorist operation": tearing down barricades, shooting and throwing stun grenades.

The exit from Maidan was blocked by armed titushki: during the night, they killed a journalist, Vyacheslav Veremiy. In total, 28 protesters and nine police officers died in less than 24 hours of clashes.

When the fighting subsided on the morning of 19 February, Yanukovych demanded the protesters lay down their weapons and disperse.

Meanwhile, thousands of activists from outside Kyiv arrived in the capital's central square, shrouded in black smoke from burning tyres. Some brought weapons. Early in the morning of 20 February, a group of Lviv residents with hunting carbines began shooting at Ukrainian security forces from the city's conservatory.

Ten angry men

In an indictment handed to another court in the capital in November, prosecutors allege Yanukovych was the main organiser of the police crackdown on Euromaidan. He allegedly wanted to stop the protests in order to maintain his grip on power. The former president therefore "gave clearly criminal orders for employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine to use special equipment and firearms for forceful counteraction without reason and in violation of the law", according to prosecutors.

Ukrainian prosecutors accuse Yanukovych and nine other former high-ranking security officials of "creating a criminal group" with the aim of preventing peaceful protests through armed abuse of power with grave consequences, organising a terrorist act, mass murder and mutilation. The most serious offences carry life sentences.

But prosecutor Denys Ivanov, Donskoy's deputy, admits investigators have found no direct evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the accused police officers and the Yanukovych to disperse the protests. That said, indirect evidence leaves no doubt that there was a conspiracy to shoot the protesters, Ivanov told openDemocracy in a phone interview.

Ukrainian investigators do not have records of the suspects' conversations, but there is evidence of regular phone calls between the interior ministry, head of Kyiv police and Berkut commanders during the most dramatic moments of those days. "Let's say Yanukovych rang [interior minister] Zakharchenko on 18 February, immediately after he held a meeting at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Witnesses say: the use of weapons was discussed. And after that, Berkut is issued live ammunition," Ivanov explains.

Yanukovych acted as a witness in the trial of Berkut officers back in November 2016 via video link from Russia. The former president claimed he did not give the order to disperse the protests and use weapons, but rather sought to maintain peace. Five years later, the prosecutor's office handed over 1,878 volumes of evidence and three terabytes of photos and video materials to Yanukovych's legal team.

On the eighth anniversary of the shootings, in February 2022, I discussed the case in detail with lawyer Vitaly Serdyuk, who has represented Yanukovych since 2014. Having studied only a couple of hundred volumes, Serdyuk was already confident the investigation against his client was biased - after all, the Euromaidan leaders laid the blame on Yanukovych in advance.

"When I first signed an agreement with Viktor Fedorovich, I asked my partners whether anyone thought he was involved in these murders," recalled Serdyuk. "Nobody did, because we all understood that [the murders were] not in his interest."

Instead, the escalation of violence was beneficial to the Ukrainian opposition, Serdyuk argued, who claimed the killing of protesters were the "sacred sacrifices" supposedly necessary to seize power in Kyiv. He referred to police officers who claimed that on 18 February they heard the signal for the start of unrest from the commanders of protesters' self-defence units, and even more conspiratorial testimony about alleged "Georgian snipers" who shot both at the police and protesters.

During Euromaidan, lawyers from Serdyuk's company, Aver Lex, defended several detained protesters in court, but Serdyuk himself strongly condemned the protests. "I am a lawyer and I defend the rights established by law, and not the right to an uprising," he insisted.

Birds in a cage

"Despite the fact that Ukrainian legislation does not provide a right to an uprising, we regarded the situation as the natural right of the people to change power," explains judge Serhiy Dyachuk on 18 October when, after the verdict is announced, the two Berkut officers leave the courtroom without handcuffs.

Such interpretations are not traditional for Ukrainian courts. But during the 11 months of working on the verdict, Dyachuk seems to have missed public speaking. He proclaims the final days of the Revolution of Dignity were not a peaceful protest, but an "armed uprising against tyranny and arbitrariness of power".

Who exactly shot at the police on the morning of 20 February and the day before has not been established. A special law prohibits the investigation of possible crimes of Euromaidan activists, except for intentional murders. The law was criticised not only by the lawyers of Berkut officers, but also by victims' lawyers and the prosecutor's office.

In the spring of 2018, prosecutor Donskoy tried to take Lviv resident and protester Ivan Bubenchik into custody. In several interviews, Bubenchik himself admitted to the murder of at least two police officers on the morning of 20 February. But then general prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko intervened in the case: he temporarily suspended Donskoy and reclassified the Bubenchik case from "premeditated murder" to "attempt on the life of a law enforcement officer," which allowed Bubenchik to avoid charges.

Opposition leaders agreed with Yanukovych on early presidential elections, a return to the 2004 Constitution and the formation of a transitional government. The parties promised to stop the violence and hand over illegal weapons. But as they said farewell to those killed on the Maidan, protesters' self-defence units demanded the immediate resignation of the head of state and the arrests of Berkut, threatening an armed assault. Frightened, Yanukovych fled the country at night, first to Kharkiv, then to Donetsk, Crimea and finally Russia. Parliament then removed him from office, and the opposition took power into its own hands.

The Berkut detachments returned to their native regions, and MPs had to accompany them, protecting them from protesters along the way. In the western regions, special forces units begged citizens for forgiveness on their knees; in Crimea and Donbas they became a source of support for the separatists and the Russian occupation.

About a dozen Berkut members fled their Kyiv base secretly, by taxi, dressed in civilian clothes. Veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan helped to organise the escape.

Those Afghanistan veterans also revealed the place on one of the Kyiv islands where Berkut commanders Serhiy Kusyuk and Sadovnik dropped Berkut service weapons into the river. It took years of examination to link the cartridges and bullets found on Institutskaya Street with the guns of 15 fighters - but this became the main evidence in the case.

On 24 February, Arsen Avakov, acting minister of internal affairs, issued a decree dissolving Berkut. But they were in no hurry to fire the special forces.

In early April, the prosecutor's office for the first time summoned 16 soldiers of the Kyiv special company for questioning. Sadovnik, Abroskin and Zinchenko were arrested.

"To prevent further persecution, the [rest of the] unit went east [to the unrest in Donbas]. Avakov invited the unit to take part, noting that it would receive an indulgence for what was happening on the Maidan. We were led to understand that if we did not agree, we would be in trouble," Yanishevskyi recalled in his only interview, which he gave from prison in 2016.

Yanishevskyi, Tamtura and Marinchenko were arrested in the spring of 2015. By that time, 20 Berkut officers had fled - to Crimea, the self-proclaimed "republics" of Donbas or the Russian Federation. Commander Sadovnik disappeared from house arrest a week after an interview in which he assured the public of his innocence and unwillingness to flee the country.

Two months later, Sadovnik received Russian citizenship. One of the lawyers of the injured Maidan protesters, Vitaly Titych, claimed Sadovnik had, in fact, been secretly exchanged with Russia for Ukrainian military personnel captured in the Donbas.

Five years later, the decision to exchange the five defendants with Russia caused outrage among the victims, their lawyers and judge Dyachuk. The general prosecutor even had to temporarily remove Donskoy from the case.

"We, unfortunately, cannot return those who are not there, but we could return the living," president Volodymyr Zelenskyi said, justifying it. "I'll tell you more, if I had 100 more Berkut members and they offered me one intelligence officer, I would give them one hundred Berkut officers and return the living intelligence officer."

Lawyer Titych is sure the policemen were released for another reason: so that, under the weight of a life sentence, they would not testify against their superiors: "Think about it, would Tamtura and Marinchenko return to Kyiv if they were not 100% sure that they would be acquitted?"

What followed

On 21 November 2023, Zelenskyi called Euromaidan the first victory in the current war against Russia.

The connection between the executions on Instytutska and the Russian invasion can also be traced in the verdict against the Berkut soldiers. Though the court found no evidence of direct Kremlin involvement, it found the Russian Federation helped to sculpt the image of "extremists" in Kyiv, encouraged the use of force by Ukrainian law enforcement officers, supplied the police with flash-bang grenades and cartridges, and FSB officers visited Kyiv several times over the winter.

"The military-political leadership of the Russian Federation immediately took advantage of the tragic events of 20 February to implement their aggressive plans for the occupation of certain territories, which in 2022 grew into a full-scale invasion," the judge said.

The verdict is not final. On the anniversary of the start of Euromaidan, the judgment was appealed by all participants except Tamtura, who was completely acquitted.

Representatives for the other four Berkut officers want the same outcome: full acquittal. The prosecutor's office and the victims, on the other hand, insist on life sentences for all five, including for dispersing peaceful assemblies and terrorism. No one can say how long the appeal will take.

The appeal gives prosecutors hope in their case against Yanukovych and security forces for organising executions and dispersing protests.

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Yanukovych's lawyers abandoned him, claiming they had lost contact. So the state gave him a free defence lawyer: Andriy Domanskyi. The latter has also so far failed to contact the former president.

"I hope our grandchildren will see the verdict," Domanskyi jokes.

From openDemocracy