What led to the high number of casualties on the Maidan in 2013-2014, as opposed to 2004?

In 2004 the police and the military were still subordinated to out­going President Kuchma, who was not prepared to authorize a brutal crackdown that would benefit his successor. In 2013, however, the Yanukovych administration was fully in control of law enforce­ment bodies and the armed forces.

For all of these reasons, the authorities were determined not to give in to the mass protests. But they could not break them up ei­ther. On November 30, 2013, the regime's first attempt to remove the tent city and disperse the protesters caused their ranks to swell. As soon as social media spread the news, Kyivites started flocking to the Maidan in the tens of thousands, and supporters from other regions left for the capital, too. At least half a million attended a mass rally on the Maidan on December 1. To break the deadlock, on January 16, 2014, the government eventually imitated the Russian example by ramming through parliament draconian anti-protest legislation that limited freedom of speech and assembly, as well as NGO activity. Yet such a blatant restriction of democracy, together with subsequent attempts to break up the Maidan protests by force, met with an equally violent response.

Street fighting ensued in central Kyiv between January 19 and 25, with riot police using rubber bullets and water cannons, while the protesters armed themselves with cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.

The so-called titushky contributed greatly to the escalation of vi­olence. They were young men from the provinces, often members of local athletic clubs, hired by the Party of Regions to pose as anti-Maidan protesters. The name refers to one Vadym Titushko, a paid thug from the city of Bila Tserkva, who had been convicted of physically assaulting journalists in 2013, before the EuroMaidan. Although they did not carry firearms, titushky freely employed vi­olence and coordinated their actions with the police. During the winter of 2013-2014, they camped out in a park near the Ukrainian parliament, where several protesters died in clashes. Titushky also roamed the streets beating up protesters both in the capital and in other large cities, such as Kharkiv.

Several more deaths resulted from the skirmishes in Kyiv during the next month, but the violence reached its crescendo between February 18 and 20, 2014. The protesters' march on parliament led to clashes with the police, who responded by attempting to storm the barricaded tent city on the Maidan. Most of the deaths occurred on February 20, during fighting on the streets leading from the Maidan uphill to the government quarter. Whether or not government forces received an authorization to shoot, they definitely fired upon protesters, and in some cases the latter returned fire. It was not an all- out firefight, which would have caused casualties in the thousands. Shootings occurred covertly during the tensest moment of the showdown, in which the usual tactics were swarming, throwing rocks, and beatings with sticks. At one point, the protesters even constructed a catapult to throw various projectiles at the riot police.

The bloodshed had immediate political consequences. Late on February 20, parliament condemned the use of deadly force against the protesters. At the same time, the three main opposition parties, including Freedom but not Right Sector, issued a statement distancing themselves from armed violence. That same day, the min­ister of the interior gave an order to distribute live ammunition to all police officers and authorized them to use it; then he slipped out of the capital. Meanwhile, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Poland arrived to mediate the negotiations between the two opposing sides. As word spread in the afternoon of February 21 that a deal had been reached between Yanukovych and the opposition, riot policemen who had been guarding government buildings un­expectedly began to desert their posts. They were not prepared to stand by the government in the event of an all-out armed assault and feared that the authorities would use them as scapegoats afterward. This move apparently came as a nasty surprise to Yanukovych, who saw from his office window how the units guarding the presidential administration building were leaving. He now had no option but to flee. Protesters organized into “Maidan Self-Defense” units took over government buildings, and the army either sided with them or remained neutral.