In March 2016, when the Twitter user @fabranquinho predicted that right-wing militias in Brazil might “Ukrainize”—that is, radicalize a nascent protest movement against left-wing President Dilma Rousseff in order to provoke government repression, which would then spur further protest—he seemed to introduce Twitter a neologism that would soon spread. Countless tweets and videos later, by 2020, the idea spiraled out of control.
The protests against Rousseff, which attracted millions of people, were successful; the president was eventually ousted in August of that year. Calls to Ukrainize—ucranizar in Portuguese—aside, however, the movement remained largely peaceful in contrast to the Euromaidan in Ukraine a couple of years before, which had its moments of bloodshed and had eventually given way to a war with Russia in the country’s eastern stretches.
