A freedom fighter from Ukraine’s bloody 2014 uprising is back on the front line and says Putin will never triumph.
For Volodymyr Parasiuk, who protested against Ukraine ’s then pro-Russian president, the war with their powerful, murderous neighbours has been going on for years.
And holding a bullet aloft, the 32-year-old says: “This is the only language Putin understands. We will kill the last Russian here and destroy the last Russian tank. We will win.”
In 2014 he stood shoulder to shoulder with other brave Ukrainians for 93 days in the Maidan Uprising.
They camped on barricades at Kyiv’s Independence Square after President Yanukovych rejected a deal for a closer relationship with the European Union for closer ties with Russia.
The demonstrators were also incensed by widespread government corruption, police brutality and the violation of human rights in Ukraine.
Volodymyr became a hero of the people after giving a rousing speech which many claim led to Yanukovych fleeing the country hours later.
But the three-month protest came with a heavy toll in human life.
The Berkut riot police beat and killed 108 protesters, even opening fire with machine guns and snipers. More than 70 died in the last three days.
The Maidan Uprising enraged Vladimir Putin who, a month later, annexed Crimea and created the self-proclaimed breakaway states of Donetsk and Luhansk, sparking the Donbas War.
During that war Volodymyr was captured and tortured when Ukrainian forces tried to recapture the city of Ilovaisk from pro-Russian insurgents in Donbas. A close friend was killed in front of him.
Now Volodymyr, speaking from a bunker outside Kyiv, has told why Russian forces will never take Ukraine.The ex-Dnipro militia commander- turned-Ukrainian MP said: “Putin is sick, mentally ill.
“He has a constant desire to rebuild the Soviet Union and he knows he can’t do it without subjugating Ukraine.
“He will not win because we love our country. We love our country because we don’t have another one.”
Volodymyr is on a Russian kill list and his home has been hit by a grenade, yet he is not afraid.He said Maidan was the start of Ukraine’s bid to be free of Russian oppression. “Wars have different phases and now is the most active phase of this war. This has been going on for years. It’s only now that people take notice when Putin invades.”
In 2014 ex-boxing champ and opposition leader Vitali Klitschko stood on stage on the final night of the Maidan and told protesters he had struck a deal to hold new elections. Volodymyr jumped on stage, denounced the opposition for “shaking hands with a killer” and threatened civilians would take up arms and storm Parliament. Yanukovych fled to Russia hours later.
He said: “If Yanukovych stayed Ukraine would have been forever controlled by Russia. We could not allow a negotiated settlement which would include him staying.When people started firing at us, we knew there was no going back. I do not have any fear.”
Ukrainians who took part will remember the protests forever. Here are some of their stories.
The journalist
Johannes Andersen was sitting in a Kyiv cafe in the early hours of November 30, 2013, when young protesters rushed in.
They were throwing away their Ukrainian flags because, that night, carrying one in the capital had suddenly become dangerous.
Johannes, a Danish freelance journalist, raced into the streets around the Maidan and started filming as riot police beat unarmed demonstrators.
He says: “They attacked me and I held on to the phone for dear life. I screamed like hell.” Now 53, Johannes spent the following weeks reporting on the protests as they turned increasingly violent.
He remembers one dispatch in February after the shootings started. “There was a line of fresh corpses and everybody was crying,” dad-of-three Johannes, who lived in Kyiv for 18 years, recalls. “I had to go on live radio and I just had to turn away in order to speak for tears.”
The lecturer
Mychail Wynnckyj remembers the date when he saw a protester gunned down in the square – February 19, 2014.
“One of the riot police jumped up from behind the monument and shot at a person about three metres away with a pump-action shotgun,” he says.
The 51-year-old lecturer at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was in the Maidan every day chronicling the uprising for three months. He first attended to support the student demo. But the protests quickly grew – and turned bloody.
Mychailo, author of Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War, says: “It became very clear that the violence was instigated not just by the Ukrainian regime, but had strong backing from Russian.”
The human rights lawyer
Oleksandra Matviichuk founded the Euromaidan SOS organisation to provide legal assistance to thousands of protestors brutalised by special forces, working 24 hours a day for three months.
The group has also spent eight years taking testimonies from victims of torture and false imprisonment in Crimea and Donbas at the hands of pro-Russian groups.
She said: “The reaction of the West was very weak in 2014, which encouraged Putin to go further. This escalation is a result of the weak response.
“I personally spoke with hundreds of people after they were released from captivity in Donbas.
“One woman told me how her eyes were pulled out with a spoon. A lot of people were tortured with electricity.”
Oleksandra, 38, from Kyiv, said Ukrainians were fighting for the democratic freedoms they hoped to secure during the Maidan protests - rights that she feels British people take for granted.
She said: “People in Russia go into a peaceful protest alone and they are beaten and tortured.
“They express much more courage than Western people who have no risk when they go to peaceful assemblies.”
She urged Brits to lobby politicians to provide military support and stop Russia "colonising" her nation.
She said: “We are Ukrainian - we have our culture, we have our history, we have our spirit.
“Russia and Putin always said that we are the same and tried to destroy our independence and our right to existence.
“Russia is an empire and we were the colony.
“The question is whether Western democracies are ready to fight and defend those values which they declare?"
