February 20, 2014. Kyiv calls it Bloody Thursday. By the end of that morning, dozens of people lay dead on Instytutska Street — protesters and police both — in the worst single day of violence the Maidan produced.
Within days, Ukraine’s new prosecutor’s office had an answer. President Viktor Yanukovych and his Berkut special police unit were responsible. The transitional government said so publicly before the ballistics were in.
What the Reporters Found on the Ground
Weeks later, a German television crew arrived to check the official version against the evidence. ARD’s investigative programme Monitor sent three reporters — Philipp Jahn, Olga Sviridenko, and Stefan Stuchlik — to Kyiv in 2014, and what they found did not sit comfortably with the government’s account.
A radio-amateur had recorded Yanukovych’s own security forces that day, confused and denying responsibility for shots fired at people they didn’t recognize as targets. A protester named Mikola, present on Instytutska Street for hours, described being fired on from behind — from the eighth or ninth floor of the Hotel Ukraina, the opposition’s own headquarters that day. A doctor who treated wounded from both sides told the crew the bullets removed from government militia and from protesters were the same type. He said he could say no more than that.
Investigators working the case told Monitor they’d been denied ballistic reports, weapons data, deployment plans. Lawyers representing the families of the dead — by their own account aligned with the new government — said they’d received no documentation at all. Ukraine’s new prosecutor general, meanwhile, came from Svoboda, the nationalist party whose own members had been named among the accused.
None of this proved who fired the shots. It only proved the story wasn’t settled the week the new government declared it closed.
The Verdict, Nine Years Later
The case went to trial in 2016. It produced a verdict on October 18, 2023 — nearly 1,700 pages, almost a decade in the making.
The court found three Berkut officers guilty of murder. Oleh Yanishevskyi received a life sentence. Two colleagues received fifteen years each. On paper, that resolves the official version: government forces, held responsible, convicted.
Except the same verdict also addressed the killings the trial didn’t charge anyone for — roughly a tenth of the dead and well over half the wounded, according to the court’s own account, shot from positions the prosecution’s investigation could not place under Berkut control. Among those positions: the Hotel Ukraina. Svoboda itself had stated, in its own official announcement at the time, that its people took control of that hotel on January 25, 2014 — three and a half weeks before the shootings.
The court did not say who was in that building on February 20. It said only that shots came from there, and that the government’s own men could not have fired them.
Convicted, and Free
None of the three convicted men are in prison today. All five original defendants were handed to Russian-backed authorities in a 2019 prisoner exchange, traded for Ukrainians held on the other side of the front line. Two returned to Kyiv afterward and stood trial in person; one was acquitted outright, the other given a sentence already covered by time served. The three who received real sentences — including the one life sentence — remain in Russia, outside the reach of the verdict that convicted them.
A verdict, in other words, that convicts nobody who will serve a day for it.
Reuters and several other outlets reported the story as officers being “sentenced.” That’s accurate as far as it goes. It also leaves out the acquittal, the opposition-controlled building, and the ten years it took to arrive at an answer this incomplete.
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The Stage, Before Any of This Was Known
None of what the court eventually found was available to the politicians who spent the winter of 2013–14 addressing the Maidan crowd directly, in person, on camera. What is available is the sequence itself — and the sequence speaks on its own.
December 5, 2013. Victoria Nuland, US Assistant Secretary of State, visits the Maidan and hands out bread to the crowd.
December 9, 2013. Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, posts a public message telling Yanukovych to end his own “winter games” and start listening to the square — a sitting foreign legislature’s presiding officer, instructing another head of state on how to handle his own citizens.
December 13, 2013. Nuland tells an audience in Washington, on the record, that the United States has invested over five billion dollars supporting Ukraine’s democratic development since 1991.
December 14–15, 2013. Senator John McCain flies to Kyiv and addresses the crowd from the stage, sharing the platform with Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok.
Mid-January 2014. Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Liberal group in the European Parliament, calls the movement the largest pro-European demonstration in the history of the European Union.
February 21, 2014. An agreement between Yanukovych and the opposition is brokered and witnessed by the German, French, and Polish foreign ministers, with a Russian observer declining to sign. It specifies a roadmap for the months ahead. Yanukovych flees the next day. The agreement is obsolete within twenty-four hours of being signed.
Eleven weeks separate the cookies from the collapsed agreement. In that window, the claims about what was happening on the square grow steadily larger — from a plea to listen, to a dollar figure, to a shared stage, to “the largest demonstration in the history of the European Union” — while the actual evidence about who was shooting whom on Instytutska Street was still nine years from being written down.
None of the people in this sequence have been asked to reconcile what they said then with what the court found later. The verdict exists. The statements exist, dated and on the record. They have never been placed in the same room.
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What does it mean when the people who stood on a stage and called the outcome before the evidence existed are never asked, once the evidence exists, whether they’d still say the same thing?
Related: Case Closed — on a different unresolved case, and the courts that couldn’t agree on it either. The German Officer Who Went to Kyiv — on what one CDU lawmaker did in that same city, a decade later.
