Ukraine’s embattled president was clinging desperately to power this week, after an increasingly violent protest movement forced his much-loathed prime minister to resign and parliament rolled back a raft of draconian laws against dissent. An alliance of opposition groups, enraged by President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision in November to suddenly abandon closer ties to the European Union and instead embrace Russia, vowed protests would continue until Yanukovych is removed from power, political prisoners are freed, and presidential authority is curtailed. “We have to change not only the government but the rules of the game as well,” said opposition leader Vitali Klitschko.
We’re witnessing the dawn of a new, postsectarian era in Ukraine, said Kataryna Wolczuk and Roman Wolczuk in The Washington Post. Anger against Yanukovych’s venal and arrogant regime has done what no one opposition leader could—namely, unite a country divided between an EU-leaning west and a Russian-speaking east that still identifies with the former USSR. Ukrainians of all stripes now see the ongoing protests as a fight to reclaim their status as “dignified citizens in their own land.”
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