KIEV, UKRAINE — “This is how storm has started,” Kateryna Kruk, a former parliament press secretary who quit her job on Nov. 21 to join pro-European protests in Kiev, wrote on Twitter. Her tweet included a video of special Interior Ministry troops assembling en masse in the government district of the Ukrainian capital just before 1 a.m. local time on Dec. 11.

Under the cover of night, those troops, along with thousands of Berkut officers — Ukraine’s feared riot police — dressed in their typical blue camouflage and black helmets, with shields, truncheons, smoke grenades and water cannons in tow, moved toward Independence Square and thousands of peaceful demonstrators.
Slowly and methodically, phalanxes of those police pushed back protesters on main streets of the Ukrainian capital, ripping apart barricades erected of park benches, planters, trees and scaffolding in their path.
See also: A Protest of Historic Proportions: 15 Photos From Kiev
I was awakened at 1:14 a.m. when a colleague called. Shouting into the phone, her voice froggy from a lack of sleep, she said: “Chris, they’re attacking! Get up!” Wiping the sleep from my eyes, the first thing I did before going out was get on Twitter to see what those on the ground had already reported.
“At St. Michael’s St. barricade is Vitali Klitschko,” wrote civic activist and opposition lawmaker Andiry Shevchenko, adding in another tweet that the world boxing champion turned UDAR (Punch) opposition party leader was attempting to talk down riot police.
Olesya Orobets, another opposition party lawmaker, tweeted that the lights had gone out in Kiev City Hall, where hundreds of protesters have been camped out for more than a week. Fearing that police would storm the building following a court-ordered eviction, in recent days they have booby-trapped the building and armed themselves with fire hoses and wooden chair legs.
Believing, in this case, that I could do more reporting from home rather than on the scene, I closely watched three livefeeds of the event while coordinating by phone and on Facebook the actions of five of my journalists on the ground who reported back through the same channels.
The pushing and shoving match between police and protesters went on for hours and into the late morning. In the end, opposition leaders and protesters declared victory. After all, they had not lost possession of City Hall or the Trade Unions buildings, which they seized during a mass public protest on Dec. 1.
Law enforcement did manage, however, to reclaim some of the square as well as the city’s main drag, Khreschatyk Street, and divide the protest camp into parts.
Caught a few winks. Back now. But wow, last night...wild. This photo by Kostyantyn Chernichkin for @KyivPost... tense pic.twitter.com/DkCWjNEuL4
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) December 11, 2013
The riot police raid in the pre-dawn hours of that Wednesday morning garnered significant coverage among Western news outlets — The New York Times featured it above the fold on Page One, and many Western publications now have correspondents on the ground here. But it was only the latest in a series of skirmishes that have played out in the streets of Kiev — and social media channels — over the past three weeks.
The hundreds of thousands who’ve turned out here in that time range in age, university students and retired pensioners, all united by similar beliefs regarding the direction in which their country is heading. They don’t necessarily want to be in the EU, but they don’t want to be more closely aligned with Russia. More than those two things, they don’t want the man leading the country, President Viktor Yanukovych, to remain in office.
Kseniya Piddubna, a Kyiv college student in her 20s, hopes the protests will result in an association and free-trade deal with the EU. She said she is also willing to remain on the streets until the government is overthrown “because it cannot continue working with such criminal actions.”
Viktor Zelenskiy, a middle-aged engineer disappointed with the way in which the Orange Revolution failed (infighting between President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko resulted in a lame-duck administration), said he also hopes this will lead to more competent state governance and a new president.
“I have nothing to lose, so I will stay here until the end, no matter how it ends,” he said.
A poet named Oleh Kostiuchyna said he joined the masses on the square because of his devotion to his country. “I have a credo: Ukraine above everything,” he said.

The role of social media in EuroMaidan is unprecedented in Ukraine. Unlike the Orange Revolution nine years ago, which overturned a rigged election, this protest has been largely fueled by social media. The first images and messages of some 3,000 people on the square didn't go out in print or television media; they were from citizens, activists and journalists on Facebook and Twitter.
See also: 9 Essential Twitter Sources for Ukrainian Conflict News
The people's uprising can be traced to Nov. 21, with messages like this one: “RT!! Meet at 22:30 under the monument of Independence. Dress warmly; take umbrellas, tea, coffee, and friends.”
Those were the words of celebrity Ukrainian journalist Mustafa Nayyem, who first called on citizens via Twitter to mobilize at Independence Square — the site of the nation’s Orange Revolution in 2004 — late that day to protest the government’s decision to abandon a free-trade pact.
Thousands turned out that night on the square, donning blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags and matching EU ribbons. They chanted, “Ukraine is Europe,” and they sang the Ukrainian national anthem.
To spread the word, participants of the spontaneous protest gave it a name and a hashtag: “EuroMaidan.” The official EuroMaidan Facebook page, created by journalists and civil activists here, was the fastest-growing page in the Ukrainian segment of the social network between Nov. 21 and Dec. 1. On Twitter, two EuroMaidan pages have garnered tens of thousands of followers, who use the hashtag #Euromaidan and Ukrainian and Russian equivalents #Євромайдан #Евромайдан to filter news about the demonstrations. From Nov. 21 to 28, the average number of Twitter posts using the hash tags was about 1,500 to 3,000 per hour, or one every 2 to 3 seconds. Prior to EuroMaidan, Twitter was far underutilized in Ukraine.
The most widely seen and shared posts show images of riot police cracking down on rowdy and peaceful protesters alike, as well as those injured. A flurry of image-heavy tweets came when the decades-old statue of Soviet Union Leader Vladimir Lenin fell.

The flurry of online activity prompted Maksym Savanevsky, founder of Ukrainian new media news website Watcher, to write on Nov. 29: “The appearance of EuroMaidan is an achievement of, primarily, digital communications in social networks and online media.”
Besides the meteoric rise of social media use, he cited other evidence: leading Ukrainian-language online news site Ukrainska Pravda saw traffic jump to about 550,000 individual readers per day. Its traffic from Facebook increased nearly tenfold in the first weeks of protests. Other news sites, such as English-language newspaper the Kyiv Post, where I work as an editor, reported significant increases in website traffic, by up to 100,000 page views per day.
However, both of these news sites, as well as several others, were victims of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Three had their offices raided by police, who ripped their servers and hard drives from the walls and took them away.
Social media networks during those times remained up and running, which is another reason why their role here cannot be understated.
With barricades going back up on Wednesday in Independence Square, and protesters and opposition parties still at odds with Ukraine’s government, demanding the resignations of President Yanukovych, the political stalemate here is likely to become a protracted affair. It will be interesting to see how the two groups reconcile, but it will be particularly fascinating to watch it all play out on new media.
Images: Kostyantyn Chernichkin
Christopher J. Miller is an editor at English-language newspaper the Kyiv Post in Ukraine.