The Lede
December 11, 2013, 2:25 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY
A screenshot of four live video streams from Kiev’s Independence Square early Wednesday.
Updated, 3:02 p.m. | As my colleagues
David Herszenhorn and Andrew Kramer report
from Kiev, the security forces failed to clear protesters from the
city’s main square overnight, despite dismantling barricades and shoving
against lines of demonstrators for hours in the freezing cold.
The relative restraint shown by the riot police, known as the Berkut, was in marked contrast to
the brutal beating of protesters and journalists
during the government’s last attempt to clear the protest camp, just
over a week ago. The security forces’s new tolerance of journalism meant
that interested observers who were not in the square, or even in the
country, were able to follow events as they unfolded in granular detail,
watching live video of the tense standoff in the square
streamed from multiple camera angles,
reading text updates from reporters and activists as the hours passed
and viewing photographs of protesters fortifying their defenses at the
nearby city hall they continue to occupy.
By ROBERT MACKEY
The Ukrainian security forces’s new tolerance of journalism means that
interested observers who are not in Kiev’s main square, or even in the
country, are able to follow events as they unfold, in granular detail.
One of those streaming video throughout the night, from both sides of the front lines, was
Mustafa Nayyem, an independent Ukrainian journalist. At one stage, Mr. Nayyem
recorded the dismantling of barricades by officers and men in orange vests who appeared to be municipal workers.
Video streamed live to the web overnight by Mustafa Nayyem, a Ukrainian journalist who uses the screen name mefimus.
As night gave way to morning, video posted on Instagram by Max
Seddon, a Buzzfeed correspondent in the square, and Sergey Ponomarev, a
New York Times photographer, showed that the protest camp’s sound system
continued to blast out
a driving hard-rock soundtrack to the action, punctuated by repeated
renditions of the national anthem from the Ukrainian pop star Ruslana.
Although the lack of violence made for less obviously dramatic
images, there was one extraordinary scene captured on video at about 2
a.m. local time. As both the Guardian reporter Shaun Walker and the
Dutch correspondent Olaf Koens reported on Twitter, hours into the
shoving match, a phalanx of riot police officers suddenly found
themselves forced through the lines and then trapped inside the square.
The protesters, however, treated them with mercy, and formed a cordon
through their lines to allow them to retreat.
Clear images of that scene were recorded by a young Ukrainian filmmaker, Vasia Nikolayenko. Just over four minutes into
his footage
of the night’s action, Mr. Nikolayenko showed the orange-helmeted
protesters clearing a path through their ranks and the police officers
filing out.
Video recorded overnight in Kiev by a 20-year-old
Ukrainian filmmaker, Vasia Nikolayenko, showed protesters forming a
cordon to allow riot police officers, briefly stranded behind their
lines, to retreat.
Mr. Nikolayenko, who was 11 years old during the last round of mass
protests against the current president, Viktor Yanukovich, also had some
fun with video of a statue of Lenin that was toppled by protesters in
Kiev last week, producing
a remix set to the soundtrack from the Super Mario Brothers video game.
A YouTube remix of video recorded during the toppling of a statue of Lenin in Kiev last week.
Back in the square as night fell again Wednesday, protesters rebuilt their barricades with one of the materials at hand, snow.
After sudden police pullback, Wed a.m.
#Kiev protesters reclaim Independ. Sq, rebuilt barriers w/ bags snow
COPY http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2
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