I have just been re-reading a timeline of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine & the thing that always jumps out is that the protests simmered for months until the police started killing protestors, which lead to Yanukovich's ouster within weeks. - ThreadSky

nied.bsky.social • 12 days ago

I have just been re-reading a timeline of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine & the thing that always jumps out is that the protests simmered for months until the police started killing protestors, which lead to Yanukovich's ouster within weeks.

Reposted from GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

if the guard or the marines suddenly open fire on protestors, the admin has a flash point explosion on their hands, and if they refuse orders to do so, the admin has an even bigger problem

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kbuts.bsky.social•12 days ago

yeah, I remember talking to folks in Nov '23 about the protests and people thought they'd fizzle out as it got colder

badhorse.bsky.social•11 days ago

The real fun part about that is that one of Yanukovich's top advisors at the time was none other than Paul Manafort, a name that should sound familiar.

It's not 100% confirmed, but some in his family seem to think that Manafort is the one who came up with the idea to brutalize protestors.

nied.bsky.social•11 days ago

IIRC Manafort was mainly involved in Yanukovich's election campaign (in partnership with Tad Devine, Bernie Sanders's 2016 campaign chair).

proofofburden.bsky.social•12 days ago

Regime change is one of those things that is glacially slow until it fucking isn't!

kbuts.bsky.social•12 days ago

"gradually, then suddenly"

starshine.bsky.social•12 days ago

when trump, after successfully publicly ordering police kill people, he publicly screams at the military to SHOOT THEM!!!!!

and the military stands down, it's not just bad optics for trump

apparatchikwannabe.bsky.social•12 days ago

once you’re at the “military refusing orders from the guy who’s supposed to give them orders” stage it’s uh, very hard to go back.

bencates.bsky.social•12 days ago

Really hard to tell how thin the ice is getting until you start falling through.

williameasley.bsky.social•12 days ago

Just look at Syria for a more recent example

ogdavisxmachina.bsky.social•12 days ago

Metastable.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/metastable

neotiamat99.bsky.social•12 days ago

Before you hit the point of no return, it's in everyone's interests to keep tension low, to de-escalate, to avoid trouble, and to basically not be the guy in the spotlight.

*After* you hit that point of no return, you need to act if you want to survive, and people start moving fast.

minimallycrazy.bsky.social•11 days ago

Another thing is that being decoupled from reality becomes a much bigger liability all at once when that happens, because 'the ability to accurately assess and respond to events' is not something you can learn to do on the fly

minimallycrazy.bsky.social•11 days ago

Right now they're deploying excess troops to a peaceful protest based on shit they made up that supposedly happened on Saturday

What do you want to guess they'll do when the timelines are tighter and real consequences start looming?

palerider318.bsky.social•12 days ago

Highly recommend Marci Shore's lecture on the Maidan. She makes it clear that Euromaidan only became a whole of society thing after Berkut brutally beat the original protesters. A small (probably ignorable) student protest became a massive movement directly as a result of Yanukovych cracking down.

nied.bsky.social•12 days ago

And often seems literally impossible until it very suddenly doesn't.

zachrabiroff.com•12 days ago

Think also of the speed and intensity with which the entire Soviet Bloc went from total, hard-line retrenchment to dizzying collapse

russellcohn.bsky.social•12 days ago

Like Assad’s regime basically collapsed over a week when no one was paying attention

lazear.bsky.social•12 days ago

Hell we just had a clear example of this with Syria. No one was expecting the regime to fall, and then boom two weeks later Assad is living in a 2 bedroom Russian apartment.

nied.bsky.social•12 days ago

A lot of people in the Trump admin (& on here) think that once the regime starts shooting dissidents that's the end of protests, but if anything that just makes the protests bigger. A fun fact is the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was kicked off by a *false rumor* a protestor was killed.

antitractionist.bsky.social•12 days ago

Well fortunately we don’t live in an environment absolutely flooded with false information generated by lying machines

urbancic.bsky.social•11 days ago

The belief that killing protestors will quell protests is downright bizarre here in the U.S., where the Boston Massacre is seen as such a galvanizing event in the path to revolution against British rule.

tbwagp.bsky.social•12 days ago

yes, it’s a pop culture truism but it’s not really based on anything real. time and time again, violence is the last desperate gasp

apparatchikwannabe.bsky.social•12 days ago

more broadly, in the case of the admin it’s a belief that the world works how they want. if the military decided to just hold the line and shoot protestors, they would win, but the only reason to assume they’d do that is if you believe that trump is already king and that disobedience is impossible.

neotiamat99.bsky.social•12 days ago

As best I can tell, the actual best approach is to let protests exhaust themselves. Let people camp out for a few weeks until they get hungry and go home, maybe offer some compromise to peel a portion off (you can always go back on it later).

This isn't manly enough for many folks, though.

timothygassin.bsky.social•12 days ago

Another case of this happening, but without any happy outcome for those who protested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident

erinslick.bsky.social•11 days ago

Literally every single one in history is like this all the up to Assad. It was impossible and unimaginable one day and reality the next

crzwdjk.bsky.social•11 days ago

It was almost exactly 3 months from Mustafa's famous Facebook post until Yanukovych fled the country.

alwaysadorecats.bsky.social•12 days ago

Trump and Miller sure seem to be doing what they can to turn ICE and CBP into the Berkut and Militsiya

alwaysadorecats.bsky.social•12 days ago

Now I’m not saying we’re definitely headed to an Amerimaidan, but I’m also not saying the chances are exactly zero

doubtingderek.bsky.social•12 days ago

Is this a good time to watch the documentary “Winter on Fire”?

I think it might be a good time.

luanneplatter.bsky.social•12 days ago

A very good time, I think.

satakarnak.bsky.social•12 days ago

It's worth pointing out berukt kidnapped people and killed one of them long before the event where the most of the Heavenly hundreds died.

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