Kerry Offers Hope Where Snipers Once Fired in Ukraine

http://swampland.time.com/2014/03/04/ukraine-kiev-john-kerry/?iid=sl-main-lead


Kerry Offers Hope Where Snipers Once Fired in Ukraine

The Secretary of State makes a show of support for Kiev, and against Putin
By Michael Crowley/Kiev @CrowleyTIME
March 04, 20140


The buildings over Institutskaya Street loomed ominously through the grey afternoon mist. High above and just days earlier, snipers had picked off the protesters one by one. They shot the people who came to rescue the wounded, too.

Secretary of State John Kerry stood Tuesday at the spot where some of the protesters had fallen—slain for resisting their government’s authoritarian, pro-Moscow tilt. A couple weeks, there are memorials to the dead: photographs and candles and beautiful bundles of colorful flowers that lie in contrast to the heaps of charred metal, wood, tires and barbed wire that once served as barriers against the now-deposed President Viktor Yanukoych’s goons. Kerry paused near a lamppost with a visible bullet hole.

A pair of middle-aged women pushed through the crowd to Kerry.

“We hope for your help!” exclaimed one.

“We will be helping. We are helping,” Kerry told her. ”President Obama is planning more assistance.”

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His next stop was the Ukraine’s parliament, known as the Rada, and now guarded by a somewhat rag-tag team of self-defense force volunteers. Clad in camouflage uniforms provided by Ukraine’s interior ministry, these men first turned out to defend the protesters on the Maidan. They can now be seen around the city. At the Rada, three of them sat around a barrel fire fueled by wood, which they took turns chopping on the spot.

Even as Putin threatens from the east, Ukraine has huge problems within. Both its politics and its economy urgently need the equivalent of open-heart surgery that must be performed in the back of a flat bed truck on a dirt road. Inside the Rada was a reminder of the human stakes: a long table featuring the framed photos of about one hundred slain protesters—most of them young men, aged 18-20. Kerry toured the table somberly, then went into meetings with the country’s post-Yanukoych political leadership.

“What they stood for so bravely,” Kerry later said of the Maidan’s fallen, “will never be stolen by bullets or by invasions. It cannot be silenced by thugs from rooftops. It is universal, it’s unmistakable, and it’s called freedom.”