The most beautiful thing I ever saw – the revolution in Ukraine started on this day, 11 years ago.

The demonstrations that became known as the EuroMaidan Revolution started on Nov. 21, 2013. Michael Andersen was on Independence Square in Kyiv that night. And he did not have much faith in it.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

On Thursday, November 21, 2013, I was about to close down the office for the night when a couple of posts popped up on Facebook from the Ukrainian journalist Mustafa Nayem:

The first one said:

“Come on, guys, let’s be serious. If you really want to do something, don’t just ‘like’ this post. Write that you are ready, and we can try to start something.”

About an hour later, Nayem wrote again:

“Let’s meet at 22:30 near the monument to independence in the middle of the Maidan.”

The “if you want to do something” referred to the political shock in Ukraine earlier that same day when President Viktor Yanukovych unexpectedly turned down the offer of an association agreement with the European Union. An agreement which potentially could become very lucrative for Ukraine financially, as well as allow its population to travel, work and study in Europe. For a while, Yanukovich had been trying to play the same balancing game that his colleague in Belarus Aleksandr Lukasheno had perfected during 20 years. But Ukraine was too important, and ‘Yanek’ got a phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin, offering him more money, more gas and more threats - ‘I will personally stand on your balls, boy’.

Both the EU and the Ukrainian opposition were taken by surprise. Despite the humiliation, the EU was, as always, treading water, emitting only the usual niceties about “further contacts and discussion.” Only then-Swedish Foreign Minister Karl Bildt spoke out: “Ukraine has bowed to pressure from Russia.” It is worth remembering that at this point in history, most Western politicians still believed that we could “do business” with Vladimir Putin (to use the expression of George W. Bush). It was only four years ago that Hillary Clinton initiated her disastrous “reset” policy, banking on a resuscitation of our relations with Putin’s Russia.

In 2013, I worked in Kyiv – or as some spelled it back then, Kiev, as a journalist for Denmark Radio and as the director of a large-scale Danish media development project (called MYMEDIA, financed by the Danish government. As such, we were the first donor to financially support the group of journalists who later became Hromadske TV in their coverage of Ukraine’s backing out of the EU deal, including supporting their trip to that fateful EU Summit in Vilnius one week later, Nov. 29, 2013. At that meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel would greet the Ukrainian leader with the famous words: “Good to see you here, Viktor, but we expected more from you.” And then Angela famously shrugged her shoulders like a disappointed mother who knows that her son is too old for her to interfere but still wants to let him know how displeased she is.

That Thursday, after Yanek’s “dosvidniya” to the EU had become public, the Ukrainian opposition did not react for many hours. In the coming weeks and months, as the popular demonstrations would explode into an unstoppable revolution, these opposition leaders would always manage to snake themselves onto the stage on the Maidan and grab the microphone and limelight as if change had been their idea, their demand. But that day, very few of them were to be found anywhere.

Then, at around eight in the evening on Nov. 21, Nayem posted his call for people to come to the Maidan, or Independence Square. Within a couple of hours, his post had gotten thousands of likes and comments - although in the end, maybe 500 people showed up in the cold November night.

I went with Natalia Domanska, my colleague in our media project. Our office was only a 10-minute walk away. It was one of those November nights in Kyiv when you could feel that the soft drizzle might turn into snow at any time.

“Oh my God, more of the usual blah,” said a frozen Natalia to me as we joined the small crowd, not taking up much space on the big, dark square: No organization, a few homemade posters, no megaphones, never mind a loudspeaker. For some time, the several hundred people stood in small groups, discussing among themselves, moaning about Yanukovych, and asking where the opposition was—nothing we hadn’t seen before.

“Well, if nobody is going to do anything anyway,” said Natalia sarcastically, “can we just all go home and meet again on a warmer day?”

Growing up in Ukraine in the 1980s and 1990s, Natalia lived through the 2004 Orange Revolution, which stopped Yanukovych from taking the presidency in a rigged election. This led to four years of Viktor Yushchenko before Yanukovych’s election in 2010. Through her work in international development projects, Natalia worked for years with the dead-corrupt Ukrainian government bureaucracy. She did not have much patience with words, particularly not in this cold.

Yuriy Lutsenko, the tall and physically imposing former interior minister, started shouting about the need to occupy the parliament, “Soviet revolution style.” He and a small group of middle-aged men in black leather jackets stumped up the hill, gesticulating toward the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Ten minutes later, though, they came back, muttering something about it being impossible to break into the parliament building without any tools.

The lack of organisation reminded me of so many other demonstrations that I had attended in Ukraine, most with lots of agitated words but in the end amounting to preciously little else.

It was now midnight and getting very cold. We were about to leave when the Klitschko boxing brothers showed up. Vitali, now Kyiv’s mayor, was a newly elected member of the Ukrainian parliament with declared ambitions for the following year’s presidential elections. His brother Vladimir was still the world heavy weight champion. Both mountains of men stand at more than two meters.

“People want to live decent lives; they do not want to live in this corrupt bandit manner that our president does,” Vitali Klitschko shouted, his voice going sore from the lack of a sound system. On my recording from that night, you can hear a couple of young women heckling Klitschko.

“You are just here to make political PR for yourself; we know about your political ambitions,” they shouted, standing right in front of the two giant Klitschkos. Some tried to shout down the hecklers. I remember thinking that those were two courageous and possibly foolhardy young women. But luckily nothing happened.

Finally, somebody had finally managed to rustle up a megaphone, and a hoarse Klitschko continued: “We can change the situation, but only if you get your families and friends to join us in the demonstrations.”

“We all want to live in a normal country, but nobody will give it to us; we have to do it ourselves; we have to show that we want this, that we are worthy of a normal life.”

”Today, several thousand people showed up here,” Klitschko said, exaggerating the number wildly. I was standing literally next to him, and we were both looking at the crowd of a maximum of 500 people.

 ”And I am convinced that tomorrow tens of thousands will come and the day after that hundreds of thousands. And then we go to the people in power and demand that they listen to us.”

He got sparse applause on the cold night. To avoid losing the crowd, Klitschko asked everybody to join him in shouting the slogan: Ukraine is Europe!” and “Bandu het! - “Bandits, get out!”

The next morning, when I sent my audio reportage from the meeting to Denmark’s Radio, a colleague in Copenhagen listened to my piece and then asked me, "So you clearly don’t think anything will come of this, Michael?”

The previous night, on the square, I had asked Klitschko, “What’s the plan now?” His response: ”To collect as many people as possible, most Ukrainians want to live with civilized European norms and standards. We have to explain to people that Ukraine’s future in Europe depends on them, not on President Yanukovych; it depends on people and on Ukrainian society.”

”But,” I asked Klitschko - and listening today, I can still hear the disbelief in my own voice, I mean we were standing surrounded by 500 people and not all of them seemed that interested. “Vitali, what can you really do if the president already has turned down the EU agreement?”

”One voice is not enough, 10 is better, 100,000 or millions going to the street and shout that we want to live in a European country, we do not want to depend on one person.” I have often wondered whether even Klitschko himself actually believed the words coming out of his mouth that night.

Finally, as the crowd dispersed in the dark Kyiv night, somebody produced an old van with a loudspeaker on the roof blasting Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

”We will return tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after, for as long as we need to,” Serhei, a 47-year-old school teacher, assured me.

“Look at those young girls shouting at Klitschko, “another man, 50-year-old Andriy, said to me. In this country, everybody wants to be a president, the one who talks.”

“But why should Yanek be the one talking, or Klitschko for that matter?” his wife Anna protested, “why should they be the ones who get to decide her future? Come on, Andrushka”, she said, pulling at his sleeve, “it’s very late, and I have to get to work early tomorrow morning, enough politics for one night.”

As we walked back to the office through the sleeping city, Natalia and I discussed what would happen now, if anything. Of course, I had no inkling back then that this tiny, chaotic gathering would soon turn into the most beautiful and life-affirming manifestation of people power that I have ever seen, before or after.

I also did not know that in the scope of this one night, I had witnessed the three factors that would come to signify Ukraine during the next 11 years, even explaining why we are where we are in 2024:

-       The Ukrainian politician, clumsily attempting to make political hay;

-       The foreigner wrongly doubting the organic power of Ukrainian civil society, Ukrainians’ sometimes chaotic but steadfast civil engagement, and most importantly;

-       The average Ukrainian showing their ingrained distrust of authority figures and their wish to take their lives into their own hands.

All three factors have been important at different times during these past 11 years, but the one that has saved Ukraine and guaranteed that Putin will never be able to dominate this country is the last one—the Ukrainians.