Life in Kyiv three years after Maidan

A radio report by Marina Lalovic

What is left of the Maidan revolution three years after? Travelling to Kyiv for the Eurozine project “Beyond conflict stories: Revealing public debate in Ukraine”, Marina Lalovic from Radio3Mondo, Italy, spoke to journalists, representatives of civil society, and Italians living in Ukraine and working for the UN. She observed the energy of the city in a country where everything but the capital seems at war. Spoke to youngsters who claim that the new division is not between East and West, but between those who want to change things and those who continue to embrace the former traditional establishment.

Lalovic discussed the concept of patriotism and how to go about the reconstruction of Ukrainian national identity while searching for stability in everyday life. Being from Serbia herself, she looks for similarities and differences in the situation in the Balkans in the early 2000s.

The report was first broadcasted on 1 September 2016 on Radio3.rai.it and can be listened to in the Italian original here (starting min. 12’46”).

Published 21 September 2016
Original in English
First published by Radio3Mondo, 1 September 2016

Contributed by Marina Lalovic © Marina Lalovic / Radio3Mondo / Eurozine

PDF/PRINT

Newsletter

Subscribe to know what’s worth thinking about.

Related Articles

Cover for: Instrumentalizing summer camps

Instrumentalizing summer camps

From the Soviet Union to Russia’s war against Ukraine

Ex-USSR youth pioneer camps – once heavily supervised yet remembered surprisingly positively – have become sites of trauma, where Ukrainian children are being deported en masse, incarcerated and re-educated. The complex legacy that Russia is exploiting encompasses infrastructure, ideology and personal memory, raising questions about the role of individuals in implementing state policy.

Cover for: Not epistemic enough to be discussed

Cultural humanitarian aid risks diminishing the complexity of creative work to ethnic kitsch: well-meaning initiatives rate nationality over content. And when the work does receive critical attention, only art that portrays trauma cuts it. Soon thereafter, Western interest fades. Could answers for meaningfully decolonizing Ukraine lie with other formerly colonized communities?

Discussion