The so-called "Heavenly Hundred" are individuals allegedly killed by law enforcement officers during the 2013-14 Euromaidan anti-government protests. More recent data shows that among the Heavenly Hundred were people who had nothing to do with snipers – or even the protests, who died, for example, of pneumonia, heart attack, or even allergy-related complications.
Euromaidan, the wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, began on November 21, 2013 on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev over President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to prioritize accords with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of signing the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement. The February 20, 2014 sniper shooting targeting both Euromaidan participants and law enforcement officers in Kiev claimed the lives of 53 people (49 protesters and four law enforcement officers) becoming the culmination of the riots. Despite 10 years having passed, the real culprits have since remained unknown to the public.
The story of the Heavenly Hundred "brutally killed" by "the regime's" security forces (although the snipers were never identified) became the cornerstone of the nation's new ideology. On February 11, 2015, a year after the regime change operation in Kiev, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko established the official Day of the Heavenly Hundred to be marked on February 20.
What's Wrong With the Heavenly Hundred List?
Officially, the list contained 105 individuals, but in November 2019, cracks appeared in the narrative when former Minister of Justice of Ukraine Elena Lukash discovered that dozens of the "heroes of the Heavenly Hundred" weren't killed during the clashes. She posted her findings on her Facebook* account. The content of her post is currently not available.
After analyzing the publicly available list of deaths, Lukash divided them into four groups. The first group of "inexplicable inclusions in the list of the Heavenly Hundred" consisted of 24 people who did not die due to the actions of the security forces. The causes of death varied from a severe allergic reaction, heart attacks, and pneumonia to suicide and a car accident.
For instance, Olga Bura died on March 10, 2014 of an allergic reaction to the injection of lidocaine administered by a doctor at the Maidan camp.
Sergey Didych was killed by another Maidan activist, Leonid Bibik, who on February 18, 2014, crushed Didych to death with a truck on Krepostny Lane in Kiev.
Yakov Zayko died of a heart attack in the Kiev subway at the time of the Euromaidan protests.
Antonina Dvoryanets got into a stampede near the Khreshchatyk subway station at the time of the protests and died of heart failure.
To the second group, Lukash added four people who died far away from Kiev – namely in the Korsun-Shevchenkovskiy district of the Cherkassy region, Slavyansk, Gorlovka, and Donetsk – who for some reason were included in the Heavenly Hundred. (Dmitry Chernyavsky, Vladimir Rybak, Yuri Correction, Vasily Sergienko.)
The third group is composed of eight people who died of injuries of questionable origin at unknown locations.
The remaining 69 died of gunshot wounds during Euromaidan, but one cannot clearly attribute their deaths to the actions by government law enforcement agencies.
For example, during the January 22, 2014 clashes, Berkut forces were stationed at a distance of at least 30 meters from the protesters and used rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, whereas Heavenly Hundred "heroes" Sergey Nigoyan, Mikhail Zhiznevsky, and Roman Senyk were shot with a grapeshot charge from a hunting rifle from a distance of two to three meters, as investigators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine determined at the time.
At the same time, at least 23 law enforcement officers were killed, 919 were injured, of them 205 sustained gunshot wounds during the Euromaidan protests, as Lukash highlighted in a separate article for Strana.ua in February 2020.
Historic Roots of Heavenly Hundred
This is not the first time Ukrainian politicians have used "the cult of the dead." Fifteen years ago, after Viktor Yushchenko came to power in the result of the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004, he and his team picked up the myth of the Holodomor, claiming that the Soviet government deliberately starved the Ukrainian peasantry and intelligentsia to death in 1932-1933.
Thus, American historian Professor Mark B. Tauger, West Virginia University, carried out thorough research on the famine of 1932-33 and came to the conclusion that the disaster was due to environmental circumstances and evidently not related to Soviet policy in Ukraine.
However, under Yushchenko, several institutes of "memory management" were established in the country to peddle the myth of Holodomor, thereby driving a wedge between Ukraine and Russia. The so-called Books of Memory of the Victims of the Holodomor of 1932–1933 published at the time contained the names of people who died of causes other than hunger or were even still alive at the moment of the release of the "books." The myth is still actively promoted by the Kiev regime and Western governments.
How Heavenly Hundred Myth Becomes Myth
It is clear that at some point, the Euromaidan protests were hijacked by violent extremists, who then needed to justify their radicalism, according to Dr. Marco Marsili, researcher at Cà Foscari University of Venice and associate fellow at the Center for Strategic Research (CESRAN International).
"We know from well-documented experience that in peaceful demonstrations cowardly extremists often emerge, trying to take advantage of the massive protest to manipulate the participants and commit heinous crimes that [they] wouldn't have the courage to fight alone openly. Unfortunately, Ukraine has a long history of street protests managed and manipulated by nationalists and right-wing extremists, as the OSCE stated in a 2019 report released at a Human Dimension meeting held in Warsaw," he told Sputnik.
To complicate matters further, the roots of Ukrainian nationalism go back to the infamous WWII-era Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, hence the brutality of the modern Ukrainian extremists and the need to pin the blame for their crimes on someone else, per Marsili.
"The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), a Ukrainian collaborationist formation established by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in 1943, was responsible of unspeakable atrocities and mass murders against the Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, that amount to ethnic cleansing or genocide, according to the Polish Parliament," the researcher said.
Marsili drew attention to the fact that under Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, living former members of irregular Ukrainian nationalist armed groups that were active during WWII and the first decade after the war were officially granted the status of veterans by a law, while Stepan Bandera is "still a popular and celebrated figure in Ukraine and somehow he is considered a national hero, while he was only a criminal."
The idea behind the US-backed Maidan coup was to create a puppet government in Ukraine, he said, adding that extremist elements quickly hijacked the protest and then cooked up a list of "martyrs" to justify their atrocities.
U.S. Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, offering cookies and (behind the scenes) political advice to Ukraine's Maidan activists and their leaders.
© AP Photo / Andrew Kravchenko, Pool
The post-Euromaidan Kiev regimes "needed some kind of martyrdom in order to find some kind of superiority, that they are the victims," said Janus Putkonen, Finnish geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist with the Patriotic Network, who was working in Kiev in April 2014
"That was very useful, this myth, in the years, let's say, 2014 to 2016, because of Ukrainian military plans or the Pentagon plans, they actually were made by Rand Corporation exactly for the summer 2014," Putkonen told Sputnik. "Because they were attacking and killing tens of thousands of Ukrainian Russians, and in order to justify their bloodshed against the Russian population in Donbass, it was necessary to justify with other blood, their own blood."
"When the people started to understand that it's not about Maidan, it's all about geopolitics, and when these Nazi battalions were defeated by Donbass defenders, first in the summer 2014 in Ilovaisk and in Debaltsevo in 2015, after that the game changed, when the Minsk agreements were done. It grew to a new level, an international level. And after that, they were just a myth left behind. And when people were asking the truth, when the Berkut police wanted to know the truth and the police that were there, when the victims and relatives of the victims wanted to hear the truth, the new government showed that they have absolutely no willingness to dig this up and to really see what's going on."
The present Ukrainian regime and its Western backers are unwilling to unveil the ugly truth about the February 2014 coup d'état and real Euromaidan victims, Sputnik's interlocutor said.
"The West didn't want to talk about it. There were all the victims and Berkut members who wanted to know what really happened, because they were heavily blamed. But I have met over the years in Donbass tens of brave Berkut soldiers who were on Maidan in order to keep the constitutional order in Ukraine. And they are great heroes. But there was nobody willing to seek the truth. So I think that nowadays, this Heavenly Hundred is more of a burden, a myth, a useful myth," Putkonen concluded.
*Facebook is banned in Russia over extremist activities.