I am sitting in a café in a Euro-Soviet city, drinking from a little pot of tea, looking at my computer, and wondering whether the leader sitting in a Euro-Soviet city to the north of here will decide to invade the country where I currently am. I check the Web sites, Ukrainian and Russian. There are all sorts of reports. Russian tanks are massing at the northern and eastern borders; American and European leaders are pondering further sanctions; the interim government has announced that it has a plan.

“The border is a two-hour tank ride from here,” a friend of mine will tell me later in the day. “Do you realize what that means? It means you go to sleep at night and you wake up the next morning and your city is filled with little green men.” Little green men is how people described Russian soldiers when they first showed up, unmarked and unannounced, in Crimea.

I am in Kiev, and the café I’m sitting in, late in the morning, is in a basement, with old wooden tables and plenty of outlets in the wall. The pipes are exposed, and musical instruments hang from them. The food is cheap. A tiny used-book store has a space off the main room; it sells both Russian and Ukrainian books, mostly hardbacks from the Soviet era, when books were better made. You can get a ten-volume edition of Dostoyevsky for twenty-five dollars. The radical-feminist activist group Femen began in this café. There are three separate rooms in the café, and occasionally a group of young people will go into one of the back rooms for a discussion and then go outside again to smoke; the smoking rate in Ukraine is approximately a hundred per cent.

A tough-looking middle-aged man in fatigues walks in and asks the waitress how much a beer costs. A beer costs about two dollars. “So much?” he asks. The man is clearly from the Maidan encampment. It’s a little early in the day for a beer, but it’s possible he was up all night doing guard duty and just wants a beer before he goes to sleep. He is polite. “I guess the price isn’t up to you,” he says to the waitress, who agrees. He drinks his beer and walks out. A short while later, another man in fatigues, with a young bodyguard in tow, walks in. This man is less polite, and has a gun in a holster strapped to his right thigh. The two are accompanied by a third man, who is proposing something. I can’t make it out from across the room, but it has something to do with the future of Ukraine. The man and his bodyguard hear him out. Then they finish their Americanos and leave.

The Maidan encampment starts a block from where I’m sitting. You can tell because there’s a barricade still in place at the corner of Prorizna and Khreshchatyk. It’s made up of all kinds of junk—old wooden chairs, metal barriers, bags of rocks and bricks, and tires. The protest began on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, in central Kiev, in November of last year, after President Viktor Yanukovych, apparently under pressure from Russia, halted preparations for a long-awaited trade agreement with the European Union. After riot police tried forcibly to clear the square, the protest grew, and over the next three months it sometimes swelled into the hundreds of thousands, with demonstrations in support of Maidan, as it came to be called, springing up in cities throughout the country; in western Ukraine, protesters seized government buildings and even, in Lviv, a weapons depot. In Kiev, there were increasingly brutal attempts to drive out the protesters, including, eventually, live ammunition, provoking a violent response from the protesters, who armed themselves with bats and sticks and Molotov cocktails. But it was burning tires, with their terrible smoke and smell, that were most effective at slowing down the riot police, and tires still demarcate the encampment. As of late March, the encampment included not only Maidan Nezalezhnosti but also a half-mile stretch of Khreshchatyk, the main thoroughfare of Kiev’s downtown, which has been transformed by the protesters from an eight-lane highway into a pedestrian mall. The space is occupied by several dozen military tents, in which many protesters still live. Some of the tents have handmade bunk beds and, out front, a little kitchen and stove and some chairs, at which the men sit and eat at all hours of the day and night. One of the tents has before it an exhibit of helmets, homemade cannons, shields, Molotov cocktails; periodically, one of the guys comes out and gives a short lecture to visitors on how all these implements were used during the fighting. Now that the fighting is over, people from the capital and beyond come and look, and ask questions, and offer unsolicited advice.

The entire encampment is festooned with photographs of the protesters who died there—the Heavenly Hundred, as they’re called. Next to some of the photographs are notes from people who knew the dead. The most common photograph is of Serhey Nigoyan, a beatific-looking young man with a beard and large brown eyes, who was one of the first to die in the fighting on Hrushevskoho Street, around the corner from Maidan. He was twenty-one. In addition to the photographs, there are thousands of flowers for the dead throughout the encampment. It is a museum, a memorial, and also, still, a site of protest.

“Sometimes I think we want this more than he does.” Facebook

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I was surprised to find the encampment so active weeks after it had achieved its goal—the abdication of Yanukovych, who fled the city in late February and, eventually, resurfaced in Russia. It was clear that some of the men had nowhere to go, or, certainly, no place better than this. Here they were heroes; back home they were not. They walked around in old Army fatigues, some of them still wearing bulletproof vests; one guy I saw a few times was, absurdly, wearing elbow pads and shin guards. The protesters had also occupied a number of buildings adjacent to Maidan, and one of these, a McDonald’s at the northwest end of the square, had been turned into a psychological-trauma clinic. Inside, I talked to a young psychotherapist named Olga, who told me that a lot of the men at the encampment were afraid to leave. They felt comfortable at Maidan, and less comfortable beyond its confines. The therapists were taking them on walking tours of the city in an attempt to overcome this fear.

But there was also a political purpose to the encampment’s continuing existence. The revolution had not actually brought many revolutionaries to power—for the most part, it had merely put the opposition, formerly the ruling party, back into government. The acting President and Prime Minister had both held high posts in earlier, unsuccessful administrations, and had only the provisional support of Maidan. Up the hill from Maidan, in the government district, men in excellent blue suits emerged from gleaming black Mercedeses to attend sessions of parliament, just as they had done under Yanukovych, and the interim government had appointed two oligarchs as regional governors in the east. The men camped out in the tents were waiting, at the very least, for new elections.