The Maidan made Yulia Tymoshenko. It was here, during the protests of 2004-2005, that Tymoshenko, newly reinvented as a Ukrainian-speaking Joan of Arc, a newly dyed blonde with a peasant braid ringing her head like a halo, promised to usher Ukraine into a new, more modern and European era. Last night, nearly a decade later, she took the stage here again, this time in a wheelchair. She had just been released nearly two years into a politically motivated seven-year prison sentence—Yanukovich, her rival in the 2010 presidential elections, jailed her for overstepping her authority and profiting from a gas deal with Russia—and Tymoshenko looked the worse for it. She was tired and aged, barely any blonde left in her long-undyed hair.

As soon as she was sprung from the prison hospital where she had spent the last part of her sentence—she has a herniated disk in her back—she got on a plane and booked it for the Maidan. "I wanted to touch the stones, the sandbags on Hrushevskyy Street," she told the crowd, referring to the street where some of the bloodiest clashes took place. "I watched it all and I cried," she said of watching the clashes from prison. She saw "our boys" advancing toward the bullets with nothing but wooden shields, saying she wished she had been there, with her people. "Every bullet that went into the hearts of one of our heroes, is a bullet in our hearts," she wailed into the microphone. "But heroes don't die. Heroes live in our hearts forever." And the Maidan should be proud of its victory. It was you who did the impossible, she told the crowd, "not the politicians, not the diplomats."

"You are heroes," she went on. "You are Ukraine's very best."

People in the crowd wept, men and women both. Tymoshenko wept. It was an extraordinarily moving moment, as thousands of people assembled on the sooty square and celebrated its victory, but it began with an acknowledgement of how dearly it cost the country, delivered by a politician who knows how to move an audience.

Tymoshenko pressed on. After such a hard-won victory, she said, "if a government, a parliament is formed without you, it would be amoral." She urged the crowd not to leave the Maidan until all their demands had been met. "Under no circumstances can you leave this square, until you have accomplished all that you set out to accomplish," she said. "If someone tells you that your work here is done and that you should go home, don't believe a word of it." No more secret agreements, no more couloirs, she said, a master of secret agreements in couloirs. "I want to say to you on behalf of everyone that, until now, politicians have not been worthy of you. And I want to do everything so that you see new politicians, new civil servants."