On the morning of November 30th, the perpetually troubled former Soviet republic of Ukraine awoke to a nasty bit of news. At about 4 A.M., riot police in Kiev, the capital, had marched into an anti-government protest encampment that had occupied the city’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan, for nine days.

The scale of the police intervention was so extreme that some in the government claimed it had been planned by the opposition as a way to blacken the regime, an argument that, while certainly false, does have a certain logic in the fun-house world of post-Soviet politics. The inevitable smartphone video of police beatings went viral, and within hours a rage had seized Kiev. In our apartment, not far from the Maidan, I was jolted out of sleep by my wife, who was sobbing over her iPad. Then our phones started ringing, as friends and in-laws called to commiserate and inveigh.

The original protest on the Maidan was limited in both size and tenor. It began with the startling refusal of Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yanukovych, to sign an association agreement with the European Union. This was essentially a free-trade contract with the multi-national bloc to Ukraine’s west—right over the border, but a million psychic miles away. The result of years of negotiation, the agreement represented a confirmation, especially for Ukraine’s educated youth, that theirs was a normal country—part of Europe, not some “Little Russia” appendage of the hegemon to the north.

It’s still unclear what was going through Yanukovych’s mind when he walked away from the deal, but in retrospect his decision was unsurprising. Moscow opposed the agreement, just as it has opposed any initiative to orient Ukraine westward. Yanukovych is Moscow’s man, an ex-Party member from Ukraine’s Russian-speaking industrial east who looks about as at home among E.U. technocrats as Marshal Zhukov would have. When it emerged that, in the days before the deal was to be signed, Yanukovych had met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, many Ukrainians quickly concluded that something fishy was going on. The opposition and its media exploded in protest.

All this was manageable until the violence of November 30th. (A poll this week indicated that seventy per cent of the protestors had turned out in response to the beatings.) At that point, the protest turned into something that looked like the early stirrings of a revolution.

Among American commentators, a rapidly solidifying consensus held that Yanukovych’s decision was a matter of traditional power politics. Europe and Russia had fought over Ukraine, and Russia won. A pity, but what do you expect when the mighty Putin squares off against a mincing crew of Brussels wine enthusiasts? The E.U., one pundit quipped, had brought a baguette to a knife fight.

But seen from the Kiev barricades, this consensus looks silly. Few here think that even the most mercenary sort of geopolitics is to blame for the E.U. debacle. Nor is there anger at Brussels. For the protesters on the streets, the villainy belongs solely to Yanukovych, whose government they regard as something like a cross between a Mafia family and a Soviet puppet regime. Yanukovych, as they see it, simply decided to sell his country to Russia, for his own financial benefit and for the benefit of the relatives and cronies with whom he runs the country.

With Yanukovych, it’s always best to assume the worst. Ukraine has always been a kleptocracy, but “the family,” as it is known, has raised the thievery to new heights. The President’s older son, Oleksandr, a dentist, has become one of Ukraine’s richest men since the start of his father’s Presidency. Yanukovych himself—an actual ex-con, who did jail time in his youth for robbery and assault—has built himself an estate the size of Monaco on the outskirts of Kiev; access to the area is now restricted. “Raider” attacks, in which regime-connected businessmen deploy extortion to literally steal other people’s businesses, are notorious. Leery of mixing with the population, Yanukovych has taken to helicoptering into work from his estate, landing at a helipad he built in one of Kiev’s lovely riverside parks.

None of independent Ukraine’s earlier Presidents were prizewinners, but Yanukovych has been particularly brazen in his provocations. In addition to the theft, he’s centralized power according to a system that one political scientist has termed “sultanism,” and he has harassed the media. So when the beatings on the Maidan gave Ukrainians an excuse to come out on the streets, the protests turned from a cry against the loss of the “European choice” into something far more visceral: an expression of hatred for Yanukovych and everything he represents—basically, the mean reality of life in a post-Soviet strongman state.

When Americans last paid attention to Ukraine, during the Orange Revolution protests nine years ago, Yanukovych also played the bad guy, for his attempt to falsify the results of a Presidential election with backing from Moscow. (Readers who are wondering how Yanukovych still has a political career should suspend their disbelief; it’s a depressing and very Ukrainian story.) Anyone who watched those protests will remember the joyous atmosphere on display for the world’s television cameras: all those photogenic kids, swaying to the music as the snow softly fell.

That peaceable mood still dominates, and reports that today’s protests have been driven by an angry nationalism are slander. But, this time, there’s also been a new aggression in the streets, including riot police brawling with protesters who tried to storm Kiev’s Presidential Administration with the help of a bulldozer. Early on Wednesday morning, police moved into the Maidan in earnest, making arrests and swinging the occasional club, managing to take back some of the protesters’ territory.

In part, this new energy is the result of the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. Things really are getting worse. The Yanukovych regime is taking political prisoners, including the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who has been jailed since 2011 on trumped-up charges. The Administration has been destroying the economy, motivated by a residual Soviet distrust of the middle class and a passion for stealing everything that can be stolen. Foreign money has been fleeing, alarmed by official corruption, and the country faces default on its debts. There are a lot of desperate people here.

The other part of the equation is youth. Yanukovych has been hit with a perfect demographic storm. Imagine a nineteen-year-old student protester. She missed the Soviet era entirely; there’s no hammer and sickle on her birth certificate. She’s also old enough to have stood with her parents on the Maidan in 2004, and then came of age in a period in which all of the Orange Revolution’s gains were frittered away by the movement’s feckless leaders. This time, she thinks, we’re going to do things right.

She’s almost certainly trilingual, completely a product of the broader pan-European cultural space. She may have trouble getting visas to visit Western Europe—for E.U. consulates, Ukrainian girls might as well have “Illegal Alien” tattooed on their foreheads—but she knows that life here is not like life over there. And she’s likely been educated in Ukrainian, not Russian, perhaps at one of the élite institutions that, despite harassment from a sporadically Russifying regime, remain committed to the preservation of Ukrainian national culture.