Early on the morning of December 25th, the muckraking journalist Tetiana Chornovil drove out of Kiev toward her home, outside the Ukrainian capital. Chornovil, who is thirty-four, had long been an irritant to the government of President Victor Yanukovych, and she is a leading figure in the mass protests that have dominated central Kiev since late November. As Chornovil drove along a stretch of empty highway in the dark before dawn, her car was chased down and forced off the road by a black Porsche Cayenne, whose passengers then emerged and beat her senseless.

The assailants broke Chornovil’s nose and gave her a concussion before throwing her into a ditch. But she had captured a video of the car chase on her dashboard camera, which post-Soviet citizens use to protect themselves against extortion by traffic police. The license-plate number of the Porsche and the faces two of the men who assaulted Chornovil are visible in the footage, which, fleetingly, generated hope among Ukrainians that the attackers could be brought to justice.

And, indeed, arrests were made. But last Thursday, the government declared that the investigation was over, and the office of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General announced that Chornovil’s beating was, essentially, just a road-rage incident. She had provoked the men in the Porsche with her erratic driving, and they had responded with an act of “hooliganism.” This is a relatively minor infraction in the Ukrainian criminal code, but it is also well known to the politically aware as the charge typically levelled by the government against those whom it would rather not prosecute at all. Case closed.

Episodes like this, which have received relatively little attention in the West, express, for many Ukrainians, what is truly at stake in the country’s ongoing political unrest, which is now entering its fourth month. There has, however, been considerable reporting about events on the Maidan—the central Kiev square where crowds first gathered, in late November, to protest Yanukovych’s spurning of a trade deal with the European Union in favor of close ties with Russia. That small protest swelled into a larger movement after November 30th, when the authorities sent in riot police to brutalize the peaceful demonstrators. The protestors are now in control of a significant part of downtown Kiev, around which they have erected barricades against further police incursion.

On January 16th, the government rammed a package of laws through Parliament that essentially criminalize protest, and, on January 19th, the demonstrations, which had until then been peaceful, turned violent. There are photographs of the subsequent street fighting between protestors and police—images of ragged brawlers hurling Molotov cocktails at riot squads, and of priests in full regalia wading through heaps of burning tires. Five protestors have been killed so far and hundreds are missing, and the government seems to have resorted to desperate tactics in an attempt to maintain its precarious grip on power.

What has been lost amid the competing explanations for the chaos in Ukraine is the story that precedes these developments: for more than a decade, Yanukovych has gradually become toxic to huge numbers of his own people. For Ukrainians, the current unrest isn’t about whether the country will once again submit to its traditional hegemon, Russia, nor is it about closer alignment with the E.U., or about putting Ukraine’s underwhelming political opposition into power.

The central issue, for the protestors and their supporters, as well as for many other Ukrainians, is that, since the Soviet Union fell apart and the country became independent, it has been run by a succession of marauding criminals, Yanukovych chief among them. For the country to have any chance at reform, they believe, these “bandits” have to go. This view does not allow for much equivocation or compromise. The energy of the protests comes from those who believe that life in Ukraine has grown intolerable, which may make a negotiated settlement that leaves the current regime in place nearly impossible.

From 1997 to 2002, Yanukovych was the appointed governor of Donetsk province, a Russian-leaning industrial region characterized by a particularly violent and unreformed variety of post-Soviet patronage politics. He then served as prime minister for two years, at the end of the corrupt Presidency of Leonid Kuchma. But Yanukovych first attracted attention outside of Eastern Europe as the goat of Ukraine’s 2004 Presidential election, which he tried to rig. His opponent at the time, Viktor Yushchenko, was dosed with dioxin in an apparent assassination attempt, which left his face permanently deformed. After Ukrainian society rose up against this attempt to usurp power, Yanukovych reportedly favored using the Army against the peaceful protestors who flooded central Kiev. It is not hard to imagine that, in another country, Yanukovych might be behind bars. Some Ukrainians, in fact, have long referred to him as the zek (convict), a reference to the time he served in prison, as a young man, for robbery and assault.

Still, many of his detractors may have been willing to consign these unfortunate incidents to history, had Yanukovych not begun, after his election, in 2010, to systematically outrage many of his countrymen. In 2011, his most prominent political opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, was jailed on trumped-up charges, about which even Vladimir Putin, Yanukovych’s patron, expressed skepticism. Yanukovych also pushed through substantial changes to Ukraine’s constitutional order after assuming office, transforming the country from a parliamentary republic into a centralized regime under a powerful Presidency. This was a radical move for a politician whose base of support was largely concentrated in the country’s Russia-leaning south and far east—places with cultures very different from those of Kiev and western Ukraine.

In the same period, many Ukrainians had the sense that their country was becoming an even more brutal and lawless place. These days, protestors can measure the legitimacy of the government by the increasing number of Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, and Maybachs gliding through the streets of Kiev, carrying the élites, whose fortunes have multiplied under Yanukovych’s rule, past pensioners who subsist on a few hundred dollars a year, past buildings with crumbling façades (from which chunks of masonry fall and occasionally injure pedestrians), and past steep, icy sidewalks that the state lacks the will or the wherewithal to clear.

Violence, much of it politically motivated, is almost never punished in Ukraine. Last spring, in broad daylight in downtown Kiev, a pack of thugs in tracksuits beat up two journalists working for one of the country’s beleaguered opposition news outlets as policemen stood by and watched. This attack was captured on video, which, like Chornovil’s footage, briefly raised hopes that the assailants—“anti-Fascist sportsmen,” as they were described in the residual Stalinist language of the state media—might face justice. Instead, they received pro-forma slaps on the wrist. In 2012, public outrage erupted after an eighteen-year-old woman in the southern city of Mykolaiv was gang-raped, strangled, and burned to death by three men, two of whom appeared to have connections to the ruling party. At first, the local police let the two men go free, but protests eventually forced Yanukovych to intervene and have them arrested—a happier outcome, but one that confirmed that justice was circumscribed by the caprice of the ruler.