Bitter mood on eve of Ukraine's election
Kiev (AFP) - The mood in Maidan Square, epicentre of Ukraine's democracy revolution, was as bitter on the eve of Sunday's parliamentary elections as the suddenly freezing October wind.
Long gone are the huge pro-Western crowds that overthrew Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych eight months ago -- and with them their heady optimism.
Burly security guards outnumber visitors in the eerily empty square, lined with ghostly portraits, dried flowers and candles honouring the more than 100 demonstrators killed in the revolt.
With the first winter ice lacing sidewalks, the atmosphere was one of bitterness and worry, tinged with steely determination.
- 'A new enemy' -
"Ukraine has lost," Viktor Vashyuk, 54, said, shivering inside his thin leather jacket. "Whatever the propaganda says, Ukraine has lost."
Vashyuk had just arrived from Crimea, a large chunk of Ukraine on the Black Sea that Russian troops snatched in April, shortly before a pro-Russian insurgency erupted in the main industrial region in the east, triggering a conflict that has killed 3,700 people, according to the United Nations.
President Petro Poroshenko, elected in May with a mandate to steer Ukraine towards the West and to fight massive corruption, says the new parliament will breathe life into the reform movement.
Pro-Western and nationalist parties are expected to win, with Communists and supporters of the once powerful Yanukovych regime largely shunted aside.
But the conflict with Russia has dimmed the future envisioned by demonstrators who braved snipers and police assaults on the Maidan.
"After Maidan, people relaxed and thought it was all over. What they didn't expect was there'd be a new enemy," said Viktoria Vodopyanova, a 41-year-old railways employee, visiting the shrine to slain demonstrators.
"If only we could have made some progress. Instead, everything has gone into the war and defending the country," her friend, Natalia Datskiv, 44, said.
Once something close to a battlefield, the Maidan has been spruced up and turned into a giant memorial to Ukraine's struggles.
An enormous banner depicting the national flag as a golden wheat field and perfect blue sky -- emblazoned with the nationalist slogan "Glory to Ukraine" -- hides the facade of a building that caught fire during the protests.
Photographs of the Maidan drama and of the current violence in the eastern Donbass region are mounted in a permanent outdoor exhibition that sums up the revolutionaries' grievances against the Yanukovych regime and Russia.
With few visitors, the overwhelming impression is of sad emptiness.
But if Poroshenko and the new parliament don't deliver on their promises the Maidan may once again fill with protesters, including angry soldiers returning from the fighting in the east.
"The leaders don't have the right to make mistakes now. People won't put up with it," Vodopyanova said. "The people doing the fighting won't accept any step backward."
Vashuky said he has left his lifelong home in Crimea because without accepting Russian citizenship he cannot get a job. But for all his desperation, he too indicated that he was ready to persevere.
"We'll have to survive this," he said. "If we want to live freely, we have to."
