Although nationalist or democratic ideals played a role in motivating some Ukrainian protesters, it was ultimately their shared belief in the need to punish the sovereign’s transgressions that united them. And it is that public commitment to restrained power that puts Ukraine on a democratic path, which many other European states traveled long ago.
The gist of Ukraine’s Euromaidan was aptly summed up in leaflets recently distributed around Kiev that featured a big X over former President Viktor Yanukovych’s crown-bedecked head. Indeed, current events in Ukraine bear more in common with Europe’s anti-monarchical grassroots uprisings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than with more recent rebellions. The Ukrainian protesters’ primary motives were not nationalist grievances or democratic yearnings but popular repulsion at the unconstrained, arbitrary, and corrupt power of an absolutist sovereign and his retinue.