Why is Kiev Hindering the Investigation of the Heavenly Hundred? People Deserve to Know the Truth
The Heavenly Hundred. That's how people in Ukraine call those who came to Maidan in peace but caught a bullet and went to heaven. So who did the shooting? The journalistic investigation is being conducted independently in many countries because the blood spilled on Maidan was a tipping point, a trigger to the coup.
Aleksandr Balitskiy is summing up its results.
Andrey Veselov, Investigation Author: "Here I have interviews with alleged shooters, Aleksandr Revazishvili and Koba Nergadze. They were forwarded to the judiciary of Ukraine, so it's forensic evidence".
Journalist Andrey Veselov is holding sensational documents: signed in the presence of Ukrainian lawyers confessions of Georgian snipers who took part in the February 2014 massacre on Maidan. In this video, they talk in detail about people who gave them the orders to shoot.
Aleksandr Revazishvili, Participated in Euromaidan: "Pashinskiy came with some people in masks. They brought bags, and I understood that there were guns inside. He started taking them out and handing them to all groups. Pashinskiy was carrying an AK-47 with a folding stock. There was a guy with him. Later I learned that his name is Parasyuk. The junior guy was carrying a Saiga, the senior one had an SKS carbine".
Aleksandr Revazishvili and Koba Nergadze. These are their tickets for the Tbilisi-Kiev train. They went to Maidan at the order of former Saakashvili's military adviser Mamuka Mamulashvili who's currently fighting in Donbass on the side of the Ukrainian military. Under Saakashvili, they had ties with the special forces of Georgia, neutralizing opposition as part of the so-called sonderkommando, so there was nothing new for them in the Revolution of Dignity.
Koba Nergadze, Participated in Euromaidan: "We had to create commotion. People weren't supposed to stop. It didn't matter if we shot at trees, barricades or people throwing Molotov cocktails. We needed to create chaos to make people go against the Berkut forces".
"Around 10 February 2014, I was with my group on the third floor of Hotel Ukrayina. We were visited by Mikheil Saakashvili, Mamuka Mamulashvili, Andriy Parubiy, Sergiy Pashinksiy and a man in combat fatigues, introduced by Saakashvili as a former US military serviceman by the name of Christopher Brian. Later I learned from Mamulashvili that he used to be a sniper in the US army".
Brian was the instructor. The mercenary coordinator Sergiy Pashinskiy, who is now the head of the Defense Committee, back then was one of the biggest provocateurs at Maidan. He and Andriy Parubiy were key to organizing the mass shooting when it seemed that the revolution would soon burn in its own fire. But the people behind the coup needed sacrifices similar to the very first murder at the barricades on Hrushevskoho Street made from the two-meter distance to fuel hatred.
Koba Nergadze: Around 19 February, Pashinskiy told us that the next day we'd have to pick up our guns. The target was both the protesters and the police forces.
- That's exactly how he put it?
Aleksandr Revazishvili: That was the task, the target he gave us. Make 2-3 shots at a time. Don't get busted, don't blow your cover.
Around 8 am on 20 February, gunfire came from the Music Academy. Almost at the same time shots were fired from the top floors of Hotel Ukrayina. What the Georgians are saying in their testament, we can also confirm as someone who was in the midst of those events 4 years ago. In those days our filming crew was based in this building in front of the Music Academy whose balcony was clearly visible from our windows overlooking Horodetskoho Street where people with rifles were moving swiftly from one column to another. Of course, we cannot be certain that they did the shooting but when the first shots were fired early morning on 20 February, the people with guns were there. And when they realized they were being watched, one of them motioned us to get away from the window.
Patrick Van Gompel, Journalist: "There were snipers here and here. They were shooting in this direction, at people".
Patrick Van Gompel, a Belgian journalist, was in Hotel Ukrayina during the massacre.
Patrick Van Gompel, Journalist: “It went on for an hour or two. I didn't count the shots of the snipers. I remember the protesters running back and forth. It looked like a cat-and-mouse game".
The news crew had a room in the side of the building from where they could see what was happening on Institutskaya Street when bullets started taking out Maidan activists one after another.
In his first interview to Russian journalists, Ivan Katchanovski, a political scientist from the University of Ottawa whose name is synonymous with impartiality and scientific accuracy says that he studied all freely available video, audio and text materials related to the events on Maidan. One of the key conclusions made by Katchanovski after four years of scientific monitoring is that the bloody events that took place on 20 February didn't start at 8 am with the shooting at the protesters, which is the story propagated in Ukraine, but rather several hours earlier with the shots targeted at Berkut. On that morning, Katchanovski was following several streams from Maidan.
Ivan Katchanovski, Political Scientist: "I still remember that stream when Berkut started retreating from the Music Academy, I saw them taking cover at Hotel Ukrayina. They wanted to hide behind those structures. They were retreating stealthily. It indicates that they were under fire."
But after the shooting, Katchanovski couldn't find that CCTV footage. It was destroyed. But his conclusion is confirmed by a former Luhansk Berkut officer, who is now a policeman at the LPR, Lieutenant Leonid Marchuk. On the morning of 20 February, he and his colleagues were at the Music Academy.
Leonid Marchuk, Former Berkut Officer: "Around 5 or 6 am, armed people had already arrived at the Cabinet of Ministers. They were building covers, setting up machine-gun nests, and all we had was a baton, a shield and some of us had rubber bullets".
"With our sticks that are only good for spanking kids, we go against re-bars. Here, look. And they hit us on the head with this. 5.45, an AK-47 round. That's what our boys are shot with".
Later, analyzing the footage from the massacre, Marchuk understood the goal that was likely pursued by the unknown snipers.
Leonid Marchuk: "The policemen were fired at to make them deploy the anti-sniper group. The anti-sniper group was at an elevation, and they could see the policemen going down, being dragged away, and the idea was to provoke it and to film its work against the protesters".
As shown by a study of synchronized streams from the scene, the so-called Black Company arrived only after the shooting had started. The photos also show that the protesters definitely weren't shot by policemen. Take this one, made by a French reporter.
Ivan Katchanovski: "I found this picture in high resolution. It's a photo of a dead protester's shield. It's clear that the exit bullet holes face Hotel Ukrayina and Berkut, the opposite side of where the protesters thought the fire was coming from".
These details have been consistently overlooked in Ukraine all these years. Even the bullet holes in a wall of Hotel Ukrayina drew the attention of investigators only on the 4th anniversary of the shooting. And Saakashvili was booted out of the country exactly the day before he was supposed to testify in court.
Nino Burjanadze, Leader of Democratic Movement – United Georgia: "Could Saakashvili arrange the killings at Maidan? I mean, why would it surprise you? He's the kind of person who will step over human bodies to get what he wants".
But apart from Georgian shooters, sniper teams at Maidan had other guest performers. Revazishvili and Nergadze, who quickly fled after the coup, confirm it for the first time.
"I was present at the briefing of the other team leaders. Brian instructed in English. Mamulashvili did the translation. The agreed course of action went like this. The group led by Pashinskiy goes into the Music Academy. His group consisted of Ukrainian, Polish, Georgian and Lithuanian people".
Two sniper bullets and an exploded flash grenade from the chest rig. That was the death of Nikolai Semisyuk from Kiev Berkut. It happened at 9:30 am, also on 20 February.
Maria Simisyuk, Nikolai's Mother: "The investigation only looks at the Heavenly Hundred. They blame Berkut. But there's no investigation into these guys. Maybe some years later the government will change and start doing something else. But right now there's nothing. A dead end".
The families of the shot Heavenly Hundred can't even answer to themselves whether the anniversary of those events is a sad or happy day for Ukraine. Every evening, going home from work, Vladimir Bondarchuk walks on Institutskaya Street. This is where his father died, a school teacher from Khmelnyskyi in the west of Ukraine.
Vladimir Bondarchuk, Son of Sergey Bondarchuk: "You can't forget these events. The more time goes by, the harder it gets".
Ivan Katchanovski: "It was a planned operation of a mass killing".
A firing point has been set up in the Music Academy. They fire with buckshot.
Ivan Katchanovski: "More than 37 Maidan protesters stated, both in court and during the investigation, that they had been shot at from Hotel Ukrayina and other places that at the time were controlled by protesters".
But the murder of peaceful civilians was almost immediately pinned on Berkut and President Yanukovych. Two Berkut officers are still being prosecuted for it even though the facts tell a different story. The shots were fired at the order of people who are now high in the Ukrainian government. No wonder that trying to hide the truth by any means, four years later, Kiev is taking out even those who helped to establish the new power.
The Georgian snipers who gave their testament to court are now forced to hide in Armenia, because some of the people who back then were with them at Maidan, have already disappeared.
Aleksandr Balitskiy, Aleksandr Berezhnoy, Anna Afanasyeva. Vesti News of the Week.