Vitaly Chernetsky is a Kansas University associate professor of Slavic languages and literature.

Marc Greenberg

A televised revolution can be especially unsettling if the country in upheaval is one you know intimately.

Vitaly Chernetsky, a Kansas University associate professor of Slavic languages and literature and a native of Odessa, Ukraine, has seen a research institute in Kiev’s Maydan Square that he’s visited frequently as a scholar become a backdrop for protests and turmoil.

“That is a place where I have walked with my own feet and where I have met with so many people on so many occasions,” Chernetsky said. “It really drives this home.”

Lately Chernetsky has been glued so tightly to his computer for news from Ukraine that he has lost sleep. He has friends who joined the protests that recently unseated former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Just days ago a well-known Ukrainian writer and friend of Chernetsky’s was beaten with baseball bats by pro-Russian protestors in eastern Ukraine, putting him in the hospital with a concussion.

Protests first broke out in November when then-president Yanukovych backed out of a trade agreement with Europe under pressure from Russian president Vladimir Putin. After a weary calm, fighting broke out late in February, leaving dozens killed. When Yanukovych fled for Russia the opposition took control of the country. The new government has already faced its first major test when Russian forces entered the Crimean peninsula.

Ukraine’s hopes and aspirations

Of course Chernetsky isn’t the only native Ukrainian forced to watch the drama from overseas. “Obviously right now it’s very scary to see what’s happening,” said Alisa Moldavanova, an assistant professor of political science at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Moldavanova, a graduate of KU’s School of Public Affairs, grew up in Ukraine and lived there until 2007. She participated in the “Orange Revolution,” a peaceful protest movement in Ukraine over a 2004 presidential election said to be marred by corruption.

“Like many Ukrainian people, I had a lot of hopes and aspirations, ” she said. “But I also understand that these kinds of reforms take a long time in a country like Ukraine that has weak democratic institutions.”

Alexander Tsiovkh, an associate professor with the KU Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, grew up in L’viv, in western Ukraine, and now travels there every summer as director of KU’s summer program at L’viv University. Tsiovkh hasn’t been to the country since the protests began in November, but he said, “With Skype and all these iPhone things, the feeling sometimes is that you’re right there.”

Moral support

In early February, Marc Greenberg, a professor of Slavic languages and literature, who’s not a native Ukrainian, visited Kiev with a group from KU for a conference. While there he visited makeshift protest encampments in the square at a time of relative peace. He even took pictures of a building that has since burned down in clashes between protestors and police.

In the few weeks since his return, just about everything has changed in the political climate. But Greenberg is not entirely surprised by any of it. “I did expect things to escalate. I thought that Putin has designs on expanding and preserving the Eurasian model for Russia,” he said. “It’s of course shocking to see violence break out.”

With the threat of more violence or even conflict with Russia, and with Ukraine’s fragile economic and political state, Chernetsky said Ukraine needs the world’s attention right now. “The people who were standing there in the freezing cold through the winter need moral support,” he said. “They need to see that the world actually cares.”