Events of November 30, 2013 that saw Berkut riot police brutally quashing a first protest at the Maydan square in Kyiv  was  a watershed moment in history of modern Ukraine, said the former Ukrainian president in a statement issued Tuesday.

Crackdown on peaceful students’ rally turned out to be a point of no return for the  regime of Viktor Yanukovych that soon triggered mass protests with millions of Ukrainians taking to streets of Kyiv the following day.

‘[People] came out to show they had power to crash the authoritarian regimes. The slogan ‘Ukraine is Europe!’ soon automatically was changed with ‘Away  with the gang!’. Then came one hundred days of grueling struggle and deaths of the Heavenly Hundred [activists]. It was the price Ukraine paid to claim the right to decide its own future’.

Now when president Zelensky is trying to put together an authoritarian regime fashioned after Lukashenko and Putin model, we must unite yet again around the ideals of Dignity and Freedom, added ‘European Solidarity’ leader.

‘We can not forget those harrowing events and the people who sacrificed their lives at the time, and our reality could be completely different’, stressed the former president.