THIEVES and thugs like to act in the small hours of the morning, and so did Viktor Yanukovych, president of Ukraine. On November 30th, at about 4.30am, Ukraine’s riot police moved in to beat up a few hundred students peacefully standing vigil to support their country’s receding European future. The police pummelled them with truncheons, beat them, sprayed them with tear gas and then chased them up a hill to beat them more. Never in its 22 years as an independent country has Ukraine seen such violence.The next day Mr Yanukovych was said to be hunting in his private grounds as hundreds of thousands of people poured onto the streets of Kiev in protest. The protest was no longer about an association and free-trade agreement with Europe, which Mr Yanukovych had just ditched. It was about an existential choice between a post-Soviet system, in which a corrupt and dysfunctional state violates its citizens, and a European one, based on the rule of law and respect for citizens.To justify its use of force the government provoked more violence. It bused in thousands of plain-clothed goons and infiltrated the crowd with agents p…
