Troubled Ukraine marks year since protest bloodbath in Kiev

One year ago, Ihor Zastavnyi was shot three times and lost a leg while taking part in demonstrations that he hoped would lead to a better Ukraine.
Today he faces a country that is racked by war, struggling with corruption and pleading to the world for financial help while still stinging from Russia's annexation Crimea.
Yet, reflecting on the situation he still expresses a level of faith.
"All this was not in vain. It's impossible even to think like this," he said.
"When a person wants to give everything and devote himself to something, as did the Heavenly Hundred, it can't be for nothing," he said, referring to the term that Ukrainians have adopted for those who died during months of protests in 2013-14 that led to the ouster of Ukraine's Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych.

The grisliest day was a year ago today, when more than 50 people were killed by sniper fire on the capital's main square, known as Maidan.

Various sources count the total number of Heavenly Hundreds as somewhere between 110 and 123. It includes those who died in earlier clashes with police as well as opposition supporters who died in beatings or mysterious circumstances.
This evening, Ukraine's current pro-Europe president, Petro Poroshenko, is to honor them in a memorial ceremony.
Heated, contradictory allegations still surround the question of who fired the shots on February 20, 2014.
Protesters and their supporters assert that the bullets came from rifles held by Ukrainian police or Russian marksmen to try to definitively put down the demonstrations against Yanukovych.

Their detractors allege radicals within the protest movement were responsible, purportedly willing to slaughter their own people to drive the political crisis to a breaking point.
Poroshenko today claimed Ukraine has evidence that Vladislav Surkov, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's advisers, organized the snipers.
Whatever the intent, the gunfire helped force chaotic change. The day after the killings, European Union envoys put heavy pressure on Yanukovych and opposition leaders to sign a pact that would allow Yanukovych to stay in power for a few months, but call early elections and make constitutional changes that would weaken his power.
But hours after the pact was signed, Yanukovych vanished from view. He surfaced the next day in one of his political strongholds in eastern Ukraine and then disappeared again until he turned up in Russia, where he eventually bitterly abandoned any claim to still being president.