In our interview with Marci Shore, we spoke about Viktor Yanukovych, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin many times. Let’s talk about gangster politics and the phenomenon of revolution:
“My friends on the Maidan were desperately hoping for more international support and solidarity, and what they received was very vague. There was sympathy but not engagement.
In the United States, it turns out, we have a small boutique industry of PR specialists for gangsters with presidential ambitions. Yanukovych hired this man from Washington who didn’t speak Ukrainian or Russian, but knew how to play golf and had expensive taste in wine. He flew to Kyiv, dressed Yanukovych in new suits, gave him telegenic coaching, and somehow this was effective.
Then, after the sniper massacre on the Maidan and Yanukovych’s flight to Russia, Manafort was out of a job. We know what he did next: he came home and went to work getting Donald Trump elected.”
Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg6a9gsdMxM
In this episode of How Come, Julia Tymoshenko speaks with Marci Shore, a historian of Eastern Europe and Chair in European Intellectual History at the University of Toronto. They discuss how revolutions emerge not only as political events but as deeply personal transformations, and why meaningful change cannot be imposed from the outside. Drawing on her work on Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, Shore reflects on the role of fear, self-organisation, and collective agency in moments of upheaval. The conversation also explores how modern politics uses distraction and information overload to shape public attention, why democratic institutions depend on individual responsibility, and how societies come to normalize what once seemed unthinkable. Shore offers a perspective on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a case of rare moral clarity, and examines the broader question of why some societies resist authoritarianism while others do not.
How Come is a series of in-depth interviews with people around the world about the global events shaping our present — from war and political systems to memory, responsibility, and the forces that define human action.
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Nicolas Tenzer: “I tell my Ukrainian friends: do not trust anyone”
Pekka Toveri: “The worst day on the front line is better than the best day under Russia”
Before Krasnov became president, I used to describe Manafort as Ukraine’s most dangerous enemy outside ruZZia.
He was in fact convicted and imprisoned, along with his equally evil Ukraine-hating friend Roger Stone, of a range of corrupt Ukraine-related activities.
Both were pardoned by their close friend of 45 years; Krasnov.