The first in 2014 People's Veche took place on Maidan in Kiev. About 50,000 people took part in it. Maidan was already openly guarded by radicals armed with clubs. It was the Samooborona’s (Self-Defence) hundreds that were officially charged with guarding the tent camp. The Right Sector that united the main ultra-radical organisations and was the main striking force of Maidan still preferred to stay in shadows at that time. The fifth floor of the Trade Unions House they occupied was absolutely unavailable for strangers, including journalists, and beyond it members of the Right Sector hid their faces under balaclavas all the time. Automaidan organised a rally to Mezhigorye, the residence of the President Yanoukovich, to hand him a subpoena to a “people’s court” of Maidan but it was stopped by the police cordon where the members of Automaidan drew up a “protocol” about the President’s refusal to accept this subpoena.

The Supreme Rada approved the state budget for 2014 and also adopted several other laws, such as on possibility to block sites on experts’ decision, on administrative responsibility for putting up tents, stages and sound systems for holding unauthorised meetings, on ban on wearing masks and carrying weapons at demonstrations, on obligatory registration of political organisations financed from abroad. Those laws were necessary to bring the Ukrainian legislation to the European standards and the Venetian commission had approved them as those totally corresponding to the European practice. However, the opposition leaders and the Ukrainian mass media instantly named them “dictatorial” and introduced them to Maidan as an encroachment on the participation in any protest actions. Maidan supporters were most infuriated by vote for those laws by show of hands even though the regulations of the Supreme Rada accepted voting in such a way in the absence of possibility to vote by MP cards. The opposition blocked both the tribune and the voting system Rada on that day.

On the orthodox holiday of Epiphany which had been announced as a ”bloody” one by the radicals the day before, the People’s Veche gathered in Kiev about 100,000 protesters infuriated by the laws adopted by ‘the pro-President majority in violation of the rules of the Regulation and without a discussion in relevant committees’. The protesters were called from the stage to go to the building of the Supreme Rada, i.e. to the Government District which already was under a heavy guard. The first to attack a cordon of the Government District guards in Grushevsky St were well-prepared radicals of the Right Sector, who turned out to be equipped with clubs, paving stones, firecrackers and Molotov cocktails only three hours after the beginning of the People’s Veche. They set on fire several buses of the Berkut, trucks, cash offices of the Dinamo stadium and started showering the Berkut soldiers with stones and sharpened sticks with metal tips. Later in the evening they set on fire hundreds of tires piled in front of the police cordon and added to their arsenal of firecrackers and Molotov cocktails some fireworks which they let off directly to the ranks of the special police forces. The police used non-lethal weapons, such as stun grenades and tear gas. They also put into action water cannons which they tried to extinguish burning vehicles with. There appeared the first casualties. One of the protesters got his left hand torn off, others had lacerations and gas poisoning. The Berkut soldiers got pulled out of the cordon and severely beaten; some of them got captured and taken to the basement of the City Hall where, as it turned out later, there was a torture room and to the Trade Unions House. It was 103 protesters and about 100 policemen who requested medical help later, 42 and 61 of them respectively were taken to hospitals. At about 8 pm Vitaly Klitschko and a group of MPs went to the residence of the President of Ukraine in Mezhigorye. Klitschko asked Yanukovich to take the police, Berkut and “titushki” away from the streets. Yanukovich called Arseny Yatsenyuk and proposed him to negotiate.

The violent confrontation in Grushevsky St went on. However, despite all efforts of the Right Sector radicals they failed to provoke the Berkut to another “bloody dispersal of peaceful protesters”. The number of sympathising observers in Grushevsky St significantly decreased - in the same way as it happened on Maidan in December. On 21 January the Berkut went on the offensive without an order. It took them 20 minutes to push the crowd back to Maidan, where the Self-Defence let in only its dwellers though, as well as to the Trade Unions House, leaving ordinary protesters face-to-face with the Berkut that had received the strictest order to return to their positions by that time.

The pressure of the Right Sector radicals on the guards cordon in Grushevsky St got stronger. The Berkut got a permission to use, together with stun grenades, rubber bullets but the order remained the same: to repel attackers without making the slightest move from the spot. On that day the confrontation got to a completely new level of violence when two protesters died. Sergey Nigoyan, an Armenian, and Michael Zhiznevsky, a Belorussian, were killed by firearms in Grushevsky St while Yury Verbitsky was found dead in a forest belt where he had been taken by some unknown persons. It was the Berkut soldiers that were blamed for it, even before the beginning of the official investigation which it took a year to find out that Nigoyan and Zhiznevsky had been killed from shotguns that had never been a part of the police units armament. And yet an allegation of the opposition leaders was enough to raise the degree of the protests to the next boiling point. At the founding meeting representatives of the opposition endorsed the Declaration on proclaiming the creation of the “People’s Rada of Ukraine”. Members of the pro-governmental organisation Oplot arrived in Kiev to counter Automaidan.

There took place 5-hour negotiations between the opposition leaders and the President Yanukovich. According to their results, the opposition stated that it had reached an agreement with the authorities on liberating people arrested for the protests under the condition of releasing the Government District and de-blocking Grushevsky St. The next People’s Veche that gathered about 50,000 people on Maidan turned this proposal down, after which Arseny Yatsenyuk announced Maidan’s spreading to Grushevsky St. In the regions protesters started to seize the State Administrations. By the next day there had been seized 8 of them: in Kiev, Lvov, Ternopol, Khmelnitsk, Rovno, Chernovtsy, Zhitomir and Ivano-Frankovsk. The Volynsk (in Lutsk) and Zakarpathye (in Uzhgorod) State Administrations were blocked. In Cherkassy the State Administration was seized but then taken back by the police. There were also meetings at the State Administrations of Zaporozhye, Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk.

In Kiev the protesters built new barricades in Institutskaya St and seized the building of the Agrarian Policy and Food Ministry in Kreschatik. The confrontation in Grushevsky St renewed, with the usage of traumatic weapons. The Self-Defence of Maidan captured three policemen. One of them got a knife wound after which he was released and taken to hospital; the other two were kept in the building of the City Hall where, as it was revealed after their release the next day, they were tortured.

There took place a new round of the negotiations between the opposition leaders and the President. During them Victor Yanukovich proposed the leader of the Batkivschina fraction Arseny Yatsenyuk the post of the Prime Minister and the leader of the party UDAR Vitaly Klitschko the post of the vice Premier Minister on humanitarian matters. Considering the proposals insufficient the opposition turned them down. A group of 300 radicals made a failed attempt to seize a strategic object, the Energy Ministry of Ukraine. The Ukrainian House (the former Lenin museum), though, was taken by storm by protesters after they had discovered policemen there. Armoured glass on the facade of the building was smashed and the protesters started to throw Molotov cocktails at the policemen after which the latter left the building via a side entrance. During the storm it was the first time when protesters used a grenade RGD-5 from which, though, the pin wasn’t pulled.

After the next round of the negotiations between representatives of the authorities and the opposition Yatsenyuk refused to head the government. The President and the opposition made a decision to repeal the laws of ’16 January’ and work together on the Constitutional reform. In Kiev the civil movement Spilna Sprava (Common Cause) seized one of the buildings of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine in Gorodetsky St ‘to get warm and sleep’. The Minister of Justice Elena Lukash made a statement that in case the building wasn’t released the government would initiate the introduction of martial law in the country. The Spilna Sprava was knocked out of the building by members of the Svoboda party. The building of the Energy Ministry was also unblocked.

In Donetsk local public organisations of Cossacks and veterans of the war in Afghanistan started to form militia units to help the law enforcement agencies keep order in the city. In Kharkov two explosive devices were thrown at a meeting of Maidan supporters. In Odessa the leader of the organisation Youth Unity Anton Davidchenko announced the beginning of forming squads of the People’s militia to defend the city from ‘nationalistic organisations of radicals’. In Sevastopol 12 pro-Russian organisations announced a possibility of cessation from Ukraine with a purpose of creating the ‘Federative State of Malorossia’ oriented to Russia in case the opposition came to power in Ukraine.

The Prime Minister of Ukraine Nikolay Azarov resigned; his resignation was accepted by the President Victor Yanukovich. Despite the fact that according to the Constitution of Ukraine the Prime Minister’s resignation is to be followed by the resignation of the whole Cabinet of Minister, responsibilities of the Head of the government of Ukraine were assigned to the first vice Prime Minister Sergey Arbuzov. At the meeting of the Supreme Rada 9 out of 11 laws of ’16 January’ were repealed.

The Supreme Rada of Ukraine passed a bill on amnesty of all participants of the protests except those who had committed especially grave crimes. There was a point in the bill, though, saying that the amnesty would enter into force only after the protesters released all seized administrative buildings.

The opposition leaders stated that the law on amnesty had been adopted in violation of the constitutional norms. One of the leaders of Automaidan Dmitry Bulatov who had been considered kidnapped for 8 days appeared near Kiev and gave an interview in which he stated that he had been beaten and tortured by some strangers. They had cut his ear off and even crucified him after which they had brought him to a suburb of Kiev, thrown him out of a car and left there weak and helpless.