At home in Studio City, California, filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky carefully unfolds a blue and white Ukrainian flag. The once bright hues are darkened with soot, the fabric frayed at the edges.The banner sustained those battle scars in 2014 as it flew over Maidan Square in Kyiv, in the midst of a revolution to oust a pro-Russian leader and to reestablish Ukraine as a true democratic republic.
Afineevsky was on hand as the drama unfolded, documenting it for his Oscar-nominated film Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.
As Ukraine attempts to stave off a Russian attack on the country, he says the invaders will learn how attached Ukrainians have become to liberty in the past eight years.“These people will not be slaves.
They will not go back into the former Soviet Union,” Afineevsky insists. “They have a taste of freedom. They became a part of the European society, and they wanted to go a completely different direction [than Moscow].
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