“It was a symbol of sympathy with the horrible situation that Yanukovich had put Ukrainians in, putting them against each other,” Nuland said during the event at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington Wednesday. “First of all, to correct some disinformaciya [Russian for disinformation], they were sandwiches, they were not cookies.”
“There were some 2,000 young guys in these Adam Ant suits, pushing onto innocent demonstrators while Catherine Ashton and I were there,” she said, adding that Berkut ended up retreating after being surrounded by the protesters.
That is why the next morning Nuland did not feel that in the Slavic tradition she could go down to the protesters “empty-handed.”
Assistance Secretary of State stressed that the Russian media did not report about sandwiches for the Ukrainian security forces.
“Obviously that wasn’t useful to Moscow propaganda to point that out, but there are pictures of me giving the sandwiches also to the Berkut [forces], who were equal victims of the authoritarian structure,” she asserted.
“The United States will never be shy about supporting efforts for more democracy, more popular choice, more enfranchisement, anywhere in the world,” she concluded.
The Euromaidan protests then spread across the country, resulting in violent armed clashes between radicals and the police. The protests were actively supported by officials from the United States and European Union.
These protests led to the violent conflict in Ukraine, that dramatically escalated in mid-April, when Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that refused to recognize the new government, which came to power as a result of a February coup.