For the government of Viktor Yanukovych, firmly in the camp of Russian President Vladimir Putin, these "Euromaidan" protests presented a major challenge, but attempts to suppress them led to what many Ukrainians took to calling "the Revolution of Dignity".

Between February 18 and 20, 2014, that revolution took a bitter turn, with more than 100 people dying as Berkut riot police and other security forces turned their guns on those in the square. It was a premonition of the many more dreadful twists and turns to come.

It was an unseasonably warm August in Kiev this year when I returned to the square. The signs of death were still on every street corner.

Mykyta Petik, a law student and one of the survivors of those terrible days in February 2014, led me up Instytutska Street, away from the Maidan and past a mound of helmets placed there as a memorial.

"It was the first day of heavy battles on Euromaidan between Berkut riot police and Euromaidan protesters," Petik says. "I was standing, not on the front line really, something like the second line, but I was carrying a heavy shield so there was no chance for me to run away."

After the Berkut police beat and left him, a medic bandaged his head to stem the bleeding and volunteers took him to a corner next to some stairs opposite the national bank.

He sat there, his eyes swathed in cotton gauze, like a traditional motanka doll – with no eyes, just a cross on the face to protect the child from evil.

"One old lady from a nearby house, she went out, she was not afraid," Petik says. "She just took my hand, because I had my eyes bandaged, and she went with me and guided me to her house just to save me from those Berkut police, who were arresting all those protesters who didn't manage to run away."

Inside the house, he lifted his bandage to test if he could see. From one eye, he saw a man smashing a chair.

"He took part of his chair ... like an improvised baseball bat.

"He was standing – he was a bit fat, with a moustache and funny clothes – he was standing with that part of the chair and he was just crying and shouting: 'I will kill any Berkut police officer I see if they try to arrest these boys.'

"I saw that ordinary people ... wanted to protect us, to, I don't know, to make the effort for a better country, so I am very grateful to them."

The Russian-language newspaper where Petik's mother works sent a car to take him to hospital. With the entire Kiev metro system locked down, his girlfriend, Nastya, walked an hour to be by his side.

Across the hospital corridor, Berkut police were arresting protesters. A nurse, whose form seemed to fill the hallway, told the officers she would not let them go past her. "This is my place," she said simply.

If not for that nurse, Petik might not be alive to tell his story.

Each day, it seems new memorials to the fallen are erected in and around the Maidan and Instytutska Street. Part of the street is closed and lined with photos of slain protesters, whom Ukrainians call the "Heavenly Hundred".

Photo after photo. Young and old. Shields, some with bullet holes. Helmet upon helmet. Flowers, wreaths, ribbons, flags.

Gazing from a balcony of Ukraine Hotel, it's incomprehensible to think of an eye looking through a sniper's scope from this same vantage point to kill a human being.

One morning, someone leaves a row of fresh apples for the fallen. As Ukrainians often say, "heroes don't die."

In the country's west, I see fresh apples again, in baskets along the highway that leads to my father's remote ancestral village of Oporets.

Perhaps the village, in the Carpathian Mountains, is named after the Opir River. Opir means resistance and signs of resistance are everywhere.

I see small children tying strips of cloth to make camouflage netting for soldiers in the east. As we enter the village, there's graffiti showing a poppy and the words: "We are victorious."

It reminds me of graffiti in Ukraine's capital that stated: "Mama, I will return."

Villagers start to emerge. One, in a voice thick with emotion, shouts: "She's from Australia! She's from another country!".

All these old people living in medieval houses, washing their clothes in the river and travelling by horse, seem to know of my family who lived in the mountains.

An old man who was taken to Siberia as a six-year-old and returned after World War II tells me most of my family was taken by force to German labour camps.

He tells me I look too young to be my father's daughter. I tell him, through my translator, that I was a surprise.

Everyone laughs and he informs me the Dmytryshchaks were known for having children late.

An old woman, born in 1920, tells us her neighbour, Petro Dmytryshchak, the last person who could have remembered the pre-war Dmytryshchaks, died in 2014, aged 94.

I had come a year too late to connect to the past.

But even if it takes longer than this generation, Ukraine has begun to connect with the free and democratic future.

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