Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom

“Winter on Fire” offers a more conventionally presented and factually informative account of the Kiev uprising than Sergei Loznitsa’s alluringly formalistic “Maidan.” Yet it misses a wider view that might have complicated and undercut its noble but simplistic unity-of-the people uplift. We hear almost nothing of the influence of foreign powers in the Ukrainian struggle, and very little of what was going on within the Ukrainian Parliament at the time Kiev’s streets were roiling. Yanukovych, after all, was popularly elected, and what one side would call a “revolution” the other side would deem a “coup.”