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N/AIn Ukraine’s domestic context, the Maidan protest movement is a crucial phenomenon with far-reaching consequences; in the global context, it is a local issue that emanated into the “Ukrainian crisis” with a wide international impact. For Ukraine, the Maidan protest is a large-scale turmoil, which involved violent means of claim making and people’s death, and triggered a territorial loss of the Crimea, as well as the military conflict in the Eastern Ukraine. Due to its topicality, the Maidan movement of November 2013 – February 2014 has been conceptualised in contradicting categories within Western, Russian and Ukrainian political discourses. In order to diminish the risk of politicising the protest movement in this research, the thesis applies a neutral category of “contention” from the theory of contentious politics, which was elaborated by C. Tilly and S. Tarrow. Recognising the available analytical materials and sociological data on the Maidan protest movement, this research suggests an integral approach to exploring the Maidan protests, which would bring together its objective and subjective dimensions. This research project was designed to examine the Maidan protests as a political phenomenon within Ukraine’s political system, as a social movement, and individual political action. Importantly, the thesis explores the Maidan movement in the context of the preceding organised protest actions in Ukraine. The thesis proposes a theoretical model for analysing the Maidan protest movement, which consists of the four categories: causation, dynamics, social mobilisation and repertoire or claim-making means. For the purpose of testing the model, this research applies the available theoretical and empirical data on the Maidan movement and Ukraine’s structural conditions since 1991. The individual dimension of the Maidan protest movement is represented in this model by the empirical data, which was collected during the in-depth interviews with three coordinators and seven participants of the protests