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[–]ActuallyNot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Agreement or no agreement, Russia was not going to meekly sit and allow NATO to eat into their security zone forever.

Seems that we agree that there was an agreement and Russia broke it by invading Ukraine.

The USA violated the spirit of the agreement in 2014 by instituting a "color revolution" (coup) in Ukraine and installing a government extremely hostile to Russia.

Nothing to do with America. Ukrainians were impatient to see economic transformation and saw the elections as fraudulent.

Yushchenko won a free and fair election, and Putin poisoned him.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Seems that we agree that there was an agreement and Russia broke it by invading Ukraine.

There was an agreement. It was broken by the US by instigating a coup that overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government.

Nothing to do with America.

The US State Department spent five billion dollars on election observers and protest groups to accuse Yanukovych of election fraud. It didn't work: independent election observers, and Ukrainians, agreed that Yanukovych had won a fair election. But the US was going to give up.

In 2013 and 2014, the US gave more money to the ultra-far right militias. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy met with Svoboda’s leader. Victoria Nuland literally chose who would be in the new Ukrainian government.

Ukrainians were impatient to see economic transformation and saw the elections as fraudulent.

That's not even close to what happened in 2013 and 2014.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) called the 2010 election "an impressive display" of democracy, fair and with no serious fraud. Denying that Yanukovych was the legitimate, democratically elected president of Ukraine is pure American propaganda.

Yanukovych was backed by both pro-EU Ukrainian oligarchs and Putin. He had the support of ethnic Russians and also many of the western Ukrainians. For three years, Yanukovych walked a narrow line keeping neutral between Russia and the EU, keeping agreements with Russia while still strengthening ties with the EU. He refused to join a Russian-led customs union; refused to merge the Ukrainian and Russian gas companies (which would have put control of the gas pipeline into Russia's hands); he encouraged Western investment, and pursued EU membership and loans from the IMF and World Bank. The idea that he was a Kremlin puppet is idiotic.

Yanukovych was the most trusted politician in Ukraine in 2013. And then he accepted an interest-free loan from Russia and cancelled a deal with the IMF, a deal which would have required Ukraine to cut pensions, sell off state assets, reduce taxes on the wealthy, and increase them on the poor. You know, the typical neoliberal globalist loan that makes millionaires into billionaires and impoverishes regular folks. And that's when the protests started, because of course there is nothing that ordinary folks want more than IMF loans that will make them poor, right?

The Maidan protesters were committing huge amounts of criminal damage and most importantly they never had majority support in Ukraine. Think of them as the equivalent of BLM protestors in America, except right-wing instead of left, even less popular, and even more violent. The Maidan insurrection is an excellent case-study in how violent revolution by a minority can overthrow a government -- especially following the false-flag shooting of both police and protestors by Svoboda and Right Sector, which the media then blamed on the police.

George Soros' Open Society Foundation claims that the Maidan revolution was completely peaceful except for government violence, which tells you everything you need to know about OSF.

It was a mess: US backed far-right paramilitary forces, including Azov, Svoboda and Right Sector, were committing violence, the government couldn't stop them, while US funded NGOs and EU media blamed the government. A classic example of what the US has done dozens of times before in Africa and South America. The new government was anti-Russian and pro-US, and to this day has still not investigated who shot the Maidan protestors, ignoring eye witnesses and forensic evidence that the shooting came from a building held by Svoboda miilitia.

Yanukovych and opposition parties came to an agreement, brokered by the EU, to reduced the president's power and hold new elections, but that wasn't enough for the far-right. They threatened more violence and threatened to murder Yanukovych. With the US openly supporting the far right, the Ukraine Parliament ratified the insurrection and stripped the presidency from Yanukovych, who then fled.

Yanukovych was corrupt, and he cracked down on protestors. But he was more democratic and less corrupt than those who followed, including Zelensky who was in first place in the Panama Papers as just another corrupt oligarch.

Yushchenko won a free and fair election, and Putin poisoned him.

Yes, he won the previous election, probably fairly, but he too was a dirty politician and he broke Ukrainian laws as president and had many enemies. There is no good evidence that his dioxin poisoning was done by Russia, it could easily have been done by his Ukrainian enemies.