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This is a pretty gross misunderstanding of the situation. Yanukovich was very successfully playing the West and Russia off each other when he was ousted by Euro

by jjk166 5y ago

This is a pretty gross misunderstanding of the situation. Yanukovich was very successfully playing the West and Russia off each other when he was ousted by Euromaiden protesters who specifically wanted Ukraine to turn West, which is the popular sentiment throughout most of Ukraine. The fact that NATO and Ukraine's government are now aligned is what prompted Russia to act in the first place, promoting sepratism in Crimea so that they can guarantee continued control of Sevastopol (a goal of Russian foreign policy for the past 300 years), and promoting unrest in Eastern Ukraine to make NATO hesitant to accept Ukraine's bid to join NATO. It's the exact same strategy Russia used in Georgia to stop it from joining NATO. Of course the whole situation is complicated by the fact Ukraine's borders are a product of Soviet planners who never thought it would wind up as an independent nation, but the ethnic Russian population is small and generally not prosperous. Ironically, Ukraine would probably be better off letting the separatist regions secede, but to do so would be publicly perceived as a win for Russia and thus is not permitted.

pydry 5y ago
>and promoting unrest in Eastern Ukraine to make NATO hesitant to accept Ukraine's bid to join NATO I stayed in Odessa a couple of years after the Maidan with an elderly (ethnic Russian) couple who ranted at me for five minutes straight about "the idiots in Kyiv". They all but endorsed the separatists in Donetsk. They supported the protesters initially "when it was about corruption and living standards", but never desired closer integration with the EU and desperately wished that the value of their savings hadn't plunged 80% as a result of the "coup"/"spontaneous uprising of freedom lovers" I suppose it's always possible that this elderly couple were shadowy agents of Putin sent there to destabilize the country with a "fairly gross" misunderstanding of their own life. No doubt say, the Washington Post would see the bogeyman of Putin hovering there, as it usually does. Nonetheless, I believe that their fury was real and shared by quite a large proportion of the rest of Ukraine (albeit more in, say, the east and less in, say, Lviv).

by jjk166 5y ago

pydry 5y ago

>and promoting unrest in Eastern Ukraine to make NATO hesitant to accept Ukraine's bid to join NATO I stayed in Odessa a couple of years after the Maidan with an elderly (ethnic Russian) couple who ranted at me for five minutes straight about "the idiots in Kyiv". They all but endorsed the separatists in Donetsk. They supported the protesters initially "when it was about corruption and living standards", but never desired closer integration with the EU and desperately wished that the value of their savings hadn't plunged 80% as a result of the "coup"/"spontaneous uprising of freedom lovers" I suppose it's always possible that this elderly couple were shadowy agents of Putin sent there to destabilize the country with a "fairly gross" misunderstanding of their own life. No doubt say, the Washington Post would see the bogeyman of Putin hovering there, as it usually does. Nonetheless, I believe that their fury was real and shared by quite a large proportion of the rest of Ukraine (albeit more in, say, the east and less in, say, Lviv).