3 ms·
The US overtly supported and encouraged an effort within Ukraine to overthrow a democratically elected president because he moving more towards Russia than the
by mopsi 2y ago
The US overtly supported and encouraged an effort within Ukraine to overthrow a democratically elected president because he moving more towards Russia than the West. Russia then ended up invading Ukraine for fears of having NATO not only right on their doorstep, but right in their geographic Achille's Heel.
This war started when Ukraine's president Yanukovych, at the last minute and under Russian extortion, abandoned the EU-Ukraine trade agreement that would have opened up the EU for trade and other opportunities. This meant that Ukrainians could've easily seen their incomes grow by 3-4x in a short span of time, like other countries that entered deeper relations with the EU and eventually joined it saw.
Naturally, Ukrainians responded with massive protests, to which Yanukovych replied with increasing violence, culminating in 100 protesters being killed by police snipers. At that moment, Yanukovych lost the support of even his own party, fled to Russia out of fear of imminent imprisonment, and the Ukrainian parliament announced snap elections to replace him. The elections were held a few months later. Not many people would call general elections a "CIA coup".
NATO has nothing to do with it either, that's pure gaslighting. In the first few years after the initial invasion in 2014, Russia denied having any troops in Ukraine. According to Russia, the thousands of people equipped with Russian tanks, artillery, and air defense systems were merely local self-defense forces who had bought their equipment from military surplus stores. Russia claimed that Ukraine was in a civil war.
The narrative started shifting to blaming NATO only in the run-up to the full-scale invasion in 2022, when Russia abandoned the story that Ukrainians were fighting each other and needed a new justification for its massive surprise attack on all of Ukraine.