Quote (Black XistenZ @ Oct 5 2022 04:29am)
You're still portraying it as if the euromaidan revolution was completely astroturfed and did not represent a genuine sentiment among at least half the Ukrainian people. You're also conveniently leaving out that the protests only turned violent after Yanukovych's special police violently cracked down on them.
Why do you have this dichotomy that everything is either entirely astroturfed or not at all. As has been said many times this thread, the western part of the country surrounding Kiev was staunchly pro-EU, while the eastern part of the country was pro-Russia, and the pro-Russian president had won a lawful presidential election. It was
half the country that rioted and overthrew the government while being supported by the US. That's what color revolutions generally are. The US finds minority groups and props them up to overthrow their governments.
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Also, like I've stressed time and time and time and time and time again, you had a split government back then - the president wanted to align with Russia, the parliament wanted to align with the EU. The fact that Russia's ally happened to be the one who held veto power, at least in the short term, does not imply that Russia had "convinced" Ukraine to stay in their fold. Moreover, the question of EU vs Russia alignment was not as salient during Ukraine's 2010 presidential election as many think. Yanukovych mainly won because the previous pro-EU camp around Tymoshenko was perceived as incompetent and corrupt. Your entire argument hinges on this false notion that the fact that Yanukovych was president in 2013/13 proves that a majority of the Ukrainian people prefered to stay aligned with Russia.
The
inconvenience that you keep glossing over is
democracy. The people had their vote and had their say. Overthrowing a government by force is not democratic. If people opposed Yanukovych's policies, they could have voted against him in the next election. If I don't like what Joe Biden's doing, the answer is to vote him out of office. The answer isn't to seize control of the white house and send him into exile and declare a new united states of america 2.0.
I want to be clear, I accept absolutely zero concessions on the point, I don't tolerate any wiggle room for saying 'oh but democracy is more of what you'd call guidelines'. There's zero legitimacy to a government formed by violent revolution overthrowing a free and fair democracy.
And its dripping in the most obscene irony that this is all coming after democrats have been screeching about January 6th for a year.