Yanukovych triggered the protests by going back on his campaign promise to not stand in the way of an agreement with the EU. You can argue that the Euromaidan was a color revolution all you want, without this trigger, the oh-so nefarious West wouldn't have had a leverage point to start its alleged color revolution.
Yanukovych started the escalation of violence. The Maidan protests were peaceful at first and only turned violent after Yanukovych's Berkut secret police started brutalizing them. It should be noted that the Berkut was infamous for its brutality long before the Maidan, and that its ranks were disproportionally filled with pro-Russian people from the Eastern provinces.
Yanukovych did not have "broad support from the population", with only a few nutjobs opposing him who unfortunately happened to all be concentrated in the capital. He came into office with 49% of the vote and benefitted from pro-Western Tymoshenko (the braid chick) and an ultrantionalist/neonazi splitting the rest of the vote. Additionally, the recent parliamentary election had resulted in a legislature with a (narrow) pro-Western majority. Simply put, the country was politically split right down the middle on the eve of the Maidan. This narrative that Yanukovych was massively popular and got violently overthrown by a CIA-led coup in spite of his broad backing by the Ukrainian people is lie perpetuated by the Russian propaganda. Basically their version of the stab-in-the-back myth.
He could have stayed in Kharkiv or Donetsk, where the pro-Russian forces were in control and tried to fight for his right as the duly elected president of Ukraine, and/or to keep the country together and prevent the outbreak of a civil war. By fucking off to Russia within a day, Yanukovych badly damaged the legitimate claims to power that the pro-Russian half of Ukraine still had. The Maidan revolutionaries taking over and the Eastern provinces seceding became inevitable at that point.
As to why he fucked off right away instead of staying and fighting for Ukraine: when the Maidan fighters entered the presidential palace in Kyiv, and Yanukovych's private residence a little later, they found obscene riches and evidence for egregious levels of corruption, even by Ukraine's lopsided standards.
Yanukovych was voted in with the majority of voters, and they were concentrated in the east. The rebels who opposed him were concentrated in the capitol, and that's how they overthrew the government.
Whether it was a color revolution or not, regardless of the provable fact of US/EU puppeteering of the revolutionary government- it was the overthrow of a democratically elected government by a revolutionary minority led by a vanguard of nazis. Its true that Yanukovych was only supported by half the country, that the country was deeply divided, but that's just how democracies function. That's been the case in America for 250 years, and it also led to a civil war here.
If Ukrainians wanted to democratically change their country they could have voted for it in the next elections, just a few months removed from the revolution. And as I've said many times, maybe in some alternate history the Russians would have been forced to crush a democratic movement to move to ally with the west. But it didn't happen. Putin's interests happened to align with the democratic interests of Ukraine and the majority of its people, and so the democracy was undone by an anti-democratic minority who overthrew it by force and instituted the overt autocracy we have now.
But all this, both framings for and against 'legitimacy', how relevant are they?
There are two important lenses we can use to examine this conflict. One of international legitimacy and rule of law and democratic idealism. One of realpolitik and balance of power.
It wouldn't matter if the overthrow of Ukraine was illegitimate, if the western rebels had conquered the entire country and declared themselves legitimate. That's the reality of force of arms
The fundamental question of sovereignty vs morality in the US civil war wasn't settled by debate, our union was reforged in cannon fire.
So the reality is the western revolutionaries never for a day seized the strongholds of the eastern separatists, and since the Russian invasion their control over contested lines in the DPR/LPR has been steadily rolled back and taken by force. That's where we are today. Western media claiming legitimacy for the Ukrainian government is as irrelevant as it is insincere.
This post was edited by Goomshill on Nov 14 2025 09:52am