Quote (Goomshill @ 6 Mar 2024 01:34)
Those mobs were actually trying to overthrow a government by force, not a bunch of chuds having a lookie loo around the nation's capitol. And yet January 6thers got shot by trigger happy police too.
If anything, a government has a duty to quell an insurrection by appropriate force, and that can mean meeting fire with fire. The Maidan attackers were clearly far beyond what nonlethal crowd control measures could handle, the failure of state forces weren't in protecting a mob from itself by managing its bottlenecks. It doesn't matter if thats FSB agents or police or Yanukovych's own secret paramilitary, what mattered was that a mob of armed Nazis were trying to overthrow the government by force and needed to be stopped to preserve democracy. And instead the country fell and democracy ended. That was the event that destabilized the region. Not protesters fired upon, not Russia's response to seize Crimea, not the CIA filling the power vacuum afterwards to handpick the new government. It was a peaceful and reasonably stable democracy that was suddenly thrown into chaos by a coup d'etat by a radicalized group of revolutionaries. And any response to that, any of the events that follow, aren't equally culpable. It matters who cast the first stone. We can't know to what degree this color revolution had CIA backing versus a groundswell of western Ukrainian citizenry versus the Nazis leading the charge. Does it matter?
After Yanukovych refused, at the 11th hour, to sign the EU association agreement which the Ukrainian parliament had agreed upon, widespread protests erupted across Ukraine. They were initially peaceful, but got brutalized repeatedly by Yanukovych's notorious special police 'Berkut'. It was only in response to these assaults on citizens excercising their rights to free speech and free assembly that the protestors themselves became increasingly violent, started fighting fire with fire (in some cases quite literally). From there, the situation increasingly escalated until the day when Yanukovych and his forces completely lost control, fled Kyiv and the Euromaidan protestors took over. There is no doubt in my mind that all sides had agents and instigators among the crowd during the crucial days of the Euromaidan: Yanukovych-aligned secret service, Azovites, Russian operatives, CIA operatives. Probably also groups aligned with specific Ukrainian oligarchs. It was a complete clusterfuck of a situation.
In any case, it seems extremely dubious that you base your entire perspective on the Ukraine/Russia conflict on the notion that we know exactly what happened during those fateful days, on the notion that one side is unambiguously in the wrong... so wrong that it justifies the other side (Russia) waging a decade-long shadow war against the country, followed by a full-scale invasion and years-long shelling of civilian and residential infrastructure all across Ukraine. Even if all of your premises were correct, Russia's response to Ukraine's actions would still be highly disproportional.
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By the way, what "peaceful and reasonably stable democracy which was suddenly thrown into chaos" are you talking about? Remember 10 years earlier, in 2004, when the pro-Western side in Ukraine was once before on the verge of winning the presidential election and their leader, Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned with dioxin in an assassination attempt by a Kremlin-aligned figure. The runoff from that 2004 presidential election had to be repeated on the orders of Ukraine's supreme court because of egregious voter fraud in Yanukovych's favor, with some regions seeing their turnout soar from 60ish percent in the first round to 98 percent in the runoff, while other Yanukovych strongholds reported turnout in excess of 100%.
Yushchenko then comfortably won the re-run of the runoff.
Since the 90s, Ukraine had always been a corrupt shithole with a deeply divided populace, a country which had always been subject to a tug-of-war between Russia and the West. The narrative that Ukraine was a stable democracy before a bunch of sinister neonazis came along, overthrew the government and plunged the formerly stable country into chaos... is myopic at best, to put it mildly.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 5 2024 09:01pm