Quote (Black XistenZ @ Mar 5 2024 08:59pm)
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.
It doesn't matter how anyone tries to spin it. They can try to cast some story of who fired the first shots, who felt they were justified in the use of violence. Its entirely irrelevant to the legitimacy of a democracy. The government was lawfully and democratically elected and had a responsible to maintain order by crushing the riots with force. The insurrectionists had no legitimate claim to overthrow a democracy and disenfranchise the majority of the country. They were a radicalized minority that seized power by force. Full stop.
Again, and I have to stress this, this is the geopolitical sticking point to which there is no excuse, no rationalization to be made. Ukraine had a legitimate and internationally recognized democracy, one that actually represented the will of the people. Those Banderites and western-aligned rabble overthrow that government with a violent siege of the capitol, sundered the country, started the civil war and forced action out of Russia to defend its interests both longterm as we see now, and the acute Crimean crisis. Its not a question of responsibility, that question is already answered. If the rioters felt unfairly persecuted by the state, their lawful recourse was to petition their government for redress, not hold a coup d'etat. If they felt betrayed when Yanukovych abandoned the EU association agreement, their lawful remedy was to campaign against him in the next election and try to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Ukrainians. Instead a bunch of Nazis with guns were handing out signed copies of Mein Kampf at their revolution.
I don't need to know the exacts of what proportion of the mob were foreign agitators or Nazis, whether the CIA preplanned it, whether the regime overreacted or underreacted. Its all irrelevant to the main takeaway, which is that a radical minority overthrew a legitimate democracy. Which stands in stark contrast to revolutions where a dictatorship faced off against pro-democracy revolutionaries, or revolutions in banana republics with no actual elections.
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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%. :rofl: 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.
Because it wasn't 2004 anymore. By 2010 the country held elections that international observers from both east and west recognized as legitimate. Yanukovych won fairly, and the international community on all sides agreed that Ukraine was a stable democracy before a bunch of sinister neonazis came along. Its pure hypocrisy by America to claim now that Yanukovych was somehow illegitimate and his elections rigged when we had observers who made formal reports that the elections were true and accurate representation of the will of the people.
It was the assessment of both east and west that Ukraine had a legitimate democracy. The EU reports put it as;
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Transparent' Election
Ukraine's presidential election, the fifth since the country regained its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, was democratic and "organized in a transparent manner," the OSCE said today in an e-mailed statement.
"Yesterday's vote was an impressive display of democratic elections," said João Soares, the president of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly and Special Coordinator for OSCE short- term observers. "For everyone in Ukraine, this election was a victory. It is now time for the country's political leaders to listen to the people's verdict and make sure that the transition of power is peaceful and constructive."
'Peaceful and constructive'
If you don't get the result you want at the ballot box, use the ammo box
This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 6 2024 05:42am