the issue with the bar fight example is that it could also go that you push a hot head, they punch you, and you're now legally allowed to bounce THEIR head off the concrete.

i keep hearing this "they had no options" talk. if Russia had shut off the oil supply without invading anyone they'd have gotten full negotiations within a week. Putin couldn't play that card because his bosses won't take a loss, but are more than willing to burn up old weaponry and young men in an invasion. and then Europe divested anyways and they'll be stuck taking a lower % on each shipment for decades. how well did they "predict the outcome"?

paging back to last week's talk tho i'm still a bit confused about how you characterize the timeline, so just to lay it out basically.

1. Russian backed candidate wins presidential election over EU friendly candidate
2. Russian backed candidate tears up proposal to shift economically towards Europe, instead choosing closer ties to Russia
3. Revolution in capital, govt seized, Vik runs to Russian exile

where in this timeline does the US via CIA's involvement begin? immediately after Vik won, and predating his shift away from the EU? or after he ended EU trade talks?

not asking for a 100% confident answer, and i ditched all mention of NATO to avoid confusion that arose earlier, but it may help understand your perspective. imo the CIA didn't get heavily involved until he tore up the agreement and the organic unrest arose. they poured gas on a fire, they didn't light a fire.

No you can't bounce someone's skull and kill them in a bar fight, even if they started it. You're 100% going to jail for that.

How does constraining oil supply reverse the coup? Even after that they had negotiations since 2014 which were fruitless and were only used by Ukraine to arm themselves and train tens of thousands of troops for war, so how exactly does that benefit them? Pretty sure they know better of what levers they had left compared to you.

The CIA didn't get involved until he tore up the agreement. The CIA was involved and funding NGO's and pro-western factions well before that agreement. That's why I pointed to the fact that to orchestrate the seizing of the power apparatus in the country (police, military, etc) for pro-Western Ukrainians alone after the coup would be silly, it's a monumental task that requires the type of organization and priming that really something like a professional intelligence agency like the CIA has. And we've done this type of stuff in Central & South America & Asia during the cold war, it's something we know how to do.

Without the CIA it's a bunch of Azov and Right Sector thugs, which get put down by the police/military within a few days/weeks. I'm just curios how do you think the military/police do a 180 in a phone booth and instead of supporting the democratically elected president they toss that chain of command out the window and side with a mob? Like the amount of faith to believe this is organic is really silly.

objectively the timeline is pretty clear:

1. Viktor tears up the agreement the democratically elected parliament already approved, well within the power of his office
2. protests spark, killing at least 100 people in a fairly short timespan in Kyiv during Jan-Feb 2014
3. protest grows, thousands occupy govt buildings, march on parliament, taking sniper fire
4. feb 21st the mob forces Viktor to resign, police/military stand down, unity govt takes over forcing reforms and early election, Viktor enters russian exile shortly after

from this my viewpoint is Viktor, smartly, never ordered the military to act. elsewise he'd have killed many thousands and been done politically and condemned internationally. he may have prevented war, and it may have been a better call in hindsight, but i understand his decision.

from then on the military/police didn't "do a 180", they abided by the resignation Viktor was forced into, literally by violence. the police specifically killed people in the mob as they marched towards the eventual revolution culminating event. what's the military's other option? storm Kyiv killing thousands to reinstate Viktor? even if physically done it would have been a mess thereafter and just spurned on more protests long term.

now, is it possible the CIA already had turned a portion of the military/police? sure, i just havent seen evidence of that. were the mob armed, aided and trained by the CIA? sure, i havent seen evidence of that either but wouldnt be shocked.
4.

You keep highlighting him tearing up the agreement as if somehow to justify a coup. If Biden tore up a trade agreement does that justify a violent coup? I'm just really confused why this keeps getting elevated to a justified reason for democracy to be tossed out the window. Like look at France and how unpopular that retirement age reform is. Are the French starting a civil war? Is the police of the military turning on Macron and his administration? This is what an organic protest looks like, not the lightning fast power shift we saw in Ukraine.

Viktor is not an idiot, he knew he literally had days to gtfo out of dodge because the power structure literally shifted under his feet extremely fast.

I wouldn't hold my breath for evidence on the CIA doing something lol, I'm sure you're not that naïve. I rather trust history though and when we know that was the modus operandi for decades to promote our chess pieces in banana republics and get rid of soviet ones it takes infinitely more faith that one of these Russian dominoes falls organically.

I keep highlighting it because Viktor did it on Kremlin orders, I of course have the same amount of evidence for that that you have of CIA coup support, but we both know both are true. does it to me justify a revolution? no. i dont support the coup, i dont support the revolution, and i dont support Viktor tearing up the democratically popular agreement, just to be clear of what i personally support.

but that one act is the spark that lit the powderkeg, and it's my contention that even without CIA backing Viktor goes down as a result. looking at it objectively he was ousted by predominately people with shields and hand weapons who were drastically outgunned that physically took buildings by rule of mob. the revolution took about a month with the CIA, imo it still gets done in 3-4 without unless Viktor orders it put down by the military. but then we spiral into what ifs.

perhaps decades from now we'll see what the CIA actually did, just as ledgers of ak47 shipments to banana republics sometimes surface, or deathbed confessions arise. but when i think logically of what they could have done i dont really see that much room for arms support. we didnt see mobs with ar15s, drones, or C4. did the CIA send in riot shields and helmets? perhaps. did they offer intel, most certainly. i just take umbrage with the narrative the CIA was needed, or worse that it was a CIA coup entirely. though id be happy to see any sources trying to actually quantify this stuff.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Apr 3 2023 12:36pm

Him being a pro-Russian candidate was known prior to him becoming president and the people chose in a democratic election. In one breath you want to highlight as him ripping up this agreement as some cardinal sin which supersedes democracy and as the spark while minimizing our military alliance creep towards them.

Again you're looking at this at in a really obtuse way. We don't need to send riot shields and C4. What we need is to grease the hands of the generals, colonels, police commissioners, the courts, etc. whatever other internal power brokers. If that happens the police and military stands down and instead of seeing hundreds/thousands of violent protestors being shot dead or imprisoned and failing before it even gets going we get Viktor running and a pro-western government blossoming.

Our positions aren't the same in lack of evidence. I got decades of history of how we operate on my side, while you want to believe we turned a new leaf and this all happened organically (but still somehow conveniently aligned with our geopolitical goals).


edit:

As a side note this is why the people that viewed Jan 6th as a legitimate and real threat are idiots. Because to overthrow someone/something it takes an immense amount of moving parts to come together. If Jan 6th was a legitimate overthrow attempt you would have found mountains of evidence at courts/military/alphabet agencies of some sort of pressures.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Apr 3 2023 01:14pm

its getting hard to respond honestly with how badly you strawman me.

i never, not even once, said the CIA didnt get involved. or that this happened organically. i admitted we 100% were involved, i just pondered how involved we were and what specifically we did. i even asked you to define what you thought we did and admitted i wouldnt hold you to it because its all just postulation anyways without direct evidence.

but time and again you keep spouting NPC script lines at me that directly contradict what im actually posting. i said i believe the revolution happens organically anyways, i didnt say it did happen organically. i said the protests seemingly arose as a result of breaking the agreement, because that seems to be what happened. how quickly they escalated does suggest CIA involvement, but we have no proof of that nor are we likely to get any anytime soon. as i said im willing to accept your opinion of the timeline on CIA involvement, you're just not willing to accept mine lol.

on the side note i said on jan 7th literally the day after that it wasnt a real coup attempt, so we agree, and always have. you've referenced jan 6th a lot in these talks, which makes me think you have my position on that incorrect also.

on one specific note tho, and Viktor being russian backed and this being known in the lead up to Euromaiden:



Viktor signaled publicly that Ukraine was preparing to make the deal happen, then it was abruptly abandoned. so he may have been russian backed openly, but that appears to have been a pivot. thus why i keep stressing it.

I'm the NPC while rejecting the current MSM perspective, while you are the maverick that cedes a few small points points here and then immediately follow it up with a 'yeah but' counter on why this is actually mostly if not all their fault.

>well it wasn't a binding agreement
>well he reneged on the deal
>well it's not a justification to escalate the war
>well even though there's a long history of us destabilizing pro-commie/Russian banana republics this is different

like it's a never ending pivot game

It's a pointless exercise. We can go back in history during times of wars and always find good reasons why it was important for us to do something or how this key detail makes this specific case different. Hawks gonna hawk, and then 10 years later we'll once again get 95% of people telling us how they were always against the Ukraine war similarly to what we've seen with Iraq or Afghanistan.