Quote (Goomshill @ Feb 22 2022 11:45am)
And what's the counterargument to it?
The US official line is that Euromaidan was the 'good' kind of CIA backed coup, that Yanukovych was corrupt and America is helping anti-corruption in Ukraine, that it was a 'popular uprising' that 'restored democracy'. When Joe Biden inserted himself and his son into micromanaging that kleptocracy, it drew all kinds of attention onto the corrupt US oligarchy profiteering off the coup. If it hadn't been infected with a partisan lightning rod, western oligarchs could have at least maintained a pretense of legitimacy while emulating their Russian predecessors. Instead we got to peek behind that curtain and got to see what total bullshit the US propaganda machine was spewing.
I think pretending that Ukraine wasn't overthrown in 2014 and Russia has no legitimate grievance here and that Ukraine is a legitimate democracy, is like pretending that the Jupiter Missiles in Turkey never existed. The world makes a lot more sense when we acknowledge muhbothsides
I certainly don't see any geopolitical righteousness for the US inserting itself into Russia's backyard as mere opportunism after Syria, unwilling to defend Ukrainian interests against Russian aggression, permitting the economic circumvallation via Nord Stream II and then throwing a hissy fit when Russia formally occupies the territory they've been informally occupying most of a decade. Its not like we're some benevolent world police intervening to stop a genocide or serve our own self-interests of national security by blowing up some hajjis with chubby aluminum tubing. Our pretense here is that we're defending a democracy in a country who's democratically elected president we overthrew in a coup a few years ago, who's oligarchs we replaced with our own oligarchs, with borders that haven't held any meaning for a decade.
At the end of the day, this is just the ongoing result of sloppy foreign policy by Barack Obama who did the dead opposite of what the Obama Doctrine promised on paper. Libya, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, the man knew how to pick them
Well, the people making the argument that it was a Western-backed coup need to do more than just point to an intercepted phone call with Victoria Nuland or US-based organizations funding pro-democracy groups. I suppose there is naturally a lot of grey area when you are determining what is a legitimate uprising, and what is a coup.
I'm not well versed enough in this area to competently defend the "establishment" position, but from what I remember about it when it's been debated on this forum before, the case for "Western-backed coup" is pretty weak. There's a lot of paranoid(and in the before times, typically left-wing) assumptions about the CIA being behind everything
But here we have a good example of how things can quickly go off the rails when you accept premises that are untrue. If 2014 really was a Western-backed coup, and if Hillary(and her CIA pals) really did massively interfere into internal Russian politics to go against Putin during her time as Secretary of State, you can end up justifying a lot of bad Russian behavior.
This post was edited by IceMage on Feb 22 2022 11:16am