I believe their argument is that Yanukovych and his party deceived the electorate.
Probably. And of course politicians never do that :).
In all seriousness I can think of myriad cases where we have started civil unrest in a nation and completely lost control of it. The State Dept and/or the Alphabet Agencies just cannot seem to win at this game.
When we go in with a huge military presence, like Afghanistan or Iraq, in the near term we certainly do wind up allowing governments favorable to ourselves to rise.
But I have yet to see us successfully do that with the more subtle approach. Usually we loose complete control and wind up letting some other group seize control. As, ultimately, we will do here too.
Ineptness is pretty much the only way to explain it, I cannot fathom its a strategy.
I believe their argument is that Yanukovych and his party deceived the electorate.
And they were systematically looting the country for the benefit of Russian mobsters. That has been pretty well demonstrated.
The thing is, that happens all the time in a democracy. You would be hard pressed to find a US president who didn’t lie in the campaign about what he would do. Bush promised a “humble” foreign policy that didn’t involve unnecessary wars. Bush senior said “no new taxes.” Obama implied that he would do away with mass surveillance of the American people, then defended it after it was exposed as being even worse than we thought.
Russia was offering a much, much more generous deal than the EU was that would have been better for Ukraine’s economy and for the people’s standard of living IN THE SHORT TERM. As president, Yanukovych had the right to take that offer. There was nothing illegal or unconstitutional about that. US and EU actions emboldened the protesters, who started getting very violent and attacking the police with deadly weapons when the police were still being extremely lenient. This was a classic provocation strategy, where one side attacks the other repeatedly and then freaks out and cries “I’m a victim” when the other side finally fights back.
Everyone in the world can see that the US worked to destabilize Ukraine and orchestrated a coup. That’s a mainstream, widely accepted truth among educated people who follow the news everywhere. Maybe it was the right thing to do, maybe not, but there is no denying that’s what happened. Our leaders are acting like they have a monopoly on information and that people will just accept their rather absurd black/white narrative on the matter.
We need leaders who understand that things don’t work like that these days.