The illegal coup in 2014 that we helped fomented threw out a President that the vast majority voted for in Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk. It resulted in the ethnic Russian population in those regions being persecuted and murdered by Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis.
The people there HAD EVERY MORAL RIGHT to seek independence and join the Russian Federation.
There isn't anyone living in those regions doesn't feel liberated. Now, if the Russians can just remove the Ukrainian bastards that continue to target civilians in Donetsk and Crimea, the people there might finally be able to live in peace.
Good point. If the Ukrainians in the eastern provinces and Crimea really hated Russia that much, why weren’t there massive worker strikes and insurgencies since 2014?
Convenient that you leave out why the population rose up against Yanukovych. He was elected supporting an EU/Ukrainian agreement. But he yielded to Russian pressure, repudiated the deal that he had previously supported and had been approved by the parliament, and sought to bind Ukraine to an economic union with Russia. The popular protests against him did not need CIA encouragement. And then when the people went to the streets to protest, he used force to quell those protest. Yanukovych was not acting any like sort of democrat. Nor was he removed by the CIA, but by the democratically elected parliament.
Granted that the action by the parliament was constitutionally doubtful — although an argument can be made for it — it did not justify the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. There could have been a political solution. The Russian invasion, however, forestalled that. There was an election afterwards, but again, it was the Russian occupation that prevented the citizens of Crimea and Donbas from participating in it.
It resulted in the ethnic Russian population in those regions being persecuted and murdered by Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis.
How long are you going to push that lie? Even the statistics provided by the two so-called republics of Luhansk and Donetsk do not support that allegation.
There isn't anyone living in those regions doesn't feel liberated.
Does that include the 60% of the Donbas population that is Ukrainian? And what of the populations of Kherson that is 82% Ukrainian and of Zaporizhzhia that is 71% Ukrainian. And don't quote me those phony referenda that were conducted by the Russians.