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But that doesn’t cut it. If you say that CIA instigated maidan, it must mean there was a phone call where someone with a thick American accent called Putin, and said something along the lines of:

“Hey Vlad, we have a situation. We really want to get rid of Poroshenko, and this is a perfect moment to do this, he just signed an EU Association agreement. So can you call him “on the carpet”, and explain the consequences such that he’d nix it, and we have a pretext for a nice little revolution there.”

That’s some 4D chess there.

I think it’s much simpler. The Ozero ОПГ just can’t have anything resembling rule of law or actual democracy anywhere near their “sphere of influence”, especially in a culturally close nation like Ukraine, lest Russians get any ideas. And those pesky EU people are known to push these things wherever their dirty paws touch. So in gets called Poroshenko, gets a briefing, nixes the EU Association agreement, people understandably get mad about this, put their CIA-sponsored cooking pots on their heads, and overthrow the dipshit stooge.

In comes Putin, chooses plan C “annexation of Crimea” to punish Ukrainians for their disobedience (but also, can’t have the Sevastopol base on Western-aligned land). And… This is likely where it was supposed to end, for time being at least.

But no, fucking Strelkov gets a divine vision of how he can become saint Igorj the Breaker of Chains, and ‘free’ ‘Novorossiya’ from those pesky Ukrainians, takes initiative, and goes for Slovyansk. Everyone else then plays along, hey, maybe it does work out.

And the thing is, none of this actually matters. Because Russia recognised Ukrainian independence in 1991 with the borders that the Soviet republic had. There’s a reason why Südtirol is still Italy, and they don’t even discuss it. Because doing so opens the kind of Pandora’s box that we’re witnessing wide open for three years now.

Иван 10mo ago

That’s all well and good, but people who like to blame everything on either Putin or the CIA/deep state tend to overlook the fact that there were real expectations among the people too. Take Maidan, for example — sure, maybe the CIA played a role in organizing it, but it didn’t just come out of nowhere. Tension had been building in society for years.

It’s the same with Ukraine now. No matter how Putin is using the situation to his advantage, the Russian people had questions about that country as far back as ’91 — but back then, there was no one to ask. In fact, it was Russia that formally set Ukraine’s modern borders without the slightest regard for its own interests, only for the interests of the elites. So, sooner or later, that was bound to lead to a military conflict.

Honestly, even in American video games from the ’90s, it wasn’t uncommon to see storylines where Moscow and Kyiv were at war. This was all pretty obvious long before anyone had even heard of Putin.

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Discussion

Janis 10mo ago

I agree with you here mostly. Except the defeatist conclusion. It does take an authoritarian leader to attack a neighbouring country. If you guys had a functioning democracy with half-decent checks and balances, you’d never have attacked Ukraine. Even if a non-negligible part of the population have imperialistic ambitions, it’s near impossible to go through with them in that situation.

And what people think in the territories of interest outside of the “mother-nation” doesn’t matter in either scenario.

In case the “mother-nation” is run by a strongman who has decided (with support from a part of his population, yes) that some outside territory “rightfully belongs” to them, it doesn’t matter what people think in the territory in question. Cases in point - Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Gaza (Israel).

In case the “mother-nation” is run democratically, and there is some outside territory where a significant part of the population would like to join with the “mother-nation”, it doesn’t matter. The democratic country won’t go imperialist. Cases in point Südtirol (Austria), Åland Islands (Sweden), Northern Ireland (Ireland).

Anyway, changing the subject a bit. Any good straight-talking Russian ultra-patriotic bloggers left on Telegram? Strelkov got jailed, sends a letter now and then that his wife posts. Alksnis died.