#Maidan coup

[immaculatasknight]

The forever war

[der-blauweisse]

Political and social double standards - racism in the USA, Israel and (Nazi) Germany. A historical comparison.

USA-Germany-Israel: the Mental Bermuda Triangle Three states play a special role in the imperial charade of the “West of values”: the USA, Germany and Israel. For the fiction of a West supposedly based on human rights, democracy and freedom, the triangle of these states creates special narratives of this fiction and at the same time represents the “Bermuda Triangle” in which historical truth…

[ohsalome]

— Timothy Snyder, "The Road to Unfreedom"

[iamthetruenhaz]

Good, good

[communist-ojou-sama]

Like, this may come as a shock to people like Tumblr liberals who are totally stuck in the Western anglophone neoliberal ideology echo-chamber but like, outside of the west, out there where the majority of the worlds people live, Kwame Nkrumah's thought is taken more seriously than Milton Friedman's. So why will left liberals engage with Friedman's thought, even if only to debunk it, but not engage at all with Nkrumah's writings on neocolonialism, and just write it off?

There's a common charge leveled by supposedly "open-minded" liberals toward anti-imperialists, that we just 'blindly' support any force that's contravailing US the US on a regional or global scale, but how am I supposed to take this seriously as anything but projection?

We anti-imperialists often make specific, verifiable claims about happenings in global geopol, such as that the so-called "Free Syrian Army" consisted mostly of salafi jihadists allowed into Syria through their northern border with Turkey, and that it doesn't make sense that a civil war could simply Materialize in a country like Syria which right before the war started had one of the lowest ratios of guns to people in the world, or that the Maidan coup regime that swept into power in Kiev in 2014 was heavily infiltrated with fascists, and would not have been able to consolidate power without the instrumentalisation of fascist gangs and paramilitary organizations.

The liberal response to these specific claims, then, is to point to reports from corporate media with every incentive to lie, themselves doing no independent investigation but instead parroting verbatim the word of the State Department as fact, and dismissing all independent media investigations out of hand with no further thought.

In a situation such as this, can that response really be considered "open-minded"? It seems that time and time again intellectual rigor is reserved for discussions of technocratic tinkering within the west's iron curtain, and not the lives of people outside of it.

There's plenty of brain-juice to be expended on justifying why the US economy is actually in good shape and the people saying they're struggling more than before are just stupid, but when it comes to considering why African heads of state choose the China Development Bank over the IMF as an economic partner or Russia over the NATO states as security partners, these leaders of millions are dismissively written off as histrionically anti-Western, paranoid, and too mentally weak to see through Russian and Chinese propaganda. Is it this really a 'rational' way to look at the world?

Personally, I think not.

[gusty-wind]

USAID is Connected to Biden Threat to Ukraine Over Burisma Investigation + Ukraine Coup

Here's the $1 Billion loan Biden used to threaten Ukraine if they didn't fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin who was investigating Burisma corruption

Here's the full thread

"Ya'll remember when Joe Biden bragged about withholding that "$1 billion loan guarantee" to Ukraine in exchange until the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired??

That was USAID.

That is how Nuland and her cronies at the State Department were able to fund the Maidan and overthrow the Yanukovich administration, which was favorable to a relationship with Russia, THEIR NEIGHBOR, in exchange for a US-Friendly regime.

THAT is how Mikheil Saakashvili went from Georgian President for two terms to Ukraine's Odessa Oblast governor (after, of course, being educated in the United States).

This was the single greatest blow in the battle against the Deep State to date."

[trickricksblog08]

Pink Floyd's Roger Waters accuses Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland of engineering the War in Ukraine:

"You could have kept Secretary of State Baker's promise not to advance NATO... You could have refrained from engineering the illegal Maidan coup d'etat... You could have supported the Minsk accords."

"Now we are told by Angela Merkel they were just a ruse to buy time to arm Ukraine for the war that you were engineering."

[thelostdreamsthings]

The myth of "unprovoked" goes up in smoke:

The New York Times admitted that the US had built 12 CIA spy bases in Ukraine over the past 8 years to turn Ukraine into an intelligence bridgehead to fight Russia.

The article goes on to say American interference could have been a factor in pushing Vladimir Putin to begin Russia’s assault in February 2022

"At the end of 2021, Putin was considering whether to launch a full-scale invasion. He met with the head of one of Russia's main spy services, who told him that the CIA, together with British intelligence Mi6, controlled Ukraine and turned it into a staging ground for operations against Moscow."

The article also notes that Ukraine’s post-Maidan coup intelligence chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko called the local CIA and British MI6 chiefs and asked for help in rebuilding the Ukrainian intelligence service from the ground up in a three-way partnership.

The US and Britain were already on Russia’s doorstep long before the war, meaning Russia’s red line of NATO in Ukraine had been de-facto crossed. The media for years called these allegations conspiracy theories, which have once again now turned out to be true.

[darkmaga-returns]

The Biden Administration is giving new insight into its involvement in Kiev’s military drone industry, which has included funding, supplies and even the help of U.S. intelligence officials who were sent to Ukraine to build the drone program, according to a new report from the New York Times.

But while the report claimed the U.S. helped develop “a new generation of drones” that have “revolutionized how wars are fought,” it also quietly admitted that Kiev’s drone warfare hasn’t helped it gain “as much ground as it had wanted, in part because of Russia’s use of drones.”

Yet another reminder that the U.S. has been deeply involved in Ukraine for more than decade, which has included the CIA training militants in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan Coup for a future war with Russia, and the CIA maintaining at least 12 secret military intelligence bases along Russia’s border.

SOURCE LINKS:

17 Jan. 2025 - U.S. Reveals Once-Secret Support for Ukraine’s Drone Industry

17 Jan. 2025 - Russia has retaken majority of territory Ukraine occupied in Kursk region – MOD

17 Jan. 2025 - How the CIA and Ukrainian intelligence secretly forged a deep partnership

13 Jan. 2022 - CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades

25 Feb. 2024 - The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin

16 Jan. 2025 - Trump Team Readies Oil Sanctions Plan for Russia Deal, Iran Squeeze

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

"The schizofascist lies displaced the events in Ukraine and the experiences of Ukrainians. Under the weight of all of the contradictory concepts and hallucinatory visions of spring 2014, who would see or remember the individual on the Maidan, with his or her facts and passions, his or her desire to be in history and make history?

Russians, Europeans, and Americans were meant to forget the students who were beaten on a cold November night because they wanted a future. And the mothers and fathers and grandparents and veterans and workers who then came to the streets in defense of “our children.” And the lawyers and consultants who found themselves throwing Molotov cocktails. The hundreds of thousands of people who broke themselves away from television and internet and who journeyed to Kyiv to put their bodies at risk. The Ukrainian citizens who were not thinking of Russia or geopolitics or ideology but of the next generation. The young historian of the Holocaust, the sole supporter of his family, who went back to the Maidan during the sniper massacre to rescue a wounded man, or the university lecturer who took a sniper’s bullet to the skull that day.

One can record that these people were not fascists or Nazis or members of a gay international conspiracy or Jewish international conspiracy or a gay Nazi Jewish international conspiracy, as Russian propaganda suggested to various target audiences. One can mark the fictions and contradictions. This is not enough. These utterances were not logical arguments or factual assessments, but a calculated effort to undo logic and factuality. Once the intellectual moorings were loosed, it was easy for Russians (and Europeans, and Americans) to latch on to well-funded narratives provided by television and the internet, but it was impossible to work one’s way towards an understanding of people in their own setting: to grasp where they were coming from, what they thought they were doing, what sort of future they imagined for themselves.

Ukrainians who began by defending a European future found themselves, once the propaganda and the violence began, fighting for a sense that there could be a past, a present, and a future. The Maidan began as Ukrainian citizens sought to find a solution for Ukrainian problems. It ended with Ukrainians trying to remind Europeans and Americans that moments of high emotion require sober thought. Distant observers jumped at the shadows of the story, only to tumble into a void darker than ignorance. It was tempting, amidst the whirl of Russian accusations in 2014, to make some kind of compromise, as many Europeans and Americans did, and accept the Russian claim that the Maidan was a “right-wing coup.”"

Timothy Snyder, The Road To Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

[loving-n0t-heyting]

@saamdaamdandaurbhed

I mean, that seems too strong to me! I am urging my friends and fellow westerners to "decide the balance of forces halfway across the world" one way over another, its just that the decision im endorsing is for the continued control of hamas over the gaza strip (among realistic near term outcomes). I think cultivating a credulous attitude towards overseas "resistance" and "national liberation" efforts is generally pretty dangerous; smth like it is, for instance, half the reason left-of-centre americans were gotten almost universally on board with us support for the maidan coup in 2014 and the disastrous ongoing war in ukraine, and american state propaganda organs both official and informal are putting considerable effort into hoodwinking many americans into believing the plo somehow better aligns with the palestinian national will than hamas

I also do not specifically think outsiders have an obligation to defer uncritically to palestinians on all aspects of the current conflict. Surveys indicate extremely high disbelief among palestinians, for example, in hamas war crimes in the course of the conflict. I think automatically deferring to that popular consensus would be outright intellectually dishonest

But you do not need that kind of deference to see that the plo is a treacherous, dangerous, and illegitimate authority in palestine; the evidence for this is abundant and public. They are to palestine what the bantustan dictatorships were to south africa. And no disagreement, even correct and justified disagreement, with palestinian consensus present past or future on tactics, strategy, or goals entitles outsiders to override palestinian democracy and dictate the leadership of gaza and the west bank like vassal states, which is what the propaganda i was complaining about from the grey lady is promoting

[immaculatasknight]

Made in Canada meat grinder

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

It should come as no surprise that Ukraine's largest arms dealer profiting off of the proxy war is also apparently one of the key figures responsible for the bloody false flag and fascist coup that started this whole mess in the first place Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/antiwar/ukraines-top-gun-runner-outed-as-responsible-for-2014-maidan-massacre

[ohsalome]

— Timothy Snyder, "The Road to Unfreedom"

[mariacallous]

While Russia has made a slew of outlandish assertions about Ukraine, including that the country is led by a Nazi regime, few Russian narratives have entrenched themselves more thoroughly in the Western far right and far left than that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was illegitimately removed from office in a Western-backed coup in February 2014. This claim has been a key element of Russian propaganda, echoed in the United States by such public figures as independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., filmmaker Oliver Stone, and Cato Institute defense expert Ted Galen Carpenter.

The idea that Yanukovych’s removal was illegitimate is easily refuted: After Yanukovych abandoned his office by fleeing from Ukraine to Russia, he was stripped of the presidency by a constitutional majority in parliament. Even Russia joined the rest of the world in recognizing the new Ukrainian government a few months later.

But the truth underlying the events of February 2014 is far more interesting: The preponderance of evidence suggests that it was Moscow itself that triggered Yanukovych’s departure in order to launch a pre-arranged Plan B—the invasion of Crimea and an engineered “uprising” in eastern Ukraine—after Moscow’s Plan A—a new treaty with a pliant government in Kyiv that placed it under Russia’s de facto control—was about to fail. Indeed, the timeline shows that preparations for Plan B were well underway before Yanukovych’s removal from office. All this, in turn, demonstrates that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans for Ukraine were far more predatory all along than merely preventing the country’s drift toward NATO, as many of Russia’s Western apologists contend.

The Maidan mass protests—which lasted from November 2013 to February 2014 in Kyiv and many other cities across Ukraine—erupted when Yanukovych pivoted from a wide-ranging association agreement with the European Union to a similar one with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s move toward closer relations with the EU was the trigger for Putin’s Plan A: the transfer of Ukraine to the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. To stop Yanukovych’s deal with Europe, Moscow pressured Kyiv with trade sanctions, including an embargo of key Ukrainian exports to Russia. In return for joining Russia’s economic bloc, Moscow offered Kyiv an emergency $3 billion loan to shore up a budget drained of resources by Yanukovych’s corruption. At the same time, Russia pressured him to violently crush the Maidan, suppress the pro-Western opposition, and thereby alienate him from the West. Toward this end, officials from the Russian security services and Putin aide Vladislav Surkov were frequent visitors in Kyiv.

Yanukovych, who had never established an absolute autocracy on the Russian model, resisted an all-out crackdown against the hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful protesters throughout western and central Ukraine. As his final actions as president would show, he also retained the hope of being able to balance Russian influence with continued relations with the West. It was to prevent that outcome that Moscow triggered his departure.

In all, more than 100 civilians and 13 police and security service operatives would die during the Maidan. Yet while the security services brutally attacked protesters all throughout the Maidan, the main deadly violence only occurred between Feb. 18 and Feb. 20, 2014—precisely the time when negotiations between the government and opposition over a political compromise were gaining traction. Brokered by the foreign ministers of Poland, France, and Germany—Radoslaw Sikorski, Laurent Fabius, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, respectively—with Putin envoy Vladimir Lukin present as well, negotiations had begun to gain momentum on Feb. 17. Over the next three days, 78 protesters and 11 police were killed.

This level of violence shocked and angered Ukrainian society. In response to mounting public fury and the threat of extensive Western sanctions, Yanukovych intensified negotiations on a compromise and moved to release detained and imprisoned protesters. For Putin, however, any path of negotiated compromise was a clear setback to his Plan A, which would have locked Yanukovych and his government into complete dependency on Moscow.

As deadly violence engulfed the streets of Kyiv, Yanukovych signaled his agreement to a broad government of national unity. After the opposition turned down the top post of prime minister, Yanukovych indicated that he would nominate Serhiy Tihipko, the billionaire former head of Ukraine’s central bank. For the Russians, Tihipko was a red flag: He had denounced politicians who were willing to “sacrifice Ukraine’s territorial integrity for electoral votes,” was a proponent of Ukraine’s integration with the EU, and opposed making Russian the second state language.

Coupled with the potential transfer of key ministries into the hands of the opposition and new elections by year’s end, Yanukovych’s willingness to compromise set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, whose representative, Lukin, withheld his signature from the agreement. Once before, during the 2004 Orange Revolution, Yanukovych had disappointed Putin by refusing to use brute force to stay in power after falsified presidential elections. When Yanukovych eventually returned to power by legal means in 2010, he further angered Russia with negotiations toward a free trade agreement with the EU, which he only aborted after extensive Russian economic sanctions and embargoes on Ukrainian exports. To Putin, Yanukovych was again vacillating and refusing to show an iron hand.

On the morning of Feb. 20, after two days of violence had failed to crush the Maidan and with Yanukovych on the verge of signing a compromise agreement with the opposition, the Kremlin pivoted. A delegation of Russian Federal Security Service officials, including Sergei Beseda, head of the Fifth Service in charge of international operations, arrived in Kyiv—the third such visit since the Maidan began. Officially there to “protect Russian diplomatic facilities,” Beseda’s real mission was to advise hardliners inside Yanukovych’s leadership team, block a compromise, and, failing that, set in motion a Plan B—Russia’s ambitious plot to splinter Ukraine.

As the EU envoys met with Yanukovych and opposition leaders to finalize the deal—and as Yanukovych did not agree to a request by Beseda to meet—the hardliners in the government escalated, presumably under Moscow’s instructions. Then-Ukrainian Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko and Security Service chief Oleksandr Yakimenko unleashed a brutal attack on the protesters in an apparent attempt to unravel the deal that that was in the process of being struck.

Indeed, Feb. 20 proved to be the bloodiest day, with police snipers shooting 48 protesters.

Zakharchenko’s role in the mayhem is well established, as are his close relations with Russia’s security services, who advised him tactics and had equipped his ministry with grenades, tear gas, and other crowd control munitions purchased for $100,000. His role as a trusted Russian asset was confirmed after his escape to Moscow, when he became senior advisor to Rostec, Russia’s state company in charge of sensitive advanced technologies, including for the military. He also ran a Russian fund that rewarded traitors from Ukraine’s security forces. Yakimenko, who had spent a decade as an officer in Russia’s armed forces and whose murky past suggested links to Russian security services, deployed snipers from the Ukrainian Security Service’s Alpha special forces unit. Ukrainian prosecutors would later allege that Yakimenko subsequently supplied pro-Russian insurgents in Ukraine with weapons as part of Putin’s effort to dismember Ukraine.

In the aftermath of the mass killings, Yanukovych signed the Agreement on the Stabilization of the Political Crisis in Ukraine on Feb. 21. But the bloodshed had changed the political calculus. Denounced by the opposition and abandoned by many of his allies in parliament, calls for Yanukovych to step down gained momentum. Yet even for the most radical elements in Ukraine’s opposition, there was no way to force him out, especially with the continued presence of thousands of militia and security forces that remained under the command of officials closely aligned with Russia. Hundreds of armed pro-Yanukovych vigilantes had also arrived from the Donbas.

Yet surprisingly, as the compromise was being ratified, this massive security infrastructure suddenly vanished. The Berkut riot police and the Alpha group exited the government quarter, where most of the protests were taking place, along with hundreds of other police. Sikorski described the sudden and systematic withdrawal as “astonishing,” noting it was not part of the agreement. This dramatic U-turn could not have happened in such rapid and orderly fashion had it occurred through internal divisions in the security services—the usual last and necessary step in the collapse of a regime. Nor were there any prior signs of security service defections to the opposition in Kyiv. The sudden stand-down can only be explained as a top-down decision by Russia’s fifth column in the security services leadership. The justification for abandoning Yanukovych overnight was soon afterward intimated by Putin: On March 4, 2014, he said that by compromising with the opposition, “Yanukovych had in fact surrendered all his power.”

Absent the Kremlin’s support, amid the disappearance of Yanukovych’s security services in the government quarter, and with a majority for a new coalition emerging in parliament, the isolated Yanukovych sought desperately to maintain his leverage and relevance. Hoping, perhaps, to maintain some semblance of power, he switched to Russia’s Plan B—the splintering of Ukraine. He traveled to Kharkiv later that day to lead a conference of regional government leaders from southern and eastern Ukraine, but was rebuffed by leaders from his own Party of Regions. Rather than attending an ineffectual rump conference, Yanukovych escaped on the night of Feb. 21 to Crimea, where Russia’s takeover of the peninsula was already underway.

It was in only in the aftermath of Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv and disappearance from Kharkiv that Ukraine’s Rada met on Feb. 22, and by a constitutional majority stripped him of office. On Feb. 28, Yanukovych finally resurfaced in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where he gave a press conference denouncing his removal from office. It was to be his last major public event. He then disappeared from the media and Russian propaganda, which soon switched to trumpeting the “Russian Spring”—the supposed uprising in Ukraine’s south and east, largely orchestrated by Russian assets. Plan B was now in full effect.

In the end, Russia’s efforts failed in Odesa, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mykolaiv. But it succeeded in much of the Donbas and led to Russia’s rapid annexation of Crimea. On March 26, 2014, the Russian Defense Ministry celebrated the annexation of Crimea by minting a medal. The medal, which initially appeared on a Defense Ministry website but was later removed, bears the date of the start of the “return of Crimea”: Feb. 20, 2014. It is highly unlikely that this dating of the launch of Russia’s operation to dismember Ukraine—two full days before the supposed “coup” that removed Yanukovych—is a mistake.

The Maidan mass protests and civic action were a landmark event in Ukraine’s history. The Maidan, without question, blocked Putin’s Plan A—Ukraine’s march, as a whole, into Russia’s orbit. The Maidan also forced Yanukovych to agree to new elections, compelled him to appoint a caretaker coalition government, and helped Ukraine’s democratic institutions endure. But it is no less true that it was precisely for this reason that, as an agreement was about to be struck in the final days of the Maidan, Russia rapidly shifted to its prepared Plan B, withdrew support from Yanukovych, and launched its operation to partition Ukraine.

A clear understanding of Putin’s actions and motives during this critical period in Ukraine’s history is not just a matter of setting the record straight. It is crucial in understanding Putin’s longstanding aims, which went far beyond blocking Ukraine’s accession to NATO or the EU. By early 2014, his ultimate aim was already the dismemberment of Ukraine and the eventual incorporation of many of its territories into Russia. Putin never abandoned his grandiose revisionist aims, which resurfaced in the large-scale invasion Russia launched on Feb. 22, 2022, eight years to the day that Yanukovych was removed from office.

[communist-ojou-sama]

speaking of fascists I'm wondering how people are going to continue to justify the notion that the maidan regime isn't fascist once zaluzhniy coups zelensky and you get more of the hard-nosed, antisemitic ukranian ethnonationalism