Did Russia Invade Ukraine in 2014 in Response to a US Coup?

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Executive Summary

Western establishment media has created a story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that leaves out the US coup.
What is the real story?

Introduction

There is a story produced by the US defense establishment and US State Department that places the entirety of the 2014 invasion onto unprovoked Russian aggression. The real story is that the US engaged in a coup in Ukraine that it hid as an internal revolution. This is an important topic to understand the 2022 invasion and how the US controls how international events are covered.

The Official US Sanctioned Story

VOX is an establishment outlet that I use to find out the official US sanctioned story on any foreign event. Their articles are well written, and their videos up on YouTube are also very good with high production quality.

This video looks very educational — but the US DOD may have as well produced it. The US bombing of Syria and support for ISIS and annexation and occupation of 1/3 of Syria is entirely left out of the video.

VOX only covers the history selectively and excludes any part of the story that the US government does not want to be known.

Here is the VOX explanation of the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

This all began as an internal Ukrainian crisis in November 2013, when President Viktor Yanukovych rejected a deal for greater integration with the European Union (here’s why this was such a big deal), sparking mass protests, which Yanukovych attempted to put down violently. Russia backed Yanukovych in the crisis, while the US and Europe supported the protesters. – VOX

This is the first lie of the article. This was presented by the US as a protest that was entirely authentic from within Ukraine, but it was instigated by the US. The same thing was done in the “Arab Spring,” which attempted to replace countries’ leadership with leaders compliant to the US.

This topic will be addressed further in the article you are presently reading in more detail.

Salvaging Lost Influence?

Since then, several big things have happened. In February, anti-government protests toppled the government and ran Yanukovych out of the country. Russia, trying to salvage its lost influence in Ukraine, invaded and annexed Crimea the next month. In April, pro-Russia separatist rebels began seizing territory in eastern Ukraine. The rebels shot down Malaysian Airlines flight 17 on July 17, killing 298 people, probably accidentally. Fighting between the rebels and the Ukrainian military intensified, the rebels started losing, and, in August, the Russian army overtly invaded eastern Ukraine to support the rebels. This has all brought the relationship between Russia and the West to its lowest point since the Cold War. Sanctions are pushing the Russian economy to the brink of recession, and more than 2,500 Ukrainians have been killed. – VOX

This paragraph has many things going on, but VOX presents the Russian invasion as an attempt to counteract a popular uprising, but what VOX omits is that the uprising was US fomented.

Russian Domination of Ukraine?

A lot of this comes down to Ukraine’s centuries-long history of Russian domination. The country has been divided more or less evenly between Ukrainians who see Ukraine as part of Europe and those who see it as intrinsically linked to Russia. An internal political crisis over that disagreement may have been inevitable. Meanwhile, in Russia, Putin is pushing an imperial-revival, nationalist worldview that sees Ukraine as part of greater Russia — and as the victim of ever-encroaching Western hostility. – VOX

This paragraph misleads in many ways. Part of it is genuine, Ukraine is filled with groups that don’t get along, and it is a poorly constructed country that should probably be broken into smaller pieces. Ukraine is not functional as is, is highly corrupt, and is the poorest country in Europe. But the last part of the paragraph proposes something without evidence, that Putin is looking to bring back the Soviet Union, which I address as false in the article Did Putin Say He Wants to Reconstitute the Soviet Union?

Some Objectivity from VOX?

This is one of the few objective parts of the article where it acknowledges both sides of the debate over Crimea.

So should Crimea be part of Russia or Ukraine?
This is actually a legitimately difficult question. Yes, the way that Russia seized Crimea by force from Ukraine this March was hostile and extremely illegal — there is no doubt about this. But the more abstract question of whether Crimea is deep down Russian or Ukrainian is much less clear. There are three ways to think about this question, and they all contradict.

Legally, is Crimea part of Russia or Ukraine? Probably Ukraine

Crimea has technically been part of Ukraine since 1954, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev transferred it from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The reasons for this are esoteric and it didn’t actually do much since both “republics” were part of the Soviet Union. In 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, everyone expected Moscow to demand Crimea back. But it didn’t. A slight majority of Crimeans voted for independence from Russia, and when Crimea formally joined the newly independent Ukraine (but with special autonomy privileges), Russia promised to honor and respect this.

Historically, is Crimea part of Russia or Ukraine? Probably Russia

Most Crimeans are ethnically Russian, not Ukrainian. While Crimea has been changing hands between regional powers for centuries, for most of the last 200-plus years it has been part of Russia. The fact that everyone expected Russia to take it back when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 tells you a lot: the world often sees it as historically Russian as well. It was not shocking when, in February, some Crimeans held pro-Russia rallies.

Do Crimeans want to be part of Russia or Ukraine? It’s not clear

Since the crisis began, some Crimeans have been holding pro-Moscow rallies calling to rejoin Russia. In mid-February, a poll found that 41 percent of Crimeans wanted the region to become part of Russia. That’s an awful lot — but it’s still not a majority. Crimea’s March referendum on leaving Ukraine for Russia ostensibly garnered 97 percent support, but it occurred in a rush, without international monitors, and under Russian military occupation. A draft UN investigative report found that critics of secession within Crimea were detained and tortured in the days before the vote; it also found “many reports of vote-rigging.” Had the referendum been held in a transparent and legal manner, it’s not clear which way the vote would have gone. – VOX

That large part of the quote is not accurate.

Crimeans, by large margin, support being part of Russia and not Ukraine. This is explained in the following quotation.

Crimeans, who mostly speak Russian, voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian Federation. – Udumbara

However, VOX simply cannot cede this point.

It is also true that Russia has very much restricted speech in Crimea. Crimea has suffered economically because Ukrainians have significantly curtailed their travel to the area after it became part of Russia.

The Orange Revolution

You may have heard the phrase “Orange Revolution”: this refers to the mass protests in 2004, after Yanukovych won a presidential election under widespread suspicion of fraud. The protests succeeded in blocking him from taking office, but he ran again in 2010 and appeared to win legitimately. – VOX

How did Yanukovych only win under widespread suspicions of fraud — but then win legitimately six years later? This sounds like he was accused of fraud in order to keep him from assuming the presidency. And who had these widespread suspicions of fraud — was that the US State Department? VOX has this pattern of stating things that are a consensus that is only the view of the US and its allies.

Cracking Down on Protests

Yanukovych alienated many Ukrainians, including his supporters, with his mishandling of the economy and especially his crackdowns on the Euromaidan protests. While lots of Ukrainians were happy to see him go, others saw his ouster as illegitimate and undemocratic. This is particularly true in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east and in the heavily Russian region of Crimea. – VOX

This again uses the unfounded claim that the protests were entirely authentic to Ukraine and were not rigged by the US, which is false. If protests are being remotely instigated by the US, Yanukovych had cause to put down the protests. Furthermore, there is evidence that the US-instigated this violence going so far as to hire snipers. The US was involved in a false flag essentially. This is explained in the following quotation.

The American scholar Gordon M. Hahn has specialized in studying the evidence regarding whom the actual snipers were who committed the murders, but he focuses only on domestic Ukrainian snipers and ignores the foreign ones, who had been hired by the U.S. regime indirectly through Georgian, Lithuanian and other anti-Russian CIA assets (such as via Mikheil Saakashvili, the ousted President of Georgia whom the U.S. regime subsequently selected to become the Governor of the Odessa region of Ukraine).

“Yet another pro-Maidan sniper, Ivan Bubenchik, emerged to acknowledge that he shot and killed Berkut [the Government’s police who were protecting Government buildings] before any protesters were shot that day [February 20th]. In a print interview, Bubenchik previews his admission in Vladimir Tikhii’s documentary film, Brantsy, that he shot ahd killed two Berkut commanders in the early morning hours of February 20 on the Maidan. … Bubenchik claims that [on February 20] the Yanukovich regime started the fire in the Trade Union House — where his and many other EuroMaidan fighters lived during the revolt — prompting the Maidan’s next reaction. As noted above, however, pro-Maidan neofascists have revealed that the Right Sector started that fire. … Analysis of the snipers’ massacre shows that the Maidan protesters initiated almost all — at least six out of a possible eight — of the pivotal escalatory moments of violence and/or coercion. … The 30 November 2013 nighttime assault on the Maidan demonstrators is the only clear exception from a conclusive pattern of escalating revolutionary violence led by the Maidan’s relatively small but highly motivated and well-organized neofascist element.”

The massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It [his investigation] found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas.” – Modern Diplomacy

Once again, VOX can only provide one perspective, which is the perspective of the US government. Nearly every item that provides a fuller picture of the story is left out by VOX in a type of deliberate lying through omission.

The Problem with Ukraine as a Country

The east and west of Ukraine disagree so fundamentally about what sort of country they want to have, about what it means to be Ukrainian, that a big, internal political battle may have been quite likely. For example, the EU trade deal that sparked all this only had about 43 percent popular support, mostly in the west; another 31 percent of Ukrainians said they wanted a trade deal with the Russia-led Customs Union instead. When Yanukovych rejected the EU deal, many western Ukrainians saw it as a betrayal, but eastern Ukrainians may have regarded a different decision the same way.

Ukraine, according to political scientist Leonid Peisakhin, “has never been and is not yet a coherent national unit with a common narrative or a set of more or less commonly shared political aspirations.”

Some Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the country’s east and south, particularly in Crimea, have not quite reconciled themselves to being citizens of Ukraine over Russia. Ideas that their region should be absorbed into Russia are very much alive.

How did Ukraine get so divided?
You have to remember that Ukraine’s present-day borders are very new and that its historical ties to Russia are very old. So the distinction between Ukraine and Russia is a bit blurrier than the distinction between, say, France and Germany. – VOX

As I said, this is a poorly constructed country.

That line started blurring in the 1700s, when Russian leader Catherine the Great began a process of “Russifying” Ukraine — making it Russian — that continued right up through the 1950s. This meant shipping in ethnic Russians, imposing laws that required schools to teach the Russian rather than Ukrainian language, and stationing lots of Russian troops in the area. At some points in the 1800s, the Ukrainian language was banned outright.

In the 1930s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin caused a famine in Ukraine that killed several million Ukrainians, mostly in the east. He then repopulated the area with ethnic Russians. In the 1940s, Stalin forcibly relocated the ethnic Tatars who dominated Crimea’s population, replacing them with Russians as well. (Some of those Tatars, who are Muslim and ethnically Turkic, have since moved back; they are a minority in Crimea and have expressed fear about returning to Russian rule.)

For most of this process, Russia focused overwhelmingly on the east, which has vast coal, iron, and some of the most fertile farmland on earth. Ukraine’s linguistic dividing line matches up almost perfectly with the line between its farmland in the east and forestland in the west.

The effect of all this history is that lots of Ukrainians, very understandably, despise Russia and want nothing to do with it. But there’s also a significant proportion of Ukrainians whose families have substantial connections to Russia, who may remember the Soviet era fondly, and do not want to break away quite so fully as does the west. This national identity crisis has been centuries in the making, and it is a big issue today. – VOX

Now that we have seen the official story supported by the US, along with some fascinating history of the region, let us look at some views that are not controlled by the US government.

Acknowledging the Coup of 2013.

The coup of 2013 was left out of the VOX article, and this is explained in the following quotation.

Incontrovertible proofs will be presented here not only that it was a coup, but that this coup was organized by the U.S. Government — that the U.S. Government initiated the ‘new Cold War’; Russia’s Government reacted to America’s aggression, which aims to place nuclear missiles in Ukraine, less than ten minutes flight-time from Moscow. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America had reason to fear Soviet nuclear missiles 103 miles from America’s border. But, after America’s Ukrainian coup in 2014, Russia has reason to fear NATO nuclear missiles not just near, but on, Russia’s border. That would be catastrophic.

Clearly, Victoria Nuland, U.S. President Barack Obama’s central agent overseeing the coup, at least during the month of February 2014 when it climaxed, was crucial not only in overthrowing the existing Ukrainian Government, but in selecting and installing its rabidly anti-Russian replacement. – Modern Diplomacy

Victoria Neuland is now the undersecretary of the DOD and admitted that Ukraine has bioweapons labs. Her testimony is covered in the video below.

More Evidence for the Coup

The second landmark item of evidence that it had been a coup and nothing at all democratic or a ‘revolution’, was the 26 February 2014 phone-conversation between the EU’s Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton and her agent in Ukraine investigating whether the overthrow had been a revolution or instead a coup; he was Estonia’s Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet, and he told her that he found that it had been a coup, and that “somebody from the new coalition” had engineered it — but he didn’t know whom that “somebody” was.

he network behind this coup had actually started planning for the coup back in 2011. That’s when Eric Schmidt of Google, and Jared Cohen, also now of Google but still continuing though unofficially as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief person tasked to plan ‘popular movements’ to overthrow both Yanukovych in Ukraine, and Assad in Syria. – Modern Diplomacy

How Was Yanukovych Impeached?

The western establishment media does not want anyone to know how Yanukovych was impeached. This is explained in the following quotation.

To understand why the removal of President Yanukovych was unconstitutional, some facts about the Ukrainian Constitution must be considered.

The Ukrainian Constitution lists four circumstances in which an elected president may cease to exercise power before the end of their term: retirement; inability to exercise their powers for reasons of health; removal from office by the procedure of impeachment; and death.

The process of impeachment is laid down in Article 111, which requires the Ukrainian Parliament to create a special temporary investigation committee to formulate charges against the president, seek evidence to justify the charges, and come to conclusions about the president’s guilt.

Prior to a final vote of impeachment, this process also requires the nation’s Constitutional Court to review the case and certify that the procedure has been properly followed, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court to certify that the acts of which the president is accused are worthy of impeachment.

Finally, the removal of an elected president from power must be approved by at least three-quarters of the members of Parliament.

On Feb. 22, 2014, this process of impeachment was not followed at all. No investigation committee was formed, and no courts were involved in the removal of the president. Instead, a bill was rushed through Parliament to remove President Yanukovych from his office, although this was not even supported by three-quarters of members of Parliament. – Udumbara

If the removal of Yanukovych was authentic, why were the rules for impeachment not followed?

Here is what Putin said on the topic at the time.

On that occasion, Putin quibbled that this was an unconstitutional overthrow of a democratically elected president. He labelled it a “coup” and questioned the legitimacy of the process at his press conference on March 4, 2014.

“[Impeachment] has to involve the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the Rada (the unicameral parliament of Ukraine). This is a complicated and lengthy procedure. It was not carried out. Therefore, from a legal perspective this is an undisputed fact,” Putin said. – Udumbara

This was not just Putin that viewed this as a coup. The Russian population in Ukraine also took this view. This is explained in the following quotation.

Soon after a new government was established, it declared itself unable to control the popular reaction to that coup in the country’s east. The American government then conveniently accused Russia of destabilising Ukraine, thus aiming to turn Russia into a “pariah state.”

Ukraine has never been able to have a functional government since. – Udumbara

Why should any part of the country accept a US coup?

The Potential Outcome of US’s Actions in Ukraine

If America’s successful February 2014 overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government doesn’t soon produce a world-ending nuclear war (World War III), then there will be historical accounts of that overthrow, and the accounts are already increasingly trending and consolidating toward a historical consensus that it was a coup — that it was imposed by “somebody from the new coalition” — i.e., that the termination of the then-existing democratic (though like all its predecessors, corrupt) Ukrainian Government, wasn’t authentically a ‘revolution’ such as the U.S. Government has contended, and certainly wasn’t at all democratic, but was instead a coup (and a very bloody one, at that), and totally illegal (though backed by The West). – Modern Diplomacy

Conclusion

The story of the Russian invasion in 2014 leaves out the US meddling and coup of 2013. This allows the DOD and US State Department along with their compliant western media entities to make it seem as if the invasion of Ukraine was because Putin and Russia were attempting to suppress an authentic revolution that the US had nothing to do with.