Now, your claim is that Russia started the civil war as a pretext to invade and that the separatists are just Russian proxies. On the other hand, the Russian narrative would claim the same thing about the Euromaidan coup.
I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?
It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR. Of course there’s enormous pushback when politicians in power try to strengthen ties with Putin (and cut ties to EU countries), it would be really weird if there weren’t. The same would happen in Poland and many other Eastern European countries who were staunchly anti Putin long before the invasion, even though they don’t have an immediate threat from a shared border with Russia.
In my opinion, if people really cared so much about the Ukrainian people, then we should’ve been providing them with foreign aid for domestic development, long before any of this started.
Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent, so there just wasn’t any political pressure to do something.
As far as I can see, it’s just about US/Ukrainian state interests vs Russian state interests
Western countries just stood by in the first days and did nothing, as they had no hopes for Ukraine surviving for more than a few days. If the Ukrainian public weren’t willing to push back, they would’ve had no chance to stop the Russian advances and their government would’ve collapsed in days, just as both Russia and the West predicted.
It would be a better use of funds to accept territorial concessions
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fled from the occupied territories, and accepting that they will never get their relatives and homes back will be unthinkable for a large part of them, especially after the reports of forced relocations from occupied regions into Russia (including thousands of children) and all the suffering that Putin has brought upon Ukrainians. Maybe they will reach the point of making concessions if they see no hope of retaking the territory. Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.
I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?
No, obviously, in the same way it would be ridiculous to claim that every single person who supports separatism is a secret agent for Russia. The claim in both cases is that the movement received foreign support, allowing it to convince more ordinary people to support it than they would have otherwise.
It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR.
Russia is not the USSR. And most people experienced a decline in quality of life, across every objective metric, following its collapse.
It’s also well known that many people in eastern Ukraine have ethnic, cultural, and family ties to Russia, so it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of them wanted to have more favorable relations with them. This goes back to when the Soviets transferred the territory to Ukraine in the first place.
Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Americans don’t actually care about Ukrainians, most people barely knew they existed and couldn’t find the country on the map. The only reason people started caring is because they started being relevant to state interests.
Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.
No it won’t. The Ukrainian people do not have the option to vote on whether or not to accept territorial concessions, because they don’t have a democracy, and even what pretense of democracy they used to have has been suspended due to the war. The Ukrainian state may get to decide that, but that is not the same as the Ukrainian people. You don’t seem to be separating the state’s interests from the people’s interests at all.
