Oh, please. We have Victoria Nuland on audio in 2014 discussing who would lead and be in the next government of Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup, and the people the US wanted at the top and near the top of the resulting non-democratic government are EXACTLY who the US said we wanted.
Joe Biden’s son is offered huge bribes from Burisma to sit on their board. Not the son of the president of Ukraine, but the US vice-president Biden who was at the time in charge of Ukraine policy.
Joe Biden in 2018 bragged about being able to force Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who was investigating that same corrupt company Burisma where Joe’s son Hunter was paid $1,000,000/ year for a do nothing job.
2004 was similar but not so blatant. Which is why when Ukraine STILL wouldn’t reject Russia enough we went full coup in 2014.
I’m still not saying that Russia was justified in the invasion, but Russia was the 2nd highest trading partner with Ukraine trade pre-invasion. China was #1. Russia and China are economic partners. So Russia’s attitude that Ukraine is more in their sphere of influence than in the US sphere is completely justifiable.
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/ukr?compareExports0=comparisonOption3&depthSelector1=HS2Depth
Everything that I have read, and according to my Ukrainian friends and my EU friend who lives in Ukraine, the country is very divided between Russia and the EU. There is no majority of Ukrainians who want to join NATO — when you include the Donbas, which until two months ago, was still part of Ukraine. Thus the idea — pre-invasion — that Russia supported that Ukraine remain neutral was obviously the choice supported by the majority of Ukrainians.
It was only after the 2014 coup and the huge amount of weapons and training pumped into the country by the US — and very importantly the exclusion of the Donbas from polling on the issue — that Ukraine started looking majority favorably on NATO and the EU.
Sure, millions went and worked in the EU. My friend went the other direction. But millions more were doing work in or with Russia. There is no denying that Ukraine’s economy was far, far more tied to Russia than the EU, and the US has fuck-all to do with Ukraine, except for using them as cannon fodder to weaken Russia.
