(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Was Russia the aggressor in Ukraine, while the West supported Ukraine's freedom struggle? Or is it the West that was the aggressor, while Russia supported Ukraine's elected government? To be able to answer these questions, we must look at what happened during Maidan-demonstrations and especially during the violent developments with many deaths in February 2014. The person who has done the most thorough academic work on these events is Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian professor at the University of Ottawa. He has now developed several academic articles into a book, which not least examines the massacre in which dozens of protesters and also police were killed on February 20, 2014.
The Maidan demonstrations were held in the West and in Kyiv, and were, in short, a rebellion of the minority against the majority.
From late autumn 2013, pro-EU groups mobilized for large demonstrations against President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv and in several cities in western Ukraine. But Yanukovych was from Donbass in eastern Ukraine and had his support in the east. If you look at the support of the presidential candidates in the 2010 election, Yulia Tymoshenko completely dominant in Western Ukraine, while Yanukovych was completely dominant in the populous Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine was politically divided, and Yanukovych won because of Eastern Ukraine's large population. The Maidan demonstrations were held in the West and in Kyiv and was, in short, a minority's rebellion against the majority. Yanukovych wanted a neutral Ukraine with cooperation with both Russia and the EU, while Tymoshenko sought to join the EU and had little interest in Russia.
The day of the massacre
In January–February 2014, the Maidan demonstrations became increasingly violent, with almost military clashes between police and militarily trained groups from the far-right. Svoboda and the ultranationalist party Right Sector. There were groups that identified with the Western Ukrainian military uprising during World War II. This uprising was for a time under Nazi command, and they killed 100 Poles, Jews and Russians. This belongs to one of the darkest chapters in European history.
Policemen and protesters were shot by the same bullets.
The confrontation in February 2014 culminated in the massacre on demonstrators and in some cases also on police officers on February 20. The president was blamed for the killings, and he was forced to flee. On the day of the massacre, the demonstrators, many with shields for protection, slowly moved towards the police forces, who were stationed further up the street. Fire was opened, and 49 demonstrators were killed and 172 were injured, 4 police officers were killed, and dozens were injured. There were many witnesses, and several films show demonstrators being shot. You can see how demonstrators seek protection behind a wall and a tree. They think the fire is coming from the front, from the police, but they are killed by bullets from behind, from Hotel Ukraine and from a couple of other buildings behind the demonstrators. Police officers and demonstrators were shot by the same bullets. Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet also said this in a recorded conversation with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. There are about a hundred witnesses who can tell from which windows or from which floor of Hotel Ukraina and several buildings the snipers fired from. These buildings were occupied and controlled by Svoboda and Right Sector.
Snipers
Katchanovski has examined almost every bullet. Who was hit, and from which building the snipers shot, with references to witnesses and videos referring to each incident. Of these snipers, seven from Georgia have reportedly confirmed their role, and they claimed to have received instructions from a former sniper from the US Army, who led their team. Some of them have been interviewed in documentaries. There were also supposed to be snipers from the Baltic states and from Ukraine. Some in the West have questioned the credibility of this information, but using foreign snipers is almost standard procedure. It is difficult to shoot your own people, and there is no doubt that snipers were used from buildings controlled by the right-wing radicals Svoboda and Right Sector.
The West and the coup d'état
In an audiotaped conversation two weeks before the bloody events of February 20, the US Secretary of State in the State Department said, Victoria Nuland, a clear message to her ambassador in Kyiv, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, about which of the three leaders of the Maidan demonstrations should become prime minister, whom he should talk to, and which of the three could not enter the government. She said that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should become prime minister, since Svoboda leader Oleh Tjahnybok would not be a possible candidate (he would appear too right-wing), and the later mayor Vitali Klitschko had family problems. However, she said that Yatsenyuk had to talk to the other two four times a week. The new government received four ministers from the far-right Svoboda.
The question we must ask is the following: Why couldn't those who organized the coup d'état wait a year until there were presidential elections? If they were not happy with the president, why did they necessarily have to overthrow him by mobilizing for mass demonstrations? Why wouldn't they accept a democratically elected president? Or was it that they had to remove him now, since they couldn't count on winning the 2015 elections?
The incident was like Stratfor's former boss, George friedman, said: “The most blatant coup d’état in history.” It was orchestrated by the Americans and a far-right elite in western Ukraine. The media accused the police of shooting and killing dozens of protesters—but the police could hardly have fired without the president’s order, it was said. The elected president, Yanukovych, was forced to flee for his life. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Yanukovych and said it was time “to stop the shooting and leave the country.” Biden said that “Yanukovych had lost the trust of the Ukrainian people.” “Control of the government was temporarily handed over to a young patriot named Arseniy Yatsenyuk,” Biden wrote (from Biden’s Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope.
In eastern Ukraine, where Viktor Yanukovych had his support, demonstrations began against the Western Ukrainian coup regime. But these demonstrations were suppressed, as in Odessa and Kharkov, but not in Donbass and Crimea. As Jacques Baud writes in his book Operation Z (2022), many of the regular Ukrainian forces deserted to the leadership in Crimea and in Donbass, in Donetsk and Lugansk. Legally, the later governments must be seen as a continuation of Yanukovych's temporary regime in Ukraine, while the coup regime, after thousands of regular forces had deserted, applied paramilitary right-wing extremists from Aidar, Right Sector and from the Svoboda-supported Azov Battalion, to continue the war against the regimes loyal to the president in Donetsk and Lugansk.
That could mean that it was Vests, not Russia, which was the aggressor. While Russia supported the elected government in Ukraine, far-right groups from Western Ukraine, together with Western interests, overthrew this government and conquered most of the country. Who is the aggressor seems to boil down to who was guilty of the violent events of February #2014. It boils down to who shot protesters and police on February 20. Ivan Katchanovski has done an impressive job of investigating all these shots. We can now say with certainty that both protesters and police were mainly shot by snipers firing from buildings under the control of the far-right Right Sector and Svoboda. It was a coup, and it becomes harder to deny that the Russian attack was a response to this coup d'état.
