DISINFO: The US spent five billion dollars to overthrow Viktor Yanukovych
SUMMARY
In 2014, the USA overthrew the legally elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. {The US] spent five billion dollars on this via the CIA, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. The US installed a puppet government that had been selected by the neoconservatives in the White House, including Victoria Nuland, by telephone, two months earlier.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Ukraine's Euromaidan protests, depicting the 2013-14 revolution as a coup d'état and laying responsibility for the ensuing Russian aggression on the West.
There was no coup d’état in Kyiv in 2014. The spontaneous onset of the Euromaidan protests was not provoked externally, rather, it was a reaction from several segments of the Ukrainian population to former President Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013, after pressure from Russia.
The claim that the US spent $5 billion to overthrow Viktor Yanukovych is misleading. The Maidan protests were primarily a reaction by Ukrainian civil society to the government's rejection of the EU Association Agreement.
This claim is linked to a statement by former US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland in late 2013. Then she said that the United States has invested $5 billion in more than 20 years to develop democratic processes and reforms in Ukraine. The diplomat said that this is the total amount of assistance that Washington has allocated to Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Money was allocated for fair elections, to fight corruption and to develop the energy sector. Victoria Nuland later frequently repeated these theses, including in various interviews.
Read similar disinformation narratives alleging that The West funded the Ukrainian coup with $5 billion, the US organised a coup in Ukraine and European countries submissively supported it and that EU and US interference and coup in Ukraine caused the armed conflict in Donbas.