DISINFO: US staged coup in Ukraine to provoke Russia and impose sanctions
SUMMARY
The Americans staged a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 in order to provoke Russia into taking steps that would be later used as a pretext for imposing sanctions on it.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring disinformation narrative from pro-Kremlin outlets justifying Russia’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and the ensuing war in Donbas.
The demonstrations which began in Kyiv in November 2013 – called "Maidan", or "Euromaidan" – were a result of the Ukrainian people's frustration with former President Yanukovych's last-minute U-turn when, after seven years of negotiation, he refused to sign the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, choosing instead to accept a $15 billion economic bailout to Russia.
Russia is the party responsible for the deterioration of Ukrainian-Russian relations. Since 2014, Russia has waged large-scale armed aggression against Ukraine and is also responsible for the outbreak of the conflict in 2014, after having illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula and engineered the creation of rebel militias in Donetsk, Luhansk and other places, with its army actively participating in military clashes.
The European Union does not recognise and continues to strongly condemn this violation of international law. It has imposed restrictive measures against the Russian Federation for the invasion.
Ukraine closely cooperates with the United States, the EU and NATO, but this does not mean that the US, or what pro-Kremlin media usually call “the collective West”, is pushing Kyiv into direct confrontation against Moscow. Ukraine’s Western partners are helping Ukraine stop the bloodshed in Donbas and alleviate the suffering of civilians in the war zone.
Read a similar case and more disinformation narratives alleging that Crimea joined Russia as a result of a popular referendum.