This is fascinating. Thank you for sending me this. It doesn't change most of the attitudes and conclusions I've been stating in this thread; I would point to two excerpts from this article as reasons why:

It’s an overstatement to say, as some critics have charged, that Washington orchestrated the Maidan uprising. But there’s no doubt US officials backed and exploited it for their own ends.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s been embroiled in a mini–civil war since Maidan. After Putin moved to secure the Crimean naval base from NATO control, using the Russian military presence and a dubious referendum to illegally annex the majority-Russian region shortly after Yanukovych’s exit, pro-Russian separatists began mobilizing in the country’s east, first into protest, then into armed groups. After the interim government sent armed forces to put down the rebellion, Moscow sent its own troops in, and the entire region has been a deadly powder keg ever since.

Both of these seem like very accurate and evenhanded summaries to me. Things that have been said to me elsewhere in this thread -- that Yanukovych's removal was a Western coup, and that Ukraine's relationship with ethnic Russians in the east could be described as "pogroms" -- seem very inaccurate to me, and I would actually point to this article's summary of those situations as a pretty good description of what the honest truth is.

If you're sending me this to poke a hole in the "Ukraine good, Russia bad, protestors good, Yanukovych bad" narrative, then I support you in that endeavor. The real actual facts are important whether or not they support your or my ideology. I'm guessing that I'm getting such a high ratio of downvotes to responding messages because people assume I'm some kind of anti-Communist stooge... I assure you I am not an anti-left or universally-pro-US-government person.

It is super weird to me to see people who oppose the very real violence and imperialism that the US government engages in, who at the same time support violence and imperialism from Russia or China. From me in my point of view, as a person who's generally leftist and generally anti-US-imperialism, it makes no sense. That's why I want to have this long conversation about it and see if maybe there's something I'm missing, but nothing I've seen so far has made any inroads as far as convincing me that there is. But, that being said, this article is showing me some sides to the whole equation I wasn't aware of before. So, thank you.

Also... Mark Ames is still around and still doing journalism in Russia? How is that possible? Is this real life?