Viktor Yanukovych

One could, in a different sense, look at the discrete decisions made in 2022, but you can also look at 2014 as a kind of accident on par with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

And there, I think the explanation, if one were to write the history in this way, would begin with Yanukovych's decision to flee Ukraine February 21st or 22nd, 2014, which I don't know if that was really expected in Russia.

I don't think it was expected in Ukraine, and I don't think it was expected in Europe or the United States, but that's the random event of one person acting out of fear, desperation, that sets in motion all of these other bigger events.

And so there, I think, the First World War can be useful, or we could take paradigms from that to try to think about this stretch of history from 2014. to the present but what i would want to communicate more than anything to you and and to the audience tomorrow is just the extreme complexity of this and the extreme difficulty i think that probably if you think of christopher clark's wonderful book the sleepwalkers about world war one he goes through all the archives and he's able to really see how decision making happened i'm not sure we're going to ever get there with the kremlin i wouldn't be very confident about that so we may for the next hundred years or people may for the next hundred years have to wrestle with this problem that this is a world-changing event of deep deep profound significance.

You know, this is Putin's action and there's a whole structure of understanding and reasoning behind that action and craziness as well, I would say.

But there's a lot of randomness at work here also.

And so I mentioned before the figure of Yanukovych fleeing Ukraine.

in late February of 2014 as a somewhat random development.

I had a whole podcast about the Mueller investigation and people with ties to Russia in the first, uh, Trump era.

And if we go all the way back to, you know, early 2016, mid-2016, when the Republicans were putting together their party platform, it included softening the language about giving Ukraine lethal weapons, talked about lifting sanctions on certain Russian oligarchs, and it talked about a peace plan with Ukraine floated by Manafort, who used to work for a guy named Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin-backed separatist in Ukraine.

And the idea was to give the Donbas region, the eastern region, to Russia and put Yanukovych back in charge of it, who had fled to Moscow after he was ousted, right? And this is all before Zelensky was elected.

Uh, and then, you know, this was all in response to the initial attack on Ukraine by Russia in 2014, with which there were, there were multiple sanctions slapped on Russia by the Obama administration.

But they didn't have the capacity to resist.

And then in twenty fourteen, if you look at it again as, uh, scholars who have studied the subject like you or I, you, uh, uh, you and I, we know very well that Yanukovych was, uh, um, prepared to compromise, and he had given a pledge that, you know, that he would go for a new election and put this to vote whether Ukrainian people, Ukrainian nation wants to join NATO.

And the European powers were part of that deal.

Russia brokered that deal between, uh, Yanukovych and the, uh, European powers.

And what happened the next day? The whole thing exploded into violence.

It was an orchestrated violence because the machinery was already created and ready there and fueled there with Western, lavish Western financial assistance.

And they created provocations and all that and bloody violence in the streets.

And in the next two days, Yanukovych fled Ukraine, and they take over.

Uh, it went against the majority will of Ukrainians, was not supported by the Constitution," you know, all of these things.

But, but still, it has to be a democratic revolution, and we supported, uh, those people resisting the regime of Yanukovych.

But once he was toppled, you had all these people in the east, primarily Donbas, who resisted, uh, uh, this, uh, post-coup government because it was also, well, extremely, uh, ethno-nationalist and, well, the first steps were essentially banning the Russian language to a large extent.

And when, so when then, then they started to resist, you know, the language can't give them legitimacy, so they were all Russian proxies, and they were, you know, uh, you know, terrorists.