I don’t think there is a copyright infringement repeating AI comments without attribution or fair use concerns. At least I haven’t seen anything addressing this.

“In contrast, Yanukovych fled to Russia and insisted he remained legal President of Ukraine while not needing to fulfill any of its constitutional duties. Which in addition to his prior conduct is a major reason why he lost the legal and diplomatic impasse in early 2014…” – Turtler

The problem with this statement is you’ve muddied the timeline. Yanukovych was still in Ukraine when the Rada voted to removed Yanukovych on Feb. 22. He only left for Russia after that vote.

“Which is why I have to second mkent’s confusion and exasperation over trying to make Yanukovych this kind of Donbas Mandela figure…” -Turtler

I find it hard to believe you don’t understand the issues in the illegal overthrow of a legitimately elected President of any country. Forget Yanukovych. Trying to rationalize the overthrow as somehow excusable because he was no longer popular is irrelevant. The constitution of any country, ours included, is the guiding document that must be observed by everyone. Without adhering to that document, the country becomes fractured and the result will ultimately lead to civil war– which in this case it did.

You linked to a BBC article that indicated Putin said he would accept the results of the election post Yanukovych’s removal.
That article is misleading.

Putin’s public stance, as expressed shortly before the election, was cautiously worded. On May 23, 2014, at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, he stated that Russia would “respect the outcome” of Ukraine’s presidential election and was prepared to work with whoever was elected. This came after months of tension following Yanukovych’s ouster, which Putin and Russian officials consistently labeled an “illegal coup” orchestrated by the West. His May 23 comment marked a shift from earlier ambiguity, where he had left open the possibility of questioning the election’s legitimacy, especially given ongoing unrest in eastern Ukraine driven by pro-Russian separatists.
However, Putin’s “respect” was qualified. He argued that the election was flawed under Ukraine’s current constitution, claiming Yanukovych remained the legitimate president because his removal didn’t follow constitutional impeachment procedures (e.g., requiring a Constitutional Court review and a three-fourths parliamentary majority, per the 1996 constitution Yanukovych had restored). Putin also suggested that a referendum and new constitution should have preceded the vote, and he expressed hope that Kyiv’s new leadership would halt military actions against separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk—regions where voting was disrupted due to pro-Russian sentiment.

On February 23, the Verkhovna Rada repealed a 2012 language law granting Russian regional status, intensifying fears of cultural suppression (though vetoed by Acting President Turchynov, the move fueled unrest).

“Grok is not and cannot be a substitute for actual research or independent analysis, any more than any other AI LLM can be. At best it is a research aid that should tell you what to look for so you can check to see if it exists. Otherwise it’s basically just the Narcissus Effect of looking at the reflection of your own queries spread out over clearspace sources. Which is why if you asked “Were the anti-Maidan movements in the Crimea and Donbas organically seeking armed separation or were they co-opted to do so by Russian spec ops?” and asked that a few times you’d probably get interesting (if sometimes contradictory and unreliable) results.” – Turtler

I agree that how you ask a question can influence the type of data the AI computer will respond with. I have done the research (we’ve been debating this for years at this point). I used Grok because I didn’t feel like spending the time to find my sources from several years ago.

I found the short synopsis and timeline Grok provided to be similar to my recollection. I added a few points that Grok had omitted, but you were free to dispute any of the dates and characterization of events if you found them to be incorrect. You didn’t, but just made a hand waving gesture to dismiss the synopsis.

If anything Grok’s comments were sympathetic to Ukraine– for example: “May 11, 2014: Illegitimate “referendums” claimed 89% (Donetsk) and 96% (Luhansk) support for independence, though turnout and legitimacy were dubious (no international recognition, heavy coercion reported).”

My point was that om and mkent have tried to minimize the effect the removal of Yanukovych had on fracturing an already divided country. Whether separatists in Donbas and Crimea would have eventually demanded more autonomy is speculation, but had the ultra-nationalist drivers of the Maidan revolution accepted the compromise agreement that would have resulted in Yanukovych’s early removal it’s likely none of the following events would have occurred.

They will not learn the lesson any other way. When they were in power, they did it to us, and when we were in power they appealed to our principles, and then when they got back into power they did it to us again. And each time our unilateral disarmament left them stronger and us weaker and made it harder for us to get back into power and redress what they did wrong.

Now they are going to learn the lesson: we had this fairness norm for a reason, and this is what it’s like for YOU when WE break it. We tried appealing to reason and fairness, they laughed and did what they wanted when they were able. We are teaching them to value the norm they refused to value before.

We are done unilaterally disarming. So yes, we’re making them say “Gulf of America” because they made us say their pronouns and renamed our buildings and monuments and mountains. It wasn’t Harris specifically who did this, but she very likely would have done something like it, and it was the people who supported Harris were the ones doing this to us, and now they are learning why the fairness norm was there.

When they are ready to give assurance that they will respect the norm when the pendulum swings again, we can all stop doing it, but not before. Or maybe they’ll refuse, and we’ll be fighting with the same weapons, but at least we’re not the ones who disarm every time. Either both sides do, or neither. We’re not chumps any more.

I’ll second that motion.
Anyway, I enjoyed the discussion at PL so thanks for the hat tip.

Turtler, obviously the western governments agree with you.

It’s not just Western Governments (and frankly I don’t think they have the same issues I have with the Ukrainian Constitution’s glaring flaws and blind spots – as shown by the lack of reform demanded for it or done to it since Euromaidan). Ultimately even the Kremlin dropped Yanukovych after the elections, even as the war was going on, Crimea was declared annexed, and the fighting in the East between Ukrainian loyalists on one side and the Donbas separatists and disguised Russian Federation forces (whether directly in the form of false flagged or unflagged spec ops or troops or indirectly in the form of trusted or at least trust-able dogs of war like Girkin and co) heated up.

No branch of the standing Ukrainian government escaped 2014 with a great deal of constitutional or legal legitimacy. But to their credit the Rada recognized this, which is why after declaring Yanukovych and his cabinet deposed due to their defacto abdication of their constitutional responsibilities, the Rada then transitioned into a caretaker government with continuity from the government that democratically elected them and Yanukovych’s executive branch back in 2010, and began expediting new elections with the plan to dissolve themselves and recreate a new government.

In contrast, Yanukovych fled to Russia and insisted he remained legal President of Ukraine while not needing to fulfill any of its constitutional duties. Which in addition to his prior conduct is a major reason why he lost the legal and diplomatic impasse in early 2014, to the point where the Russian Government and its Donbaschukuo vassals ultimately abandoned him.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27542057

Which is why I have to second mkent’s confusion and exasperation over trying to make Yanukovych this kind of Donbas Mandela figure whose removal led the existent anti-maidans to spontaneously (and with confusing amounts of militancy and Russian Federation exclusive military equipment they had not had before) decide to attack not just their traditional Maidanite enemies but also Ukrainian government and military forces that had tried to stay neutral (with the military in particular rarely deciding to leave its barracks up to this point). The number of those fighting for Yanukovych’s name or memory are basically nil, absolutely no separatist republic has extended an invitation for him to share power in their system, they rarely fight in his name, and not even the Russian government views him as a tenable proxy or client any more, which is why after the 2014 elections in Ukraine they generally dropped the pretense he was the legal President of Ukraine and even now they mostly dredge his memory up in order to wave a bloody shirt rather than as part of any programme to empower him.

His removal is clearly a watershed moment in Ukrainian politics, and he certainly represented a strain of politics in the Donbas that helped indicate where things would go, but even most of his proteges remained loyalist (at least in name), and the militant turn of the anti-maidans owes more to them being directly orchestrated by the Russian government and its “organs’.

What I don’t think Ukrainian supporters acknowledge is how angry eastern Ukrainians felt about the overthrow,

I echo mkent here. Most of those representing “Eastern Ukrainians” that remained in the Rada voted to remove him, and most of those that didn’t distanced themselves from him. Which is again why even among the separatist forces in the South and East (which we can see pretty clearly now were outside of Crimea an armed minority and ones that lost much of their luster early, especially in the East) they did not recognize his power. Even in Crimea where the “separatist”/Russian satellite government was at its most stable and intact (in large part because it was the pre-existing autonomous government after a purge of the loyalists) there was no “Hey Yanukovych, want to play Slavic Jiang/Chiang here?”

The anger of the people in the East and South had very little to do with Yanukovych himself, as by the time he fled Kyiv he had revealed himself to be not just a corrupt, brutal bully (as had been evident for years) but also a coward devoid of the ability to distribute patronage and with little of a loyalty base, even in the Donbas or Crimea.

He’s at best a leading indicator of where things went, but even at the time of his power most anti-maidanites fought loosely under his banner for their own purposes, and even among the likes of Berkut or other groups he directly controlled became more disillusioned with his as time went on.

the move to restrict the Russian language.

Which overwhelmingly post-dated the start of violent hostilities and in particular Putin’s Feb 22-23 decision to deploy spec ops to among other things “reunite” Crimea with Russia. The radical Maidanites had made it fairly clear once it became clear this would not be limited to the EU Association Agreement that they wanted a repeal of the 2012 Language Law, but they were not united with other Maidanites like Tymoshenko’s bloc and in any case didn’t even start the process of unsuccessfully trying to repeal it until late Feb/early March.

By which time the Russian Federation was already minting medals for the reclamation of Crimea dating to Feb 20th and had Little Green Men in Crimea and increasingly the Donbas.

The same day Yanukovych was removed nationalists were calling for an anti-terrorist operation to “unite Ukraine” in the east.

I’m going to need sources for this that *AREN’T* Grok, which is fundamentally incapable of doing more than scraping public sources of questionable authenticity without much in the way of fisking them.

It’s telling that even Wikispooks (which seems to be overwhelmingly cribbed from Kremlin propaganda and outright claims the thing amounted to “war crimes”) dates this to April 2014, when Turchynov declared it formally after an ultimatum deadline lapsed. Which makes a lot of sense, especially given the legal issues of trying to organize an election and the fact that one of the key weaknesses the Ukrainian loyalists faced early on was that they were slow on the draw responding to anti-Maidanites splitting (and especially those taking an increasingly separatist tone) and to the Russian Federation intervening.

I asked Grok,-

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most separatist-y of all?

Yeah no. Grok is not and cannot be a substitute for actual research or independent analysis, any more than any other AI LLM can be. At best it is a research aid that should tell you what to look for so you can check to see if it exists. Otherwise it’s basically just the Narcissus Effect of looking at the reflection of your own queries spread out over clearspace sources. Which is why if you asked “Were the anti-Maidan movements in the Crimea and Donbas organically seeking armed separation or were they co-opted to do so by Russian spec ops?” and asked that a few times you’d probably get interesting (if sometimes contradictory and unreliable) results.

This is why while I dabble in AI, including for research, and work under a friend that is a credentialed expert (and dear haven’t we heard a lot of those before?) in the field, she emphasized that you Do Not use these as a substitute for the primary or secondary sources, and that the reason Zero Trust exists is because no AI (or pseudo-AI like Grok) can make true decisions or calculations, no AI can be responsible.

In any case, I do not deny there was a disproportionate amount of Russophone and pro-Russian sentiment in the South and East, and in Crimea in particular this amounted to explicit threats of separatism, often drawing on much older regionalist, autonomist, or separatist sentiment. But these were militarily and politically impotent until Vladimir Putin and the Russian Dictatorship – over the course of at a minimum Feb 19th-23rd – decided to deploy Russian Federation military forces and intelligence assets to seize control of at a minimum Crimea from the Ukrainian government – NOT on behalf of Yanukovych or his cabinet, but for themselves.

This is why attempts to conceptualize the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2014 as some kind of “Crimea/Donbas War of Independence” ala 1775 flatly fail to me. Because while there had been plenty of rioting and brawling among the different camps before the radical turn to paramilitary violence and armed separatism in Crimea and later the Donbas did not happen organically but can be directly linked to the deployment of Russian government forces and forces closely associated with them like the Russian Imperial Movement.

Which is also why I keep emphasizing how as early as late Feb you already see Russian Federation exclusive equipment being present on the ground. This obviously does not mean that there was absolutely no grassroots or genuine separatism or paramilitary anti-maidanism in this era, far from it (especially in Cirmea). But it DOES emphasize how even the most bellicose and vocal anti-Maidanite groups like those in Crimea were reliant upon getting support from the Russian government before going ahead with armed separatism.

By the way, Kyiv Institute did a survey shortly after the Maidan revolution and the percentage of Donbas residents favoring independence had risen to 29% with 14% unsure.

Which obviously explains divisional level artillery fire originating from over the Russian border and the presence of the Russian Imperial Movement in Slavyansk and the Little Green Men in Crimea.

In any case, the Kremlin

It’s a mistake to blame the independence movement only on Russia.

It’s a mistake to blame independentist sentiment or autonomism in the Donbas and Crimea only on Russia. However, it very much isn’t a mistake to place the Russian dictatorship front and center when discussing how these movements got unspeakably more well armed, violent, and organized over the span of at most a month, while liaising with known FSB and GRU contacts, often fielding Russian Federation exclusive military equipment, and coordinating with Russian Federation naval and landborne artillery assets from over the border.

This is akin to assuming that because there was a significant and longlasting strand of thought for Greater German union in places like Austria and the German dominated Bohemian borderlands in Czechoslovakia, the emergence of the Austrian Nazi Party and the Sudeten Freikorps as terrorist insurgencies and armed conspiracies was totally organic and emerging from the community itself rather than – say – acting with the patronage and even direction of a foreign government in Berlin. Ditto things like the dreams of Chinese Federalism or at least regional autonomy or the Left-Wing and anti-Chiang KMT factions compared to the parade of “Provincial” or “Regional” governments created by the invading Japanese.

They certainly used the anger/response by Ukrainians in the Donbas region.

Yes, they did. Though they did significantly more than using it, especially given what the Russian government has now acknowledged regarding the process of taking over Crimea in particular. They very clearly were not content to rely upon the previous levels of publics support or violence.

But so did the State Dept./CIA use the unrest in the western Ukraine that led to the Maidan revolution and a friendly Ukrainian President.

The difference is it wasn’t just unrest in Western Ukraine, as I mentioned before. One of the reasons Yanukovych and Putin took Maidan so badly was it featured minority but significant backlash in even the “Safe” areas like the Donbas and to a much lesser degree in Crimea, because it turns out that even ethnic Russian Russophones with a habitual preference for Russian trade tend to be leery about giving up EU Trade (as they saw it) during an economic slump, and even moreso when the decision was made in what seemed to be such an inorganic and coerced way that they saw (rightfully or wrongly) as mortgaging their votes without a resolution to the tariff issue. These were obviously not the entire population, or even most of it, but they were enough to cause a panic and erode Yanukovych’s base of support.

Which is why I generally repudiate this vision of Euromaidan and even moreso the wars in 2014 as a story of “West Ukraine vs. East Ukraine.” Yanukovych ironically might have fared better had he stuck to that in his 2010 election bid, even if he might not have won. But the compromises he made to help exploit the fracturing Orange coalition and win defectors over from Yuschenko and Tymoshenko came back to bite him badly, and are one reason why when you had “curious” cases of armed separatism and paramilitary forces involved they generally did not fight on behalf of Yanukovych or follow his orders.

Just don’t startle a gathering of Tren de Aragua thugs…