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PicturesOfABetterTomorrow says
No, Americans made this happen when they chose to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine.
DUUUDE!!!
It was UKRAINIANS who ousted Yanukovych! After Yanukovych abandoned his office by fleeing from Ukraine to Russia, Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office by 328 to 0 (about 73% of the parliament's 450 members).
And what happened prior to UKRAINIANS ousting Yanukovych??
The Maidan mass protests—which lasted from November 2013 to February 2014 in Kyiv and many other cities across Ukraine—erupted when Yanukovych pivoted from a wide-ranging association agreement with the European Union to a similar one with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s move toward closer relations with the EU was the trigger for Putin’s Plan A: the transfer of Ukraine to the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. To stop Yanukovych’s deal with Europe, Moscow pressured Kyiv with trade sanctions, including an embargo of key Ukrainian exports to Russia. In return for joining Russia’s economic bloc, Moscow offered Kyiv an emergency $3 billion loan to shore up a budget drained of resources by Yanukovych’s corruption. At the same time, Russia pressured him to violently crush the Maidan, suppress the pro-Western opposition, and thereby alienate him from the West. Toward this end, officials from the Russian security services and Putin aide Vladislav Surkov were frequent visitors in Kyiv.
Some more details relating to the ousting of Yanukovych:
The preponderance of evidence suggests that it was Moscow itself that triggered Yanukovych’s departure in order to launch a pre-arranged Plan B—the invasion of Crimea and an engineered “uprising” in eastern Ukraine—after Moscow’s Plan A—a new treaty with a pliant government in Kyiv that placed it under Russia’s de facto control—was about to fail. Indeed, the timeline shows that preparations for Plan B were well underway before Yanukovych’s removal from office. All this, in turn, demonstrates that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans for Ukraine were far more predatory all along than merely preventing the country’s drift toward NATO, as many of Russia’s Western apologists contend.
And what about this alleged corruption:
When former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country following the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukrainian citizens who stormed his Mezhyhirya mansion discovered a palace of cartoonish opulence with guilded bathrooms, a private zoo, and a floating restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship. A good illustration of this extravagance is the $11 million he allegedly paid for a chandelier and his seven tablecloths worth a staggering $13,000.
This private opulence was all paid for with public money. Embezzlement in the Yanukovych era is said to have taken the form of theft, corruption in public procurement, rigged energy prices, and misuse of carbon-emissions allowances.
Yanukovych and his associates, known as ‘the Family’, are believed to have embezzled as much as $37 billion and stashed it in bank accounts and company shares around the world, including in EU countries such as Austria, Latvia, Cyprus, Italy, and the Netherlands.
