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Comment by NoPie | Hacker News Reader

I cannot speak for other countries but in Ukraine people started protesting by their own will. To allege that it was due to foreign influence is to deny Ukrainians of their agency. Let's not believe this Russian propaganda that Ukraine is not a real country and its people cannot decide by themselves.

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> Ukraine people started protesting by their own will. To allege that it was due to foreign influence is to deny Ukrainians of their agency.

Do you extend the same line of thinking to separatists in Crimea and Donbass?

Even if it were grass root movement (could be possible, though somewhat doubtful) in donbas and crimea, they didn’t start with peaceful protest demanding early election or greater autonomy or something democratic. There goal clearly was to chip away the territory from ukrain.

The peaceful protests for closer ties to the EU didn't achieve anything. And the democratically elected president was ousted by force. It's not hard to imagine that those opposed to the new regime would see armed insurrection as the logical means of achieving their aims.

“Yanukovic was ousted by force”, does not describe the situation. Yanukovic tried silencing protesters using force, but they didn’t surrender.

"Yanukovych's Berkut violently tried to put down peaceful protests" and "Violent protests ousted Yanukovych by force" are both true. For some reason you want to ignore the fact that the peaceful protests failed and then escalated to violent retaliation.

Regarding Crimea and Donbass, as far as I am aware there were no attempts to overthrow the government by local population before Russian military seized control of government buildings.

So the difference is clear:

- in Kyiv, everything started with protests that the government tried to suppress for several months

- in Crimea everything started with Russian military taking control over the peninsula which is a foreign intervention, exactly the type that commenters above try to attribute to USA. But there were no USA soldiers on Maidan, and there were Russian soldiers in Crimea and Donbass.

> as far as I am aware there were no attempts to overthrow the government by local population

The Guardian says otherwise: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/ukraine-crisis...

This article talks about a regular protest. No overthrow attempts were made

How is this relevant in deciding whether a protest was caused by outside manipulation vs free will of the people?

Personally, I don't care about outside manipulation, unless it is either achieved by spreading misinformation, or by military force.

Second, the parent comments were explicitly referring to overthrow.

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