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Comment by yetanotherphd | Hacker News Reader

A lot of what seems to be grassroots could be aided, and perhaps even orchestrated, by sophisticated groups with a political agenda, e.g. the CIA.

It would only take around 10-20 bloggers to create the illusion that the majority people in the country felt a certain way.

EDIT: and nowadays, they wouldn't just blog, they would post to Reddit, and maybe even HN.

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True enough. But my extended social circle includes a number of people of Ukrainian nationality and/or descent. Everything I've heard from them (which is, granted, not a lot; I haven't been tracking these events terribly actively, let alone vis-à-vis their perspectives) tends to corroborate what I'm seeing in this blog post, at least.

There is a very significant pro-Western bias amongst educated people who have moved to the West.

If you just looked at educated Chinese immigrants during the last 50 years, you would never guess at the overwhelming support for the communist party.

There is an equally significant anti-Western bias among liberal university-educated people who were born in the U.S, so it mostly balances out. In addition, we now have maps like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/01/24...

I doubt the CIA could have plot the political decision of Ukraine to turn their back on Europe. This is the cause of this, as far as I know. Ukrainians hoped to be able to work in Europe like their neighbour countries and this has been denied to them. Obviously that political decision was strongly "influenced" by Russia. This is why so many people are taking part in these contests. Every single Ukrainian is concerned by this political choice and unhappy of it. I don't think CIA could make such mass popular protest sprout and sustain in front of strong political resistance.

People just want to get away of misery. If Russia want to keep this country in its "federation" there is a very clear and "simple" thing to do. Keeping this country from joining europe by force is just delaying the final issue as it happened with Hungary and all these other countries. This Federation hold together by force will fall appart anyway soon or later unless Russia manages to offer equivalent job opportunities and salaries as Ukraininag could get in Europe.

The CIA is a poor example. The motivation isn't there, it's not really their style, and they are rather incompetent. More importantly, if it were an American plot of some kind, the US news media wouldn't be ignoring it, they'd be going on and on about a Ukrainian Democratic Revolution etc. etc. To orchestrate something like this and not hook it up with massive Western support would be futile.

I guess I'd better become a citizen journalist to counteract it, then.

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