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https://theduran.com/ukraine-wars-10th-anniversary-it-started-20-february-2014-heres-how/

Ukraine War’s 10th Anniversary: It Started 20 February 2014. Here’s How:

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The war in Ukraine started on 20 February 2014 when a very bloody coup, which was hidden behind peaceful anti-corruption demonstrations in Kiev that had started November 2013 and became progressively more violent, climaxed with the resignation of the democratically elected President, whose principal commitment (on the basis of which he had been elected) had been for Ukraine to retain the internationally neutralist foreign policy that Ukraine had held ever since it declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. By contrast, his electoral opponent was a strong advocate to NATO for it to provide a Membership Action Plan for Ukraine to become admitted into NATO; and, of course she likewise advocated for the EU to accept Ukraine as a member. (At the end of this article will be discussed what the extensive polling of Ukrainians on both the EU and NATO shows; but to summarize it: they’re strongly against BOTH.) The only other nationally prominent politician in Ukraine who shared her pro-U.S. anti-Russia position was Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom Obama’s agent who had planned and overseen the coup (or “Revolution of Dignity”), Victoria Nuland, selected and instructed in a 27 January 2014 phone-call to America’s Ambassador in Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt to get appointed to run the country after the coup would be over, until a new election would be held when enough pro-Russian voters there would have been slaughtered or escaped into Russia — ethnically cleansed out of Ukraine.

A member of the Rada (Parliament) quit on February 20th, saying (at 18:00-), “And now those beasts are shooting at their own guys in order to provoke conflict. And those scoundrels opened the way for the disintegration of Ukraine. We’ll now have to see what happens next, because today it’s about protecting human lives already. The hell something good awaits Ukraine while these scoundrels are hiding behind their deputy [Member oif Parliament] seats. Both Klitschko [Kiev’s Mayor] and Yatsenyuk are freaking scumbags! They got an OK in Germany [Angela Merkel] to start a civil war.” (Actually, no evidence has yet come forth that Merkel had anything to do with what was happening on that day.)

Also on that, the first day of the coup, on 20 February 2014, eight busloads of Crimeans who had come to the demonstrations holding placards opposing the overthrow of the elected President (who had been voted for by 75% of Crimeans) were forced by members of the pro-overthrow Right Sector organization to flee back into their buses and depart Kiev but were trapped en-route near the town of Korsun by Right Sector and Azov Battalion forces who beat them with clubs, shot them with guns, and aimed to burn all 350 of them but were opposed there by some police, whom the attackers also beat with clubs and severely injured. The injured and corpses were thrown onto a pile but no decision was made by the perpetrators to pour gasoline onto and burn it, and thus many of the 350 survived and walked or got carried back into their buses home to Crimea. Of course, word of this spread there like wildfire, and thus helped to spark resistance to the U.S.-installed government in other parts of Ukraine that had voted over 75% for the elected President, and especially in the far-eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, where over 90% of the votes had been for the elected President. (The U.S.-installed regime and its backers claimed that the allegations that any such event had occurred in Korsun were a lie. But if the videos were faked, then it would have had to have been a very large and expensive operation to do that, with lots of hired professional actors and some destroyed buses expended in its production. Obviously, the U.S. side had no interest in doing real research into the matter, nor in interviewing the dozen-or-so named individuals who were shown being interviewed about it.)

On that same day, February 20th, the Crimean Natalia Poklonskaya, Sr. Prosecutor in Ukraine’s office of the Prosecutor of Ukraine, escaped from Kiev back to Crimea. Shortly before Crimea’s 16 March 2014 plebiscite about whether to return to being a part of Russia as Crimea had been during 1783-1954 when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred it to Ukraine, she was interviewed on TV in Crimea and explained why she thought that what had happened in Kiev on February 20th was (2:20- into the video) “an unconstitutional coup d’etat and armed seizure of power.” Also in her interview, she correctly identified as leaders in the coup, both Dmitriy Yarosh (the co-founder of the Right Sector) and his nominal boss in the Maidan demonstrations, Andreiy Parubiy (the head of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine), both of whom she called “nazis.” Her presentation was heart-rending. Brief though it was, it was 100% accurate, and she offered it passionately as a proponent of democracy, and against nazism. Such obvious sincerity for the public’s welfare cannot be staged, which is why her presentation instantly became legendary, and she was even an instantaneous international star (which she didn’t want to be, so she didn’t feed that tendency).

20 February 2014 was, however, just the first climax of violence in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected Government. Already by 19 January 2014, the extremely violent phase of the operation had started, and it continued on 20 January 2014; and, by 21 January 2014, it was clear to anyone in Ukraine that this was no “Revolution of Dignity” but instead organized riots whose aim was to end democratic rule in Ukraine (to the extent it ever existed). On 25 January 2014, a crowd of rioters viciously assaulted the police, who had been courageously doing their job, and were using no force to resist — a job which, moreover, Ukraine’s taxpayers were paying them to do. On the day of the coup, 20 February 2014, it culminated with snipers firing down upon the crowd from high up in a tall building, but the BBC’s news-report on it mentioned this fact only in passing and excluded any footage which showed the Nazi emblems which were common among the ‘protesters’. Also it misidentified “demonstrators” as “police.” However, all of the billionaires-owned media likewise presented that violence as having been originated by the elected President instead of by the violent demonstrators. The hyper-propagandistic British “Vice News” even simply assumed that the snipers in that tall building were “police opening fire upon the largely unarmed protesters” (saying this while showing footage of police — not “protesters” — being shot dead while holding their police-shields facing upwards toward those high-up, firing-down, snipers.) That report then continued by showing the ‘protesters’ bringing their wounded into the ground floor of the Hotel Ukraine (now Kiev Radisson Blu), where their medics were. That was the main tall building from whose top-floor opened windows the snipers were firing down into the crowds. (The other such building was the Conservatory.) So: who was actually behind these events? A superb compendium-video (an hour long and with only one error in it — in its introduction saying at 0:29 the year as being “2013” instead of the year 2014, which was intended — showed clearly that the Obama Administration was behind it, and that even Catherine Ashton, the EU’s Foreign Policy chief, was surprised on February 26th to learn that those snipers’ bullets had come not from the security forces but from the ‘protesters’ (hirees of the U.S. Government, sometimes by way of its foreign contractors) who were overthrowing the democratically elected Government. An Italian TV investigative reporting team issued to youtube on 19 November 2017 its 20-minute documentary “The HiddenTruth About Ukraine”, interviews with two of the snipers, who said that they weren’t told why they were being paid to travel to and work briefly in Kiev, but only told, by an American Brian Christopher Boyenger (not an “assumed name” such as some German academics have alleged), what to do, once they arrived there. And they did their job  — which was to fire down and indiscriminately kill people there — and then they packed their bags and left as soon as the Government was overthrown. And there were other foreign snipers too, who likewise admitted that they had participated at the Hotel Ukraine and/or the Conservatory (both of which buildings were then controlled by the ‘protesters’ — NOT by the Government). 

This was a job that the Obama Administration had been planning at least since June 2011, and was training Right Sector people for both inside the U.S. Embassy starting on 1 March 2013, and also at facilities in Poland provided by the Polish Foreign Ministry.

Ukraine's Right Sector organization planned and led the violence during the Maidan ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations and was itself led by Dmitriy Yarosh (shown addressing his paramilitary troops on the third day of the eight-day-long coup — 22 February 2014 — here), who admired Germany’s Nazis but focused mainly against Russians instead of mainly against Jews. Their organization’s Coordinator Andrei Tarasenko announced on 22 January 2014, “Guerilla warfare will begin in Ukraine.” They had been secretly trained in this type of warfare by special forces classes and exercises that America’s CIA had arranged for them, which were held in Poland. (So, what Yarosh said in his address to his troops on 22 February 2014 might have been relying upon that mutually shared experiance.) 

Donetsk broke away from Ukraine on 7 April 2014, and U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media were immediately calling it part of a Russian ‘invasion of Ukraine’, and even calling it ‘Russian roulette’, though it was an authentic response by Donetsk residents to Obama’s anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, and the aggression there was by America’s stooges, not by any Russians or stooges of or from Russia. On 9 April 2015, Ukraine’s U.S.-installed government shut down 10,000 Websites, and confiscated a leading independent newspaper, Vesti, which the regime had twice before violently invaded on 27 June 2014 and 5 July 2014 but not confiscated. On 12 April 2014, the anti-Russia U.S.-backed newspaper Kyiv Post bannered “Armed pro-Russian extremists launch coordinated attacks in Donetsk Oblast, seize regional police headquarters, set up checkpoints”, and the reporter, who was from Chicago, portrayed the anti-coup movement as non-local, a foreign invasion from Russia. However, that ‘journalist’ gave away that it was actually a popular uprising when he noted that “One of the masked armed gunmen — among 70 who took part in the takeover of the Sloviansk police station — called the target a strategic building with a weapons arsenal that the militants began handing out to protesters.” Then, on 9-12 April 2014, were the new Ukrainian government’s massacres of people in Sloviansk and in Kramatorsk, two major cities that likewise had voted overwhelmingly for the President whom Obama’s bloody coup had overthrown. The locals were terrified of the coup-regime. On 16 April 2014, the Kyiv Post reported about the rebellions the prior day in Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Donetsk and Lugansk, headlining “A day of humiliation as Ukrainian military offensive stalls, six armored vehicles seized”. Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are specifically mentioned there as having been the first Ukrainian cities that rebelled (on the prior day) against the new regime, and whose residents would therefore henceforth be officially labelled by the newly installed government as being targets of a just-announced “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or “ATO” to eliminate them. Anyone who would support the “rebels” would now officially be a “terrorist.” (But already back on 5 March 2014, the newly-appointed-by Yatsenyuk Minister of Defense had announced that there would be an ethnic cleansing to rid Ukraine of opponents of the newly installed government.) On 27 April 2014, Lugansk joined with Donetsk and likewise broke away from Ukraine. All of the rebelling cities were now being bombed and shelled by the Obama-installed government. As Seumas Milne well documented in the Guardian on 30 April 2014, “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war”, it’s the U.S. regime that did it, and Milne mentioned both the Right Sector and the Svoboda Party as the key behind-the-scenes agents, enforcers, for the U.S. regime there. Next up was the massacre in Odessa on 2 May 2014, trapping and burning people to death. And, then, Mariupol outright rebelled, starting on 9 May 2014, and the Obama-installed Ukrainian junta crushed them within three months. However, Lugansk and Donetsk never surrendered, and that part of the civil war has continued till this day. France, Germany, and Russia established in February 2015 the Minsk II cease-fire agreement that Lugansk and Donetsk willingly signed, and that Ukraine was compelled to sign in order to keep alive the U.S.-installed regime’s chances for admission to the EU. But Ukraine never complied with Minsk II, and just continued its shelling into those two breakaway republics. The U.S. regime was determined to get Ukraine as a base from which to invade Russia. On 19 June 2014, I headlined and documented “Independence Movement in Southeastern Ukraine Accuses Obama’s Agents of Slaughter” And it was that, and had many resemblances to what Hitler’s troops had done. On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in order to prevent that from being completed, but even more importantly to prevent the U.S. regime from becoming enabled to place a nuclear missile on Ukraine’s border only 317 miles away from blitz-nuking within a mere five minutes of missile-flight time The Kremin and so beheading Russia’s central command. The war is successfully portrayed as being between Ukraine and Russia, but it is instead actually between America and Russia, and Ukraine is only the hottest battlefield of it at this stage.

Not only did Yanukovych win the Presidency on a platform of continuing Ukraine’s neutrality, and not only was his decision to say no to the EU’s bad offer consistent with that (and — as will be shown at the end here) consistent with Ukrainian public opinions about both the EU and NATO), but he saved Ukraine $160 billion by doing so; and yet almost as soon as he became President, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spoke privately with him to try to entice him to reverse that neutralist policy, and both times he turned down their demand. Perhaps this was the reason why Obama started by no later than June 2011 to plan for him to be overthrown and replaced by a regime that would say yes.

In order for a news-medium to be authentic instead of a propaganda-organ such as they were in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany, it has to refer to what happened to Ukraine in February 2014 as having been a U.S. coup to grab control over Ukraine to use it against, and to enable it ultimately to grab control over, Russia, instead of as having been any sort of revolution in and by Ukraine. Both Jens Stoltenberg and Volodmyr Zelensky did say at least one thing that is true, which is that Ukraine’s war started not in February 2022 but instead in February 2014. However, they need to acknowledge that it started in a U.S. coup, instead of in a Ukrainian revolution. There was nothing democratic about this U.S.-Government organized and funded anti-Government riot. And it started the new government there, which promptly started the war against Russia on behalf of the U.S. regime. Will the ‘news’-media in The West EVER come clean about that, or will they and their ‘historians’ keep on forever lying about it? Furthermore, despite the U.S.-and-allied press alleging that the overthrown President, Yanukovych, shouldn’t on 20 November 2013 have rejected the EU’s offer to Ukraine, Ukraine’s academy of science had analyzed it and concluded that it would leave Ukraine’s Government $160 billion in the hole; so, he then promptly turned down the EU’s offer, on 20 November 2013. He did the right thing for the people of Ukraine by doing that.

And the U.S.-and-allied press have also scandalously misrepresented Ukrainian public opinions regard both of the U.S. regime’s European empire organizations, the economic/political EU and the military NATO: The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic, regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., NATO, or EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. A poll published in Ukraine on 11 February 2008 found that whereas “57.8% of Ukrainians support the idea of a national referendum on joining NATO,” “50% of Ukrainians would vote against membership of NATO,” and only “24.3% of Ukrainians would vote for Ukraine's joining NATO.” In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But, after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, "Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup. But by the time of 2017, Gallup reported that 35% of Ukrainians viewed NATO as a threat again, and only 26% saw NATO as protection, but Gallup buried this fact in their article and alleged that unfortunately “Ukrainians may be losing confidence in NATO's ability to help them in this crisis,” and that if the U.S. will do likewise, then NATO “would be less equipped to curtail any Russian military and political expansion” (thereby suggesting that Russia invaded Ukraine in order to acquire more territory — a ludicrous allegation, which would be vastly more applicable to America’s Government than to Russia’s, so that it is just propaganda from that major U.S. Government contractor).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.