DISINFO: Extremists reached power in Ukraine after a US and EU coordinated coup d'etat
SUMMARY
After the coup d'etat that was coordinated by the United States and the European Union in Ukraine in 2014, extremist forces came to power in Ukraine and took a path to stimulate the outbreak of a military conflict with Russia in favour of Washington, until the current relations between Ukraine and Russia became even worse than the relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign against Ukraine, containing multiple disinformation narratives.
First, there was no extremist coup d'état in Ukraine organised by the US or the EU. The spontaneous onset of the Euromaidan protests was an organic reaction by numerous parts of the Ukrainian population to former President Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013.
Second, Russia is the responsible party for the deterioration of Ukrainian-Russian relations. Since 2014, Russia has waged large-scale armed aggression against Ukraine and is the responsible party for the outbreak of the conflict in 2014, after having illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula and engineered the creation of rebel militias in Donetsk, Luhansk and other places, with its army actively participating in military clashes.
In March-April 2021, Russia was again concentrating massive military power on Ukraine’s borders and threatened to intervene in support of Eastern Ukrainian separatists, raising fears of an upcoming military operation against Ukrainian territory. A large amount of Russian military hardware remains in areas near the border while soldiers are sent back to barracks. Officially, the units are expected to participate in the large autumn exercise ZAPAD 2021 ('Zapad' meaning West in Russian).
Ukraine closely cooperates with the United States, the European Union and NATO, but this does not mean that the US, or what pro-Kremlin media call “the collective West”, is pushing Kyiv into direct confrontation against Moscow. Ukraine’s Western partners are helping Ukraine stop the bloodshed in Donbas and alleviate the suffering of civilians in the war zone. They were mediators when the Minsk Agreements were signed in 2014 and 2015.
See other examples in our database, such as the claims that a far-right coup government in Kyiv emerged from the 2014 Maidan uprising, that the US spent $5 billion on the Ukrainian Maidan, and that Russian-Ukrainian relations deteriorated because of the coup.