Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Western belligerence towards Russia, Western attempts to encircle Russia, its involvement in the war in Ukraine, stating that the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests resulted in an illegal coup; painting Ukraine and other states as failing states incapable of making its own policy choices and painting the West as the puppet-master of their politics.
The Euromaidan was not organised by the West but was the sovereign choice of Ukrainians for pro-European development. The spontaneous onset of the Euromaidan protests was an organic reaction by numerous segments of the Ukrainian population to former President Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013. There was no coup d'état in Ukraine.
After Yanukovych’s escape from Ukraine in 2014, Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula. Also, the war in Eastern Ukraine is a well-documented act of aggression by Russian armed forces, ongoing since February 2014.
In late December 1979 Soviet troops invaded in Afghanistan after staging a coup against the incumbent President, Hafizulla Amin. The Soviet Union intervened in support of the Afghan communist government in its conflict with anticommunist Muslim guerrillas during the Afghan War (1978–92) and remained in Afghanistan until mid-February 1989. The war in Afghanistan became a quagmire for what by the late 1980s was the disintegrating Soviet Union. The Soviets suffered some 15,000 dead and many more injured; around 2 million Afghan civilians were killed during the war. In 1988 the United States, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union signed an agreement by which the latter would withdraw its troops from the country.
