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Alternate history caricatures? Was Nuland not a highly ranked state department official ?
Were the people she was seen with handing out cookies not armed militias ?
Characterizing the Euromaidan protest groups as an insurgency would be the caricature you're painting, yes.
A useful pejorative for an alternate history, but still an alternate history given it's reliance on twisting the conventional usage of active revolt or uprising. Particularly in the context of 2013, when the Syrian Civil War, Afghan War, and even the Iraq Wars were the contemporary standards of what an insurgency entailed. Truly, the battlefield of Independence Square could be fairly compared with any of these.
While seeking the categorical equivalence would be useful to those who want to exaggerate the Euromaidan protests, just as calling January 6 an insurgency (or a coup, or an uprising) is useful to those who want those categorical insinuations, such claims remain false and their usage appeals to historical fanfiction.
Armed clashes between protesters and government culminating in the militias invading parliament and forcing government MPs to dissolve the cabinet do not count as 'insurgency'?
And thus we go back to your history by caricature and alternative contexts.
Like, say, how the armed protestors, government security forces, and significant parts of the cabinet being in concurrence rather than in opposition when a minority of the cabinet- including the President and the pro-Russian wing in control of the FSB- granted themselves the right to shoot opposition forces after the sustained lobbying of said foreign power. Leading to the breakdown of the cabinet when the parts of the cabinet not on board with such a policy had their own supporters being shot by snipers, and were being accused of supporting the same sort of sniper attacks on the police in a week that led to triple-digit deaths. Or the general stance of the parliament on the power play of an unfolding attempt by the government to purge factions of the government without parliamentary approval, particularly when many of them were associated with the parties to be purged. Or that the security forces on the ground really didn't appreciate being sniped at with the same sort of weapons as the FSB snipers that the government denied were present even as they were being broadcast on international media, even as the government insisted it was totally the protestors who had suddenly escalated to sniping the police and other protestors.
It would certainly be a more convenient historical narrative if the government was on board with shooting protestors after months of not, but it wasn't, hence why the career communist official balked on joining Yanukovich's crackdown and withdrew the riot police. And it'd also be a more convenient if the government and the opposition were different sides of the government-non-government line, but they weren't, because Yanukovich had already created a unity government that included opposition figures. It'd even be good for the narrative if Yanukovich's Cabinet could be presented as a united force behind him... but it wasn't, hence why the pro-Russia wing was isolated when it called for a crackdown and the rest of the government didn't want to support.
But an unsanctioned purge of the opposition- even thought that is 'an armed clash between protesters and government'- is not an insurgency, even when it fails so badly that the instigators lose the support of the rest of the government and flee before they can be tried and sentenced by the legislature.
Ukrainian court recently found that elements of far right protesters started shooting at both sides to speed things up.
The protests went on for weeks before the shootouts happened.
So the idea that FSB did it and fucked it up seems really fucking odd.
Getting security forces to kill people is always the primary goal of protest leaders
The government wins if they go home.
I am pleased our discussion as always has retreated so far from the bailey from which it started, where we were discussing a fanfic of an American-involved insurgency installing an illegitimate government by force, to one where we can trust the truth-finding capacity of the Ukrainian court and investigation systems nearly a decade after it's takeover of the system...
...which did not find that said right-wing sniper protestors were a coherent part of Maidan strategy or American-aligned, but which has (repeatedly) also found the involvement of the government in the crackdown to rise to criminal levels. And which did not find extremist agitators to be a controlled factor of the Euromaidan key leaders or even to be American led, at a time when the Americans were publicly advising the Euromaidan protestors to not escalate. But which has repeatedly found substantial indications of resistance and obfuscation by the Yanukovich-era FSB and internal security forcesduring attempts of investigation the use and activities against protestors, including not just destruction of evidence but also the significant number of defections to Russia by possibly involved parties, including and up to Russian-requests for individuals of interest in the context of prisoner swaps.
I was worried you wouldn't want to believe anything that came out of the post-Maidan government and would dismiss anything they said as a pack of lies, or that the post-Maidan investigations couldn't be raised as reliable due to the amount of evidence tampering potentially done by interested parties including many which have since died or defected, but as I am sure you aren't just selectively cherry-picking any possible item in blatant confirmation bias, I am glad we can now both reference and agree with the results of Ukrainian reporting, investigations, and other government positions of the post-Euromaidan Ukraine...
...including that Yanukovich was credited as giving the order to open fire 20 Feb, and Internal Affairs Minister Zakharchenko announcing his (not legislature-derived or approved) authorization to security forces the same day to use live ammunition against protestors going forward, on a day when a lot of live ammunition was used against protestors, and no one claims primarily by Maidan elements sanctioned or otherwise.
Instead the discussion has simply moved on to the motte of verisimilitude, and what you do or do not find too odd to believe about a government giving itself the right to shoot protestors...
...after increasing pressure from both its primary briber and the pro-Russian elements within the government publicly and privately pressuring Yanukovich to escalate suppression tactics, after the protest movement did not disband and was not thrown into turmoil after the failure of Yanukovich's unity government gambit to divide the opposition but instead empowered them as part of his own government, after the protestor demands had evolved to not only the still-maintained issue of EU-to-Eurasian Union switch but also demands for credible investigations that were likely going to be costly to Yanukovich personally (such as investigations into his possible links to pre-20FEB attacks and kidnappings of protestors).
And why this sense of verisimilitude finds those factors less credulous than characterizing the Euromaidan as an insurgency fighting its way into the halls of power at American direction.
But we are talking about a sense of verisimilitude who believes the primary goal of protest leaders is always to get security forces to kill people, and even less odd senses of verisimilitude often struggle to accept the nature of history. History, after all, doesn't have to be plausible- it just has to happen.
Yeah. The Maidan snipers who were shooting at their own people and also at the government, were doing so purely because they were out of control psychopaths. That'đ what you're implying.
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