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It is just untrue. Only organizing said referenda (as well as participation in any "counting commissions" etc.) falls under "treason" charges. One can participate in them, because no one would be able to prove that it was willingly, and not under duress. The same goes for "receiving humanitarian aid" from Russians — Russians spread this rumor to enforce compliance: "aha, you got some canned fish from us, now when Ukrainian authorities will learn of that, you'll get imprisoned, now you better obey us".
I am a Ukrainian, and usually just lurk, but I see so. Much. Bullshit. Spread. Around. From both sympathetic to Ukrainians people admittedly, but much more so from all those American internet contrarians. Starting with silly ("Zelensky prohibited letter Z! What a moron! Doesn't he know he has Z in his surname" — on /pcm it had probably 5k updoods, and many people uncritically assumed it's true); but also the standard tropes like "Maidan was a CIA plot!", "Zelensky prohibited all socialist parties!" and so on. Of course, all those people have never been to Ukraine, have no idea how Ukrainian politics is organized, don't read Ukrainian media, and don't know how people on the ground really feel.
But they watched maybe a couple videos on the subject including "Ukraine on Fire", read Karlin, and some others just as uninformed people as themselves on reddit and here, and now they think they are qualified to comment on the subject. Maybe those internet commentators should learn some humility? I don't comment on e.g. Finnish politics, and me knowing that people like "Sanna Marin", or "True Finns" exist, doesn't make me an expert, I just read Stefferi, and quietly updood.
Sorry for the rant.
"Maidan was a CIA plot."
I'm sure much of it was organic. But it's naive to think that the CIA wasn't involved early and at the ground level as it was obviously in their interest.
I could always be wrong but I would be genuinely shocked if the CIA wasn't involved at all. If you concede thay they were involved, then we are just debating how involved they were and how much and how well the organic movent would have gotten without them.
This sub got a little bit too invested in the Ukraine war. It is shocking to me that the claim "CIA was involved in (a very favorable) regime change in country where American foreign policy has serious interests" now brings up several heavily upvoted "rebuffs".
Yes Ukraine was very corrupt and mismanaged by pro-Russian politicians. It was also very corrupt and mismanaged by pro-Western politicians. Majority of the countries around the world are very corrupt and mismanaged. Virtually no CIA takeover ever comes out of nowhere. Grievances on their own rarely bring down regimes. The Soviet Union used to be well-known for leveraging the political problems in foreign countries to force regime changes favorable to themselves, and they would use basically the same arguments to justify their behavior. Interestingly, the Americans would use the opposite arguments to justify military invasions of said countries to restore the aligned regimes.
Just change CIA to KGB and Ukraine to Vietnam or Cuba and somehow you can write this entire discussion in reverse with the same arguments.
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If they were involved (I cannot disprove it of course, just as I cannot prove or disprove that Kennedy was assassinated by CIA), it was for certain not at the earliest stages. Even on Wikipedia you can read that it started with some protests by students and activists, organized by a journalist Mustafa Nayem. It evolved into mass protests only after Yanukovich made an unforced error on Nov 30 and brutally suppressed by that time low number of protesters — Russia-style:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6HtbdFfaYUc
Did CIA forced Berkut (riot police) to hit people's heads with police batons?
After seeing that, people got berserk and rioted. Maybe only after that State Department (that we know for sure) and intelligence services (possibly) got involved, but even without them hundreds of thousands people went protesting.
By 2013 situation in Ukraine was already explosive — even Russians, who supposedly know more about Ukraine than some Americans who listen to Oliver Stone, probably don't know the extension of government corruption at the time, Azarov's (PM of Yanukovich) mismanagement of the economy, or e.g. Vradiivka riots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Iryna_Krashkova — abuse by police was not something new, and people already demanded police reform; but Yanokuvich led Ukraine to Belarus-style autocracy). You have to live there to understand what happens there. Maybe that's why they thought they'll be met with flowers.
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Involvement on its own doesn’t mean anything. Ironically this is somewhat analogous to claims of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 elections
Is there much difference in the CIA originating the plot to overthrow Yanukovych, or instead aiding an existing plot? Every country has its dissidents. Using an existing movement to accomplish your goals is a matter of practicality, it's going to be harder to organize a separate movement from the ground up.
I don't think the West would be ambivalent if the Catalonians won their independence and then we obtained a tape wherein high-level Kremlin officials were discussing who should be the new President of Catalan and that they needed to run it by Putin.
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The key difference is that claiming Russian interference in the 2016 elections was high status.
Criticizing CIA involvement in a former soviet is low status.
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