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If I can show you examples of Ukraine supporters who can form a coherent argument, who don’t rely on shame or vibes, is there any chance you’ll be convinced?
I’m open to arguments that Maidan was going to happen regardless of western involvement. I think the evidence points to the west being heavily involved, but I can have epistemic humility here.
But how can you argue that it wasn’t deposing a man who won a fair election, and that his supporters, who happen to be geographically concentrated, are right to be angry to the point of secession?
Speaking of Maidan, can anyone who knows Ukrainian peruse the court document from this article and check if it's accurate? The author claims that many of the protestors shot during Maidan were shot by far-right pro-Maidan groups, not the special police (Berkut), and that this has been confirmed by a recent trial verdict.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/buried-trial-verdict-confirms-false-flag-maidan-massacre-in-ukraine-2024
The document in question: https://reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/114304164
And some sections translated with google:
https://www.academia.edu/109357708/Maidan_Massacre_Trial_Verdict_Selected_Excerpts_Confirming_False_Flag_Massacre_English_Google_Translation_
Video from a BBC reporter at the scene where he claims to have seen shooting from the Hotel Ukrainia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zQhuD4F1yJ0
I'll pass on a million words of Ukrainian legalese and government reporting, but I can speak a bit to Ivan Katchanovski.
Ivan Katchanovski as an author probably isn't your best bet for an objective take, since he's made his theory his career niche and he gets signal boosted as part of the general propaganda wars, partly because he deliberately conflates various elements to make a more reaching case than he has. (For example- the court found that sniper shots came from Hotel Ukraina- it did not identify by who, or how many people were victims of them. In absence of identification, the perpetrator's affiliation is assigned.)
Katchanovski's core claim is that only the Maidan groups could have operated from the Hotel Ukraina because it was used by the protestors, and thus the sniper reports as a whole were a Euromaidan false flag. This... really isn't a strong link, since there was no sort of real access control / accountability in Hotel Ukraina or the Euromaidan protest zones, where if you weren't clearly government you could generally move around. You need active control and screening to credibly argue that no one trying to do a false flag could walk in, go upstairs, and take shots before leaving in the confusion of people hearing shots and thinking they might be under attack, particularly since security services can penetrate protest movements as much as any other sort of agency.
(To be explicitly clear on alternative narratives: the dispute isn't that shots came from Hotel Ukraina, but one framing is that the police never opened fire unprovoked but were merely defending themselves from far-right Euromaidan provacateurs, and another is that Ukrainian attempted a false-flag provocation to justify / prompt a Ukrainian state crackdown. Part of the basis of the later theory is that it was a tactic used by Russia elsewhere, such as in Syria at the start of the syrian civil war, and Russian advisors were present with Ukrainian security services at the time (though the Ukrainian govt. position is that the actors were Ukrainian).)
You could argue the plausibility of either chain of events, but Katchanovski dismisses that with language asserting solid control, while using insinuating language to maximize culpability to Euromaidan ('many' Euromaidan shot by far-right snipers... but no proprotional allocation or acknoweldgement of state snipers) and minimize actions by the Yanukovich government ('no massacre order given'- itself a twist of phrase to obscure the lethal force authorization that Yanukovich's government announced, which of course was not a literal order to conduct a massacre). Katchanovski is fond of these sort of semantic framings, such as calling the Russian-instigated separatists a civil war. Katchanovski tries to play to his western audience, but he's not exactly subtle with his attempts to lead the audience.
Multi-lingual word games aren't fun, and the unsatisfying answer is that in the time between Maidan and the reorganization of the internal security services, there was evidence of substantial evidence destruction (such as destruction of weapons believed used in the shootings) and key witnesses- including the internal security service leader- defected to Russia and thus were not available for Ivan's investigation to, well, investigate. Some security service people who were later recognized as being of interest were even turned over in Russian prisoner swaps.
What made the post-Maidan investigation worse/more embarassing for the post-Maidan government is that the post-Maidan government did not actually have firm control of the government aparatus for some time, and even then Ukrainian institutions- including the judiciary- were notoriously corrupt. Pro-Russian corruption was notably present even years after the revolution- such as the significant successes in the Russian invasion itself.
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By noting that the secessionists were an astroturfed special operation, as demonstrated by the systemic lack of support where Russian green men were not on the ground to carry initial efforts and the Russian state relations (and even more controlled replacements) of separatist 'leaders,' and that the deposed man who won a fair election was also a man fled before he could be tried for actions that would merit deposition in civilized countries, including- but not limited to- attempting a purge of his own unity government by unilateral lethal force that made Soviet-era politicians blanche.
The NovaRussia campaign was Putin's attempt to instigate a popular uprising that he thought would sweep the country after Putin's attempt to instigate a purge of the opposition that had already been invited into a unity government backfired when he tried to treat an oligarchy as a party-dictatorship. The reason why the Russian military had to repeatedly intervene to prop up the popular revolution was because it was neither popular or a revolution.
By the same token, I don't think that the Kievan government would've spent February of 2022 distribing rifles and ammunition to anyone who asked if they expected those weapons to be turned against them.
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As far as I know, the war in Donbass began as the result of actions by individual Russians like Strelkov who crossed the border into Ukraine without their government's knowledge or sanction (though these individuals did believe they were instigating a popular uprising that would sweep the country), and only once their filibuster campaign was on the verge of collapse did Putin finally intervene to save them.
That's another version of events that would work against the 'eastern Ukrainians were just so upset with Euromaidan they decided to secede,' I suppose.
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