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by _DeadFred_ 734 days ago
When the strongest evidence is 'the Americans handed out cookies to those protesting for independence' I'm not sure it's really an 'argument'.
3 comments

The cookies were handed to the riot police, not protestors.
IMO, this falls short of directly implicating the USG in the revolution but it certainly highlights their detailed concern in the region and a desire for specific outcomes. It makes it harder to believe USG intelligence operatives were completely hands-off. To what extent the situation was being driven by them is something I can't tell/guess.
To what extent do we expect to see direct evidence the Euromaidan protests were instigated/leveraged by intelligence officers and associated cutouts for strategic purposes? I don't know and the lack of concrete evidence makes me reluctant to draw any firm conclusions but a comment from a former intelligence analyst seems interesting to me:

From https://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/3/who_is_provoking_the_u...:

"RAY McGOVERN: Well, a couple of things. You know, it really depends more on who seizes control of these uprisings. If you look at Bahrain, you know, if you look at Syria—even Egypt, to an extent—these were initially popular uprisings. The question is: Who took them over? Who spurred them? Who provoked them even more for their own particular strategic interests? And it’s very clear what’s happened to the Ukraine. It used to be the CIA doing these things. I know that for a fact. OK, now it’s the National Endowment for Democracy, a hundred million bucks, 62 projects in the Ukraine. So, again, you don’t have to be a paranoid Russian to suggest that, you know, they’re really trying to do what they—do in the Ukraine what they’ve done in the rest of Eastern Europe and elsewhere."