I appreciate your willingness to question the narrative and push for peace even while everyone seems to have a real appetite for war. I found this article from 2014 that discusses the US’s influence in the 2014 protests. The cited experts are Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern. They discuss a recorded phone conversation where two US State Dept officials are going over who they want in power in Ukraine. Snyder seems pretty convinced that the 2014 protests and elections were genuine, regardless of State Department conversations about who they want to win. Then you have McGovern, who has experience in this sort of thing, saying that the CIA does not really do this sort of thing anymore, and so the State Dept does it instead. And as i’m reading, he seems quite convinced that the US was placing its thumb on the scales, and he seems to agree that maybe this should be resolved by everyone coming to the table.

McGovern’s most convincing piece of evidence is this:

The other thing is, you know, Professor Snyder talks about the parliamentary vote, voting in the new government. Well, he must know that that was a rump vote. I think it was—I think it was unanimous, something like 253 to nothing, which, you know, really is sort of a nostalgic look back at the votes that I used to count in the Soviet Union. There’s something very smelly here.

But I looked it up, and it seems like in 2014, the Prime Minister Yatsenyuk was elected via a parliamentary election where he got 371 of the 372 members that voted. Which sounds suspicious, but you should factor in the other 78 members that were either abstaining or not voting. Is it strange? Sure, but here’s another theory: the protests happened with no or very little Western influence, but the elections happened with lots of implied Western influence. There was a lot of crisis and turmoil, protests and corruption combined with Russian soldiers on the doorstep. The Parliament was under a lot of pressure to act swiftly and decisively to ease unrest. So they picked up the phone when the US called, and listened to their advice. In this way, the US got the outcome it wanted, but not by particularly manipulative means. They just offered their advice, and the Parliament listened. And so, all of the anti or neutral-to-Russia Parliament simply fell in line, to bring stability to the country.

Now, I have no evidence of this. This is just my extended thoughts on the matter after trying to understand your point of view. I think the reason many are quick to defend Ukraine’s side in this conflict is that Russia has shown itself to be corrupt, fascistic, and manipulative in foreign and domestic affairs multiple times over the past decade or so. And in the context of what has happened and continues to happen, it’s hard to be sympathetic to Russia’s “position” when they’ve been shown to argue in bad faith over and over again. It’s impossible for us to know what the people of Crimea want because they live under an authoritarian regime. It’s impossible for us to make treaties and concessions to Russia because they always break them. Every barrier to peace seems to be created by Russia, so people side with Ukraine, the underdog that they know very little about.