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Comment by Isinlor | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Westerners and Russians seems to think that everything is organized by USA and that people of other nations do not have any autonomy.

A lot of people seem to think that Poland or Baltic states were somehow forced into NATO. Certainly narrative that China is trying to sell right now.

We knew very well that aligning ourselves with Russia is just straight road to disaster. And we needed to get as far as possible as soon as possible from Russian imperialism when we had a small window of opportunity.

Ukraine was split on it and it did result in disaster.

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> everything is organized by USA and that people of other nations do not have any autonomy

This is not an either-or proposition: the truth could well be that there were (lots of) people who wanted a regime change AND the US State Department intervened.

What do you mean by "intervened"? That they talked to people? Sure, they did talk to people.

They designated a leader for the future government and vetoed other leaders from joining it. You can spin it as “they talked to people” all you want.

It's not a spin. The word "intervened" may mean anything from talking to people to military intervention. USA officials talked about who would be good for them in Ukrainian government, granted some loans etc., while Russia put soldiers in Crimea parliament, annexed Ukraine territory and started war that continues till this day.

USA talked, while Russia started a war. Both can be understood as interventions, but they are not equivalent.

> Both can be understood as interventions

And both are wrong.

> but they are not equivalent

And still, both are wrong.

Technically true, but this reeks of false balance fallacy. The US recognizing that Yatsenyuk will inevitably take power (given that he was the most popular opposition politician by far) and strategizing about factional politics following a brewing revolution is just categorically different to annexing territory and poisoning opponent politicians.

Read my comments above in this discussion tree.

> I agree that discussing who should and should not be in the government of an independent state is wrong.

But annexing a piece of land is just on a completely different level.

There is no equivalency and you should not be trying to create it.

> There is no equivalency

There's also no equivalency between a serial killer who killed 10 people and a serial killer who killed 100 people.

> and you should not be trying to create it

I'm not trying to create any equivalency. But if these two serial killers are fighting each other to death, may I please be excused from rooting for one of them?

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