The Claim:
A Twitter/X influencer has falsely claimed that Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan pro-democracy protest movement was a “US coup d’état in Ukraine was made possible by CIA funded Ukrainian Nazis who killed their own people and blamed Yanukovych. The US Govt wrecked Ukraine.” The Tweet has been viewed over 800k times.
Narrative Context:
The Russian government has falsely claimed that the Ukrainian pro-democracy Maidan revolution was funded and organized either by the United States and/or the CIA and/or other Western nations and/or Ukrainian neo-Nazis. These false narratives are intended to discredit Ukraine’s current democratic and European political orientation and have been used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Facts:
There is no evidence to support this claim. The Maidan pro-democracy protest was a popular uprising against the corrupt pro-Kremlin regime of Viktor Yanukovich.
On October 18th a Ukrainian court sentenced a former Ukrainian police officer to life in prison and gave two others 15-year prison terms over the deaths of dozens of people shot dead in 2014 during protests that toppled a pro-Russian president, authorities said. According to Reuters, all three former officers were sentenced in absentia by Kyiv’s Sviatoshyn District Court because they were handed over to Russia in 2019 in a prisoner exchange. Yanukovich fled to Russia during the protests and was convicted in 2019 in absentia for treason and abetting Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
