The writer of that article is an apologist as well. He cites tons of imperialist arguments for why Ukraine as a sovereign nation apparently doesn’t matter and how everyone should bend to Russia because they are a “great power” (an imperialist concept). He has also written other articles that seek to blame the West for what happened, despite having terrible and easily countered arguments for it. His article on “western meddling in Ukraine” is especially terrible. In it, he claims EU meddling was brazen, because (and I’m not joking here) one high-ranking EU official expressed her support for the protesters and handed out cookies.

The US meddling was supposedly more brazen, with a leaked phone call discussing who the US would like to see take power. But as others have already noted:

Yale University professor Timothy Snyder said, “Imagine just how much evidence the Russians have of what the U.S. was doing in Ukraine, given that they had access to that telephone call. That was the best bit they could come up with. And in the context of the time, what that telephone conversation showed was that the Americans were, A, not up to date about what was happening in Ukraine and, B, unable to influence events happening in Ukraine.”

It’s also blatantly ignoring that nothing unconstitutional happened (other than the firing on protesters killing over a hundred civilians), that Yanukovych was voted out of office by a large majority of the democratically elected parliament and that the first thing they did was hold new elections.

It’s also blatantly ignoring Russian meddling, providing 2 billion to Yanukovych and effectively ordering him to crush the protests (possibly the final trigger that led to his removal).

You can’t accept the arguments in that article without also accepting that Ukraine is a vassal state to Russia, which it just isn’t. Russia could have done plenty to make themselves more popular with their neighbours, but never did. They did nothing but demand, demand, demand. Nobody is required to listen to those unreasonable demands, and claiming that not doing so is “provocative” is total horseshit.

Some of us are more concerned with human lives than preserving imaginary lines drawn a map.

If only that was true for Putin.