Watch Winter on Fire. The idea that the Maidan was a US managed coup like Chile in 1973 or Guatemala and Iran in 1954 and 1953 is fantasy. Tim Snyder's Yale class #20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58
If the bottom up rebellion had agency, there was no sponsored coup.
Vassal states: you mean like bankrupt Britain in 1940-45? "Without American Lend Lease, the UK would fail as a country in short order."
"Without American Lend Lease, the USSR would fail as a country in short order."
according to Stalin's toast to American war production in Tehran on November 8, 1943.
Yanukovych puppet pivoting to Putin's Eurasian Union against the overwhelming vote of the Rada was the real unconstitutional coup.
Russia's ambition to crush an independent Ukrainian identity and the bottom up idea of contractual governance is three centuries old, which you'd know if you bothered to listen to Peter, Catherine and the language and media banning Alexanders and Nicholases. It's Russia's resource-cursed land-based colonial empire that's contingent, negotiable and prone to repeated collapses since 1917, not Ukraine. The fundamental problem is the gap between Russian geopolitical ambition to parity with the West and its real state capacity as a third world petrol station. This is what drives Russia's collective narcissistic nationalism and autocracy-generating marriage to empire, whether under Tsars, Bolsheviks or post-Soviet mafia with a flag kleptocracy.
1991 left the ongoing dissolution of the Russian empire begun in 1917 half done.
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/lost-in-russified-whataboutistan-3b6d27874592
Russia will be added to the list of defunct empires since 1918 in our era of empire demolition (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian....etc). Expect to see lots of new Eurasian states you never heard of before. After that, China.
The American empire and the $, like the one-eyed guy in a room full of blind men, will be the last man left standing. https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-russia-ukraine-wars-backdrop-three-empires-triangular-dance-78811fdbb655
