Thread by @rynkrynk

I’m not even gonna list everything this person (or, probably, group of good old balding comrades sitting around in a government building somewhere in Moscow) is hilariously wrong about, but I do want to make this point very clear: Maidan was not a coup.

https://twitter.com/PolinaPomorenko/status/1547884011975954432

It initially was a slightly naive, incredibly peaceful student uprising against a government filled with amazingly corrupt (if you think Ukraine has problems NOW, read up on Yanukovych’s inner circle) thugs who had no problem whatsoever kidnapping and murdering journalists or

who ever disagreed with them and had enough influence to threaten them. A lot of people use the phrase “the protests turned violent”, and they’re kind of right. The protests did turn violent — but only after the government sent special ops guys to beat up the students who were

peacefully protesting with posters and stuff. But even then, after more and more outraged people joined the protest, Maidan remained pretty much peaceful. Until the government tried to outlaw all kinds of protests and, when that didn’t work, sent actual snipers to slaughter

the protesters in broad daylight. And over a hundred people died valiantly fighting for a better future for Ukraine. Despite what Kremlin-funded sources might tell you, this wasn’t some kind of alt-right uprising — there were people of all political backgrounds among the people

who spent their days and nights on Kyiv’s independence square, building barricades, painting posters, giving lectures and so on. Yes, there were nationalists. But there also were all kinds of leftists there, as well as people who had generally been pretty much apolitical

until our government decided that beating up unarmed kids in the middle of the night was a good idea. All of my friends — mostly sociology students from Ukraine’s oldest university — took part in the protests, as well as my parents, their friends, and pretty much everyone I knew.

And you know what else often gets overlooked? Maidan didn’t result in someone “coming to power”. It resulted with our ex-president fleeing to Russia (where else?), our government resigning, and new elections being held. Transparent ones with international electoral observers.

Petro Poroshenko won those, but if you wanna imagine him as some kind of bloodthirsty tyrant who hung on to power, think again — he ran for second term in 2019 and lost to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. So who exactly is running this “Kyiv regime” Russian trolls get so overexcited about?

Is it the democratically elected president who served one term, lost the following election and calmly went on with his life? Or is it the other democratically elected president who won more than 70% of the votes, and just happens to be an openly Jewish Russian-speaking comedian

who based his entire electoral platform of the idea that Ukraine should try and stop the war in the East (reminder: Russia actually invaded back in 2014) and seemed to genuinely believe that it would be possible to solve all of this through diplomacy?

As a bonus: some photos I took during the earlier-ish days of Maidan. Yeah, this is definitely what a secret CIA-organised coup looks like.