Don't play stupid. Everyone knows the historical links between Ukraine and Russia for centuries. Everyone knows the security concerns an NATO-led Azov regime poses on Russia's border.
How about YOU don’t play stupid.
Russia actually poisoned one pro western electoral rival years before the Maidan situation, at a time when pro Russian leaders were still electable and Azov was nonexistent.
In 2008, Poland warned Ukraine that Russia fully intended to invade it, after it had done the same in Georgia.
In 2013 Russia bought Yanukovych and Azarov and convinced (or coerced) both men into mothballing the European trade deal before Yanukovych took a massive bung to sell his country out. Again, that was before Azov was an issue.
Yanukovych wasn’t forced out. His government collapsed from resignations, he was constitutionally obliged to install an interim government, and realising his attempt to turn the second biggest Putin puppet regime after Belarus had failed he fled Ukraine into Russia... And had the audacity to order the Ukrainian forces to LET Russia take Crimea.
Ask yourself this - if Benedict Arnold had been President would you have supported him remaining in office after breaking the most fundamental oath of office by fleeing to England and ordering a surrender to the King without any debate at all?!
The mistake made was letting Yanukovych leave. He should’ve been flayed alive.
Azov became an issue entirely because of Russian interference, through Yanukovych, to break up Ukrainian sovereignty.
You know what is completely absent from all of that? America. Which had nothing to do with any of it.
“Everyone knows the historical links between Ukraine and Russia for centuries.”
Yep, Vibrant links in 1933 when the Russian communists murdered millions of Ukrainians in an engineered terror famine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsM3YoPiloE
BTW, Ukraine was a stronghold of the anti Communist “Whites” during the Russian civil war of 1920. They lost to scorch earth tactics in the ‘Red Terror” of the communists from Moscow.