It was the spring of 2014, and Kyiv was in tumult. For all its talk about democracy, the Obama administration had enthusiastically supported the mass protests in western Ukraine that, on February 21, had ousted the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Progressives have memory-holed much of this history. The Obama State Department and its European counterparts had an embarrassingly notorious hands-on role in the Maidan revolution and the new Ukrainian government that emerged in its aftermath. Predictably, this meddling in another nation’s domestic politics, to the point of toppling the elected government, was exploited by Vladimir Putin to rationalize Russia’s responsive aggression in eastern Ukraine — the annexation of Crimea and the border war that exploded into today’s full-out war when Moscow launched its February 2022 invasion.
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