But that doesn’t cut it. If you say that CIA instigated maidan, it must mean there was a phone call where someone with a thick American accent called Putin, and said something along the lines of: “Hey Vlad, we have a situation. We really want to get rid of Poroshenko, and this is a perfect moment to do this, he just signed an EU Association agreement. So can you call him “on the carpet”, and explain the consequences such that he’d nix it, and we have a pretext for a nice little revolution there.” That’s some 4D chess there. I think it’s much simpler. The Ozero ОПГ just can’t have anything resembling rule of law or actual democracy anywhere near their “sphere of influence”, especially in a culturally close nation like Ukraine, lest Russians get any ideas. And those pesky EU people are known to push these things wherever their dirty paws touch. So in gets called Poroshenko, gets a briefing, nixes the EU Association agreement, people understandably get mad about this, put their CIA-sponsored cooking pots on their heads, and overthrow the dipshit stooge. In comes Putin, chooses plan C “annexation of Crimea” to punish Ukrainians for their disobedience (but also, can’t have the Sevastopol base on Western-aligned land). And… This is likely where it was supposed to end, for time being at least. But no, fucking Strelkov gets a divine vision of how he can become saint Igorj the Breaker of Chains, and ‘free’ ‘Novorossiya’ from those pesky Ukrainians, takes initiative, and goes for Slovyansk. Everyone else then plays along, hey, maybe it does work out. And the thing is, none of this actually matters. Because Russia recognised Ukrainian independence in 1991 with the borders that the Soviet republic had. There’s a reason why Südtirol is still Italy, and they don’t even discuss it. Because doing so opens the kind of Pandora’s box that we’re witnessing wide open for three years now.