From the Ocean of Lies
9. The Ukraine war is a fight for freedom.
Scott Ritter has repeated in interviews, Substack posts, and X: the United States used Ukrainian nationalists as proxies to remove a constitutionally elected president, install a pro-Western government, and set Ukraine on a collision course with Russia. He treats later events (Donbas fighting, 2022 invasion) as direct consequences of that 2014 operation. According to Scott Ritter, the 2014 events in Ukraine were a U.S.-orchestrated coup (which he calls the “Maidan Coup”), not a spontaneous popular revolution. He attributes primary responsibility to the CIA and the U.S. government, working with Ukrainian far-right nationalists. In his telling, the CIA had a long-standing relationship with the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) dating back to the Cold War.
After Viktor Yanukovych returned to power in 2010, the CIA viewed him as an obstacle to U.S. goals (including eventual NATO membership for Ukraine).
The CIA, together with USAID, NED, and other U.S.-funded networks, helped create the conditions and then “helped orchestrate” the February 2014 overthrow. Armed Ukrainian nationalist groups (Right Sector, Svoboda) provided the street violence that turned protests into a coup.
U.S. diplomats, especially Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, selected the post-Yanukovych leadership (Ritter frequently cites the leaked Nuland–Pyatt call and Nuland’s preference for “Yats”/Yatsenyuk).
According to Scott Ritter, the war did not start with Russia’s February 2022 invasion. He says it started in 2014. His sequence is: The United States (CIA, State Department, Nuland/Pyatt) orchestrated a coup in Kyiv in February 2014 that removed the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and brought Ukrainian nationalists (Right Sector, Svoboda, Banderists) into power.
That new government immediately began persecuting ethnic Russians in the east and south—most notably the Odessa Trade Union building fire and the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in Donbas. Ritter calls this a war of Ukrainian nationalist aggression against the Russian-speaking population.
From 2015 onward, NATO (especially the U.S.) trained and equipped the Ukrainian army at a new facility in Ukraine so it could eventually retake Donbas and Crimea by force. Ritter says the Minsk agreements were never intended to be implemented; they were a stalling tactic.
After eight years of fighting that killed thousands in Donbas, and with NATO treating Ukraine as a proxy that could be used against Russia, Moscow launched its “special military operation” in 2022 as a preemptive/self-defense response.
On 9 April 2022 Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to Kyiv. According to Davyd Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation, Johnson’s message was that Ukraine should not sign anything with Russia “and let’s just fight.” In late March 2022, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators in Istanbul sketched a possible framework: Ukrainian neutrality (no NATO membership), delayed resolution of Crimea, and some form of security guarantees, with a possible Zelensky–Putin meeting to finish it.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO needed to justify its continued existence. NATO expanded eastward over decades to provoke Russia into continued tensions. The war in Ukraine is a proxy war between NATO and Russia. The goal of NATO is to weaken Russia and allow a greater war to gain control over trillions in natural resources controlled by Russia. Napolean and Hitler had such goals and failed badly. Countries in Europe are desperate to avoid blame for the coming financial system collapse and war is the best excuse they can find.