Why Obama Lost His War in Ukraine

When President Obama took control of Ukraine in February 2014, via a coup d’etat against the democratically elected President, rather than by an outright invasion of U. S. troops, the new Government that he imposed in Kiev was democratically very vulnerable. The man whom Obama overthrew had been elected by overwhelming margins in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine’s southeast and by high margins elsewhere in the country’s southeast; those southeastern voters needed to be gotten rid of (exterminated &/or expelled from Ukraine) in order to make the new, pro-U. S. Ukrainian regime (which was supported only by the voters in Ukraine’s northeast), stick, if Ukraine was ever to be restored to democracy while being anti-Russian such as the the new rulers were, whom Obama had installed.
But Crimea immediately broke away from that new Government, Russian troops came into Crimea to protect them against military action that was planned by the U. S. to stop that breakaway, and Crimeans then immediately held a plebiscite in March which overwhelmingly supported reuniting Crimea with Russia – Crimea had never voluntarily left Russia: the USSR’s leader Khrushchev had donated Russia’s Crimean region to Ukraine in 1954, and Crimeans were always overwhelmingly opposed to that change.
Then, elsewhere in Ukraine’s southeast, locals took over government buildings and refused to accept the new coup-imposed, anti-Russian Ukrainian Government. Obama and his newly appointed leaders of Ukraine didn’t like that, and were determined to stop the rebellion. They commenced an ethnic-cleansing campaign to eliminate the voters in the southeast (except in Crimea, which was now being defended by Russian troops, so Obama wouldn’t support his coup-regime’s intent to extend the ethnic cleansing immediately into Crimea and even to destroy Russia; Obama viewed that intent as being premature; his ethnic-cleansing program would be only in other parts of the southeast).
No one can understand Obama’s defeat in Ukraine who does not know that he imposed upon Ukraine a Government that was committed to an ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of the people in the regions that had voted for the man whom Obama overthrew. That’s basic to know, in order to have any possibility to understand why Obama lost this war that he started with his February coup. In fact, the man whom the Obama-team chose to design the ethnic-cleansing program announced in June that there were going to be concentration-camps for everyone in the southeast who supported the breakaway-movement.

This post was published at Washingtons Blog on October 1, 2014.