This part here is not entirely true:
Yankovych out, interim government in, elections scheduled for May. Boom. Regime change.
At this point, Putin's still been pretty much a side player throughout it all. Nothing more than a few phone calls with Yanukovych, probably just offering him the sanctuary in Russia that he ultimately accepted.
Putin wasn't just a minor side player at this point. This is the point in which MASSIVE amounts of propaganda started coming out of Russia, claiming that nazi fascists were in charge of Maidan protests and constituted a very large part of it (when it was maybe 20 guys tops), that they were pretty much guaranteed to be elected in power in the new government (even going so far as to plant a virus in Ukrainian election systems that would make the the fascist party win with 37.13%+ of the vote, which Ukrainian intelligence discovered and eliminated without telling anyone they found it, and then Russian media accidentally ran reports on election results that showed the fascist party winning with that exact percent of the vote, when it actually got only 0.7%
), and even after the election showed that the country rejected far right fascists and elected a moderate, liberal, pro-Europe government, continued to publish news claiming that the new Ukrainian government is fascist, wants to ban the russian language, and wants to kill all russians.
The result of all of this, as intended, was to make a lot of people in the eastern parts of Ukraine freak out and claim they want independence from the crazy nazi Kiev. So Russia was instigating this fight from the very beginning, even before they sent any troops in.
= new reply since forum marked as read
