Baseless accusations = nothing was happening in Crimea. You yourself said that the new government "might", that "it's fair to expect", etc. For the time being, it's Russia which isn't respecting previous agreements, ie, not to try to take apart Ukraine.
And the fact that Russian interests are clearly threatened is NOT a moral justification for invading a foreign nation. Otherwise, every war would be justified.
>For the time being, it's Russia which isn't respecting previous agreements, ie, not to try to take apart Ukraine.
Nuland's call clearly shows that the US administration has actively supported the overthrowing of an elected government. This comes after $5bn of investments to "democratise" (i.e. de-russify) Ukraine in the last 10 years. Is that "respecting previous agreements"?
>And the fact that Russian interests are clearly threatened is NOT a moral justification for invading a foreign nation.
I admire your "black & white" thinking, but history is not that clear cut. Was Reagan justified in invading Grenada? Was Bush I justified in invading Panama? Big countries must look after their interests, or they wouldn't be big countries.
Crimea is a majority-russian enclave, on which Russia maintains historical dibs, and which is irreplaceable from a strategic point of view. Ukraine as a whole is almost not a "foreign nation" in many ways (it has holy cities for the Russian Orthodox and a long history shared with Russia that only sort-of ended 20 years ago). There is no way a Russian government will ever leave Crimea to NATO or the EU, end of; as I said elsewhere, it would be like Panama being left to the Chinese or the Russians.
A sane US/EU strategy would have worked to peacefully de-federate Crimea from West Ukraine first, before bidding for Kiev. That's the realistic, win-win approach. Trying to get that peninsula out of Russian control is an overreach that Putin will not accept. The '90s are long gone, Putin is not Eltsin, if we want to keep weakening the old bear we have to play smarter than this.
This entire frame is insane. The USA and EU certainly have their own interests in Ukraine, but by the sounds of it you think the protests were part of a US/EU strategy to engineer an artificial coup.
And your critiques are incoherent. First you claim that the protests are the works of ultra-nationalist neo-nazis, then you move to saying that all the developments of the past couple months are the work of the EU, USA, and Russia? It makes no sense. The neo-nazis you link to above are relatively fringe groups with little influence (though a propensity to violence), but they despise the EU and USA as much as they do Russia. There may be a path to reconcile these seemingly very contradictory stances, but it's very, very narrow and you don't seem to to realize they need to be reconciled.
And the fact that Russian interests are clearly threatened is NOT a moral justification for invading a foreign nation. Otherwise, every war would be justified.