Tomás Ó Flatharta

We wish to thank a good friend and comrade, Duncan Chapel, for writing the document which follows.

Link :

Spotlight on lies about Ukraine – 18 Claims that circulate and what the evidence shows

Readers are invited to join the discussion – the myths which are demolished here have circulated in all parts of the globe – some are specific to Ireland -which we have highlighted in previous blog articles on this site – see references at the end of this article.

The policy of Irish Left With Ukraine (ILWU) is highlighted by the slogan

TL;DR: Part 9 of the ‘With Washington and Moscow’ series. Not an analytical piece: a tool for conversations that happen at short notice in group chats, meetings, and pub debates. Each entry is self-contained. Where the evidence is genuinely contested, it is described as such. Seventeen claims are answered. The 2014 coup claim has to explain why the coup produced an OSCE-observed election in which Svoboda fell from 10.45 to 1.16 per cent. The civil war claim runs into Igor Girkin, the FSB colonel who seized Sloviansk and later said he pulled the trigger of this war, a hostile witness the Kremlin has since jailed. The “not one inch eastward” pledge was real and verbal, and Russia then signed the 1997 Founding Act accepting that every state chooses its own security arrangements. The Johnson-at-Istanbul story rests on one Arakhamia sentence while omitting the next one, and on a visit that came ten days after the talks ended. The proxy claim collapses against Kursk, the refinery strikes and the Chevron tankers. Also covered: language law, Minsk, the UN Nazism resolution, Russia’s imperialist character, the polling shift to 69 per cent for negotiations alongside 80 per cent refusing territorial concessions, and Baltic and Georgian agency in NATO accession.

Many of these claims circulate simultaneously through Russian state media and MAGA-aligned outlets — a convergence examined in Part 10 of this series. This document addresses the factual substance regardless of the source.

1. ‘The CIA staged a coup in 2014 and installed a far-right government in Ukraine’

A coup is the sudden, illegal seizure of power. If the CIA staged a coup, the people who came to power should surely be its agents or tools. Ukraine held a presidential election on 25 May 2014, observed by the OSCE. A mainstream liberal-conservative, Petro Poroshenko, won 54.7% of the vote in the first round. The far right was routed electorally: Svoboda’s vote was decimated, from 10.45% in the 2012 parliamentary elections to 1.16%. Dmytro Yarosh of Right Sector received 0.7%. A coup, then, that produced a democratic election — and a democratic election that the far right lost by a factor of ten.