Photo: Leonhard Foeger/Reuters

You might just possibly not have heard of the Nazi Jews in Ukraine. I mean those who, in illegally removing the democratically-elected President, Victor Yanukovych, have served as the minions of a decadent, gay marriage conspiracy.

No bells ringing yet? You’re not alone. For, if you’re a western European, Yanukovych, Russia and their friends will only have told you that the Ukrainian revolution is a Nazi coup.

If you happen to be a Ukrainian riot policeman, however, your erstwhile president will have told you that the protesting students in the Maidan, the main square of Kiev, are part of a Jewish conspiracy. Hence why they had to be beaten, abducted and tortured; attacked with tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades and live ammunition; and tricked into chasing the police as it retreated from the Maidan so that rooftop snipers could pick off the activists and, then, those who came to drag the wounded to safety.

Meanwhile, if you’re a devotee of official Russian news, you’d have heard that, somehow, all this was driven by that major pillar of EU foreign policy, the gay marriage agenda, through which Europe hopes to spread its decadence. (Surely you didn’t think that the fact that Germany, up until recently, had an openly gay foreign minister was just a coincidence, did you?)

When the protesting students began to call the Maidan, “Euromaidan”, the pliant Russian media retorted by referring to it as the “Gayeuromaidan”.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to keep tabs of what Yanukovych and Russia are saying for internal consumption and what for foreign ears. Much of the world media missed that the people warning us of the anti-Semitism of the protesters were themselves stoking anti-Semitic propaganda to beat them down.

It’s taken an academic specialist, the historian Timothy Snyder of Yale, to bring this and much else to clear light. As he’s memorably put it, Yanukovych is a case of the wolf crying wolf. The fascist who warns against another holocaust.

None of this means that the politicians who have replaced him at the centre stage of Ukrainian politics are wholly attractive. Shady business deals lurk in the past of both Yulia Tymoshenko (the former prime minister who was imprisoned by Yanukovych and who’s recently been released) and Oleksandr Turchynov, the current Acting President. Indeed, the two have been business partners. Turchynov, a Baptist elder, is not a liberal poster-boy, having equated same-sex marriage with “the promotion of sodomy”.

But all this pales against the record of Yanukovych. Democratically elected, yes. But, since then, industrious in undermining every pillar of parliamentary democracy.

Rule of law? Separation of powers? Yanukovych was a rapist and a thief who found a judge willing to make the relevant file disappear. The judge was then appointed chief justice.

Those people who say that Yanukovych was not deposed in a constitutional manner had better tread carefully. The laws that Yanukovych passed during his last weeks in power – laws that essentially transformed all the protesters into “extremists” liable to imprisonment and religious organisations into “foreign agents” – were themselves passed illegally.

In the years leading to all this, Yanukovych had been busy pillaging the State coffers and squeezing businesses and factories to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. His son overnight became one of the richest men in Europe.

It’s in this context that the protests began last year. Is there any element of truth that the far right was the moving spirit and that the deposition was, as Yanukovych claims, a Nazi coup?

There is a far-right party, Svoboda (founded in 1991 as the “social national party”), which has been electorally successful. It’s one of the top five political parties. But its electoral success came in the wake of Yanukovych’s imprisonment of the leaders of the mainstream opposition parties.

Vladimir Putin knows that history has no right side

Svoboda suited Yanukovych the way that Islamist parties suited the Arab dictators deposed in 2011. He could present himself as the only alternative to fascism.

But how representative has Svoboda been of the Maidan protests?

The initial Ukrainian organiser was actually a Muslim journalist, Mustafa Nayem, originally from Afghanistan. Religious leaders, Catholic and Jewish, backed the protests; some of the more important later organisers were Jews. Hotlines for those seeking missing persons were run by gay activists. Russian speakers from the eastern Ukraine also joined the protests and some of them are among those killed.

Were they all puppets of a sinister power? The far right did play an important role in the protests, alongside all the others. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said that the new government is made up only of the victors – suggesting that it is not representative of the entire country.

In fact, however, the transitional authorities are not from the hard right. The most delicate ministries are being led by technocrats or Russian speakers. The major candidates for the presidential elections in May are both Russian speakers.

You could just about argue that what’s taken place in Ukraine is a coup. But all the signs are that it’s following the pattern of the vast majority of coups of the post-Cold War era. It’s a ‘democratic coup’, led by a popular revolt and with free elections following within five years.

Where does that leave Vladimir Putin’s reaction? Russian troops and ships are on alert from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Will Putin stop at Crimea?

What we’ve witnessed in Ukraine is a revolution, which is never tidy. It’s a coalition of political and social forces that, in normal circumstances, would be adversaries. One can’t exclude that, either in the transition or in a later purge, things could get nasty for Russian speakers.

Which is, of course, the reading of hundreds of thousands Russian speakers in Ukraine, who have called for Russia’s protection. But the Russian intervention also follows a familiar pattern. As many of Russia’s former neighbours have joined Nato or asserted their independence, Russia has sponsored a string of breakaway territories: the eastern part of Moldova; in Georgia, the north-west Black Sea as well as South Ossetia.

In each case, the ostensible reason for action was the protection of a national minority. Russia supported local militias, while itself entering the fray formally as a peacekeeper but it always enforced the peace by protecting the separatists.

The effect, in each case, was to strengthen Russia’s cordon sanitaire against Nato’s encroachment of Russia’s former sphere of influence.

The same pattern appears to be taking place now in Crimea. Some further territory may be nibbled away from Ukraine but if Putin’s record is anything to go by, he’ll settle for hiving off just a part of Ukraine and having it internationally recognised by a handful of allies. A full-scale occupation of the country would be too financially costly.

What should we make of Barack Obama’s claim that Putin is on the wrong side of history? That it’s the usual vacuous talk from a man who loves the ringing sound of his cliches.

Putin knows that history has no right side. Besides, it isn’t on his mind. He’s thinking of the future: an alliance of Eurasian energy-rich autocracies, stretching from the Russian to the Iranian Caucasus.

ranierfsadni@europe.com