ABSTRACT
With the exception of the disaster that took place at Chornobyl in 1986, Ukraine used to be almost invisible to much of the world until angry Ukrainians propelled it recently into the news. In 2004–05, the country got sympathetic media coverage in the West and elsewhere where there is a free press because of the Orange Revolution, a grassroots action that succeeded in preventing Viktor Yanukovych from stealing the presidency through a rigged election; and then there was mostly sympathetic coverage again in the same parts of the world nearly a decade later, in 2013–14, when Euromaidan exploded on then-President Viktor Yanukovych, and then drove him from office. There were many reasons for the people’s anger, and many protests against him during his time as president (and even before), but the trigger for Euromaidan and what eventually did him in was that fateful announcement on November 21, 2013 that he had changed his mind about the direction that he would take Ukraine, and that he preferred to follow a path in tandem with Russia and to not seek closer association with Europe and the West as he had once promised. It is almost certainly no coincidence that Yanukovych’s change of heart followed a trip to Moscow, where he met with Russia’s President Putin, and where he may have been threatened or dressed down, or both.
