Victoria Nuland, who is now Acting Deputy Secretary of State and who was then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, can be heard on an intercepted phone call selecting Arseniy Yatsenyuk as America's choice to replace Yanukovych. He did.

The new government changed Ukraine. For the first time, the government had been changed by western Ukraine and its monist vision of the country crushing the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine and the pluralist vision it had hoped for. The pluralist dream died, and the ethnic Russians of the Donbas would suffer attacks on their language, their culture, their rights, their property and their lives.