The Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014, fomented by efforts to purge the government of its Russia-leaning leadership, has its roots in the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) teamed up with the State Department, USAID, Freedom House, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Britain’s Westminster Institute, the political consultant Dick Morris, and other government groups, including the CIA, to block Viktor Yanukovych from taking office as president following an election in 2004, which the US and domestic enemies of Yanukovych branded as rigged. That year alone, according to the State Department, the US spent about $34 million on regime change initiatives in Ukraine, while Soros pitched in about $1.6 million in support of a local “Freedom of Choice” NGO coalition and Ukraine’s “New Choice 2004.”

NED activists and Soros’s OSI employed a broad public relations strategy to aid a youth protest movement, bus paid out-of-town protesters into Kiev, create an online TV protest station, create agitation paraphernalia, and provide offshore training to the anti-Yanukovych student leadership based on a template “revolutionary” strategy and the writings of Gene Sharp they had previously successfully employed in Serbia with a youth group called “Otpor.” They also paid local pollsters to do exit polls in favor of the US backed candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. One of the paid polling groups had USAID, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the U.S. State Department, and Coca-Cola among its former clients.