Imagine, if you will, that the Trucker Protest had succeeded in ousting Justin Trudeau from power and putting in its place an ultra-MAGA government sympathetic to Russia. (For the record, I do not believe Trump or his administration is actually all that sympathetic to Russia, but we will leave that for another time.) How would we expect Joe Biden to react to this? There is a significant probability that we would invade Canada and attempt to restore Justin Trudeau to his rightful place: In the Russian mind, Euromaidan had about as much legitimacy as the Trucker Protest does in the minds of America’s left.
What complicates the picture, of course, is that we are several elections away from Maidan—so, to really get at a proper analogy, we would have to imagine a president invading in 2029 or so to restore a “Trudeauite” who understood the importance of US-Canadian friendship after years of increasingly strained relations following an earlier US invasion which had taken Vancouver, i.e. the nice part of Canada.
The irony, of course, is that Euromaidan had a great deal in common with January 6th (as well as the Trucker Protest, for that matter). While it was a byproduct of Yanukovych's decision to reject a European trade deal, it was, like January 6th, fuelled by concerns that the prior election had been fraudulent. It also involved large numbers of people coming to the seat of government and engaging in conflict with law enforcement and the military. The main differences between them are that Euromaidan actually succeeded and was far, far bloodier; 106 protesters and 13 police officers died, 186 people suffered gunshot wounds, and 750 people sustained serious injury.
Euromaidan was, in fact, an insurrection: And it had no legal justification whatsoever. If Putin had invaded Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of this event, it would have been much, much harder to deny its legal justification.
Of course, several elections have occurred since then; the current government is not the government that replaced Yanukovych. That said, Putin almost certainly believes that Euromaidan affected the trajectory of Ukrainian society in such a way as to invalidate those elections: On the other hand, if European integration and Westernization were a bad policy, they would certainly have been repudiated in one of the subsequent elections. They weren’t. Russians, however, don’t appreciate this fact. Even if Euromaidan were illegitimate, subsequent elections have given the policy changes implemented since then legitimacy. Let’s be honest though: I do not believe that the American left would, in the Trudeau analogy above, accept the policy changes introduced by the Trucker Protest simply because a few elections had passed.
There is a certain irony here: Euromaidan may have had good policy aims (much as, I am sure, January 6th did too) but the fact that our government brushes aside its clear illegality is interesting, esp. as it goes about hunting down every person who happened to meander onto the Capitol grounds. If Republicans had invaded the Capitol to protest the signing of NAFTA, or if Democrats had swarmed the Capitol after its rejection had that happened, I doubt few television commentators would talk about what a glorious thing that was. Rowdy foreign protests and insurrections are good, domestic protests and insurrections are bad: Why? Because America. The left is demonstrating the sort of incoherent intellectual double standards that they had, until recently, so mercilessly pilloried the right for holding.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a clear act of imperial conquest—being pursued for a variety of reasons I have described at length elsewhere. But if he had done it in 2014, and tried to take all of Ukraine then, he would have had better justifications at his disposal.