D. Trump: "You (Ukrainians) should have never started it."

 

US President D. Trump described the reason for the current situation in Ukraine last month as follows:
"You (Ukrainians) should have never started it."
see The Guardian

Below I present my view of what D. Trump meant by this sentence.

In February 2023, more than two years ago, D. Trump published a video message on his official website containing the following words:
"For decades, we've had the very same people, such as Victoria Nuland and many others just like her, obsessed with pushing Ukraine toward NATO, not to mention the State Department's support for uprisings in Ukraine. These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time…"

I believe that at the end of 2013, Ukrainians - provoked by then-US President B. Obama and his subordinates, including the aforementioned Victoria Nuland - began protesting against a completely insignificant issue: against the postponement of the signing of an Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. At some point during these protests, the opposition began committing arson and killings.

However, firstly, the next presidential elections in Ukraine should have taken place in 15 months, and then Ukrainians could have legally elected another President who would sign the above-mentioned agreement more quickly.
Secondly, in November 2013, not only Ukraine but also Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova were offered to sign this Agreement. Azerbaijan too refused to sign the Agreement, and despite signing it in November 2013, Georgia and Moldova have not become EU members so far.
Thirdly, countries are constantly joining and leaving different unions, and nowhere (except in Ukraine) this has become a major problem. 

From the above, we can conclude that Ukrainians should have never started killing and arson during the Euromaidan. 

In addition, the Ukrainian Parliament (immediately after the illegal removal of then President V. Yanukovych from power) repealed by a majority vote the Language Law that had previously granted regional status to the Russian language in Ukraine.
And as even the first post-Maidan President of Ukraine, P. Poroshenko, called this a mistake, Ukrainians should have never started restricting the linguistic rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

And then the situation developed according to the scenario that unfolded in Yugoslav Kosovo in the late 1990s.

Ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine began to fight against the new Ukrainian government, but the Ukrainian media (like the Yugoslav media in the late 1990s) began to claim that the fighters in eastern Ukraine were actually foreigners who had received weapons from abroad.

There were only two differences between the situation in Ukraine and that in Yugoslavia.
The first difference was that the Yugoslav media had claimed that citizens of neighboring Albania were fighting in Kosovo, while the Ukrainian media claimed that citizens of neighboring Russia were fighting in eastern Ukraine.
The second difference was that NATO countries had supported the separatists in Kosovo by beginning to bomb Yugoslavia. In Ukraine, however, NATO countries supported the central government by beginning to supply it with weapons. 

After the Crimea became part of the Russian Federation following a referendum, in 2021 the Ukrainian authorities began threatening Russia with military action to "reintegrate the Crimea into Ukraine." see the official website of the President of Ukraine. I believe that Ukrainians should have never started threatening Russia with this. In my opinion, these threats became one of the main reasons for the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in February 2022.