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New York Times investigation

This article: "Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted" contains significant information about the final hours. It seems that the security forces, rather than submitting to being the fall guys, fled. User:Fred Bauder Talk 11:37, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

"they were alarmed by language in the truce deal that called for an investigation of the killing of protesters. They feared that a desperate Mr. Yanukovych was ready to abandon the very people who had protected him, particularly those in the lower ranks who had borne the brunt of the street battles." User:Fred Bauder Talk 11:38, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

"the sudden departure of security forces on Friday afternoon had taken the president and his entourage entirely by surprise." User:Fred Bauder Talk 11:45, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Too Much Advocacy and Too Little Neutral Point of View

The Euromaidan article is extremely problematic. It fails to conform to the three basic article policies: (1) no original research, (2) neutral point of view, and (3) verifiability.

The article covers a highly politicized issue on which there are several sides of the story, and none of the sides appear to comport well with verifiable facts.

Recently I deleted two paragraphs that contained a narrative that advocates just one of the several non-factual versions of this issue. The text in question was completely unsupported by references.

I also made two minor editorial corrections where I could see that point of view could be easily removed by simple word changes.

For instance, the original text said "Many protesters joined because of the violent dispersal of protesters..." Calling the police action violent is pejorative and reflects one side of the story. Another side would say that the police were responding to a provocation and were seeking to restore law and order.

I thought that a POV-neutral way of describing the incident would be to use the term "forceful dispersal" instead of violent dispersal.

Similarly, a sentence beginning with "Escalating violence from government forces..." seemed to reflect the same point of view that is in contention. For the sake of neutrality, I changed that to "Escalating use of physical control by government forces..." In both cases, my edits maintained the undisputed description of the events, but without the pejorative words used originally.

And, finally, in a later section the narrative discusses an action of the parliament. It said that the body "allegedly impeached the president." That suggests that there has been no authoritative determination made about whether the president was really impeached or not. But this is an instance where there is irrefutable evidence that the president was not impeached. I modified the text accordingly, and provided references to reliable sources.

After having done all that, Volunteer Marek, citing "POV pushing, weasel-ing and removal of relevant text," undid all of my editorial corrections.

In my opinion this article in its present state is an affront to the facts of the matter. It is a narrative of advocacy.

The article needs to be more factual and less partisan.

One of the challenges in achieving that is the unfortunate amount of media bias that has manifested in covering the topic. There are vast differences in media storylines depending upon which country's media is doing the reporting.

This mainstream bias means that simply citing media reports will not establish something as factual. The media reports themselves would have to be fact checked before they could be relied upon.

But if there is some reasonable way to move toward fixing the present article's problems, I'd be glad to help in a modest way. (Although, I must say that I have no appetite for going back and forth with individuals like Volunteer Marek who apparently wish to preserve a distorted description of the issue.)

But are there others who might be motivated to join in to remove POV rhetoric from this article?

If not, perhaps Misplaced Pages readers would be better served if this article were deleted entirely.

Comments please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tikva2009 (talk • contribs) 18:13, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

At 03:41, 23 January 2015‎ Jbhunley deleted my proposed deletion saying "No, Just no. This is an improper use of PROD," without addressing the policy violations that I asserted. Tikva2009 (talk) 04:25, 23 January 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

My apologies for not immediately posting a note on your talk page as I should have done. I corrected that a few minutes ago. You tried to use a deletion process for articles no one will object to the deletion of. See WP:PROD. The proper process for an actively edited article would be via WP:AFD although considering the quality of the article, and the continued improvement such a proposal would be considered disruptive and would likely lead to sanctions. Before you placed that template you had already been notified that this article was subject to discretionary sanctions because of the controversy surrounding the topic. There was no need for me to address your policy concerns, "mainstream bias" is not a policy concern it is the point-of-view we edit from at Misplaced Pages.

My assumption, when I saw your PROD was that you are a new editor simply being WP:BOLD. I saw a Welcome template on your talk page, it has links to Misplaced Pages editing policies. I would encourage you to read and familiarize yourself with the basic policies on sources and verifiability at a minimum before editing in such a highly charged area. If you approach the issues you find here in a collaborative manner and within Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines your editing time here will be much more rewarding and the encyclopedia will benefit from your perspective. If you have a specific policy concern you can point to with a diff please feel free to contact me on my talk page.JBH (talk) 05:22, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

New Section

@Tikva2009: per our discussion on my talk page I have read through the article and have a pretty good idea of what the talk page history is like. The article is well sourced as articles on controversial subjects tend to be. Most sections that state facts cite a good source however I have not used my Russian in nearly 20 years so I can not get a good sense of the Russian language sources, even less so the Ukrainian ones.

Essentially the first sections seem pretty good. The pro-Government perspective, which could use some elaboration, is mostly covered in Anti-Maidan. Where some new work might be needed is in updating the Impacts sections. We are a few months down the road from when much of that was written and time might lend perspective. Keep in mind that a lot of the follow on effects have been overtaken by and subsumed in the war. What are your ideas? JBH (talk) 01:00, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

@JBH Thanks for moving the conversation to the talk page. Please look at the second and third paragraphs in the introductory section of the article. (The ones that begin with "The protests reached..." and "Despite the impeachment...") I'm having trouble understanding how that is not what's called in Wiki lingo "no original research." My understanding is that content is supposed to be sourced, not simply expounded upon by Wiki editors. Since those paragraphs have no citations, what is the source? Tikva2009 (talk) 05:16, 6 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

@Tikva2009: These paragraphs are what is known as the LEAD and are intended to summarize the main points of the article based upon information in the body of the article. Best practice is not to load up the Lead with citations because everything there is backed up by the sources in the main body. In effect the entire article is what backs up the lead. If you feel the substance of the article does not back up what is in those paragraphs then you need to address how the lead misrepresents what is in the article or state what specific assertion you want to challenge. Also how would you want to change it?

WP:OR does not prevent editors from using their own words, in fact copyright requires that they do. What is disallowed is drawing conclusions beyond what the sources say or combining sources to draw conclusions not addressed by any of the sources. Do you think this has occurred there?

Also just typing @JBH will not send me a notification you need to type {{ping|Jbhunley}} and sign your edit with ~~~~ which will send me a notification as well as an email in case I have not logged on to Misplaced Pages.

I guess the question is specifically what do you object to in those paragraphs and how would you want to fix it? JBH (talk) 05:49, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jbhunley I read the LEAD style guide you referenced. Unlike your understanding, this document calls for the lead paragraphs being "carefully sourced as appropriate." It also calls for "a neutral point of view." The paragraphs in question meet neither criterion. Let me give you an example: Paragraph two includes the statement, "The next day, the parliament impeached Yanukovych..." and the third paragraph says, "Despite the impeachment of Yanukovych..." The Lead Section Guidelines also require that "significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article." So I tried to follow the "impeach" theme into the body of the article. I found two occurrences. In the first there is the phrase "allegedly impeached the president." A Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article is cited as a source. But if you read that article you will see that it presents reliable evidence that Yanukovych was not impeached. The second occurrence of this subject says, "...Yanukovych flees the country and gets impeached on 22 February 2014." It cites articles from BBC news, the Financial Times, and Agence France-Presse, none of which seem to use the word "impeach." If Yanukovych had been impeached, there would have been a constitutional transition of power in Kyiv. So that matter is not trivial. It is not just a matter of word choice. It is a matter of what really happened. The Ukrainian crisis is one of the most dangerous situations in the world today. For many people Misplaced Pages will be the source of first choice if they seek information about it. This article presently is permeated with misleading information. You asked me to cite what I think should be changed. I've tried to give you a starting point. Hope you will find it helpful. Tikva2009 (talk) 19:38, 6 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

@Tikva2009: OK, I understand what your objection is and agree that it has merit. I also agree with you that the events in the Ukraine in particular and the Russian periphery in general, constitute an incredibly dangerous situation I have looked at the sources used to support "impeachment" and agree that they and the facts do not support the legal term. Based upon those sources and some others I found I think we can use "removed by a constitutional majority vote". This term is supported by ref 173. and if you need more by:

"The vote to "remove Viktor Yanukovych from the post of president of Ukraine" was passed by 328 MPs.Such ballots, passed by what is called constitutional majority, are binding and enter into force with immediate effect, the BBC's Ukraine analyst Olexiy Solohubenko reports." from Ukrainian MPs vote to oust President Yanukovych

I also think that Was Yanukovych’s Removal Constitutional? gives a very good analyss of the situation although I have not explored the bona fides of the site to see if it passes WP:RS. This is also addressed in 88 Discussing the de jure requirements vs the de facto realities of Yanukovych's removal from office might make a good section for this article or possibly an interesting article Constitutional Crisis in Ukraine of its own now that enough time has passed for some good sources to be available. JBH (talk) 21:23, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jbhunley A "constitutional majority vote" does not seem to be applicable here. The RFE\RL article spells out what was required by the constitution that was in force for removing a president. There was a majority vote, but it did not measure up to the constitutional requirement. In that circumstance, the majority vote was not constitutional, and that makes the term "constitutional majority vote" nonsensical, regardless of what source claimed it. Perhaps it could be said that "a parliamentary majority voted to remove Yanukovych, but the vote failed to meet the constitutional requirements for removal," and then reference the RFE/RL article. I tried to view the www.ponarseurasia.org article that you mentioned. But my virus protection software won't allow me to connect. It reports, "This Connection is Untrusted." Tikva2009 (talk) 22:24, 6 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

@Tikva2009: Most of the sources I have seen report it as meeting the "constitutional majority" although I have seen a couple that say it did not reach the required numbers. Here is where WP:OR comes in, we must report what the sources say and give the greatest weight to what the majority of RS report. We can place a note-link that says the constitutionality is disputed but the fact is that Yanukovych abandoned his office, was removed, and the government of Ukraine has moved on without him. I could see using Yanukovych was removed by a super-majority vote of parlament but that would likely run afoul OR because the sources are calling it a "constitutional majority" and I have not seen the watered-down term "super-majority" used. It might also be good to make a section about the dispute in the article. The paper I linked above talks about the constitutional issues and one of the things it brings up is that a President simply abandoning his office is something that the constitution did not envision. So when presented with that situation the Rada had to make do to continue governing. This kind of sticky situation happens in revolutions.

About the weakest modification I could see is Yanukovych was removed from office by the Rada or more precisely After abandoning the capital Yanukovych was removed from office by the Rada both of those capture the essence of what happened and can be supported by sources, although others here may well object. The constitutionality of the vote, what constitution was in effect etc are all what is being fought over, right now the current government of Ukraine is recognized as legitimate so that is how we report it. If the pro-Yanukovych faction wins someday then we will report their way. We, of course, can and should document the issue but it will always be from the mainstream/status-quo viewpoint. JBH (talk) 23:16, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

@jbhunley There is no such thing as a "constitutional majority" in the Ukrainian constitution that was in force. See: //en.wikisource.org/Constitution_of_Ukraine,_2010. I searched it and find no such term. (Read what it says about how a president can be legitimately removed.) It doesn't matter what a so-called reliable source reports on it, the "constitutional majority" simply is a non-existent construct for removing a democratically elected president. This is a very politicized issue. People are lying on all sides. Right now the Euromaidan article strongly favors one set of lies. Why are you inclined to support it? I suspect you are getting so caught up in the letter of the Wiki law that you are failing to see the reality. I still maintain that saying "a parliamentary majority voted to remove Yanukovych, but the vote failed to meet the constitutional requirements for removal," is most in keeping with the Wiki rules. The Maidanists claim he was removed from office democratically. The Russians claim he fled the country without relinquishing office, under threat of death by neo-Nazi thugs. Neither version will be helpful to the Wiki reader. The language I suggested would help readers to understand the truth. It is also well documented. Will you make the changes? This is an important issue, as we both agree, and I think that removing the politicized point of view is essential. Tikva2009 (talk) 01:55, 7 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

@Tikva2009: If you can find good sources to say that please cite them here. Like I said, I can easily support a linked footnote that says the constitutionality is questioned.

You are quite correct that I am caught up in Misplaced Pages rules, that does not mean I do not see the reality of the situation. My background is in International Relations and pre-1991 I studied the USSR. Once I could see the focus was moving from Cold War I moved into other areas so, while by no means an expert, I have a pretty good idea how to handle a house of mirrors when I encounter one. However the WP:OR you so often mention means that no matter what my analysis says or however good it is, I can not put it into Misplaced Pages. I can use my background to inform my editorial judgement but I can not say "screw it I know what is right no matter what the sources say". I know that there is a propaganda war going on with anything touching on Russia, just like I know the US is using massive propaganda about the War on Terror but there is nothing that I can do about it on Misplaced Pages except try to find Reliable Sources that talk about the issues. Sometimes the best way to deal with the media hall of mirrors is wait for a while for good academic papers and books to come out that cut through much of the propaganda.

All the lead really needs to say is that Yanukovych was removed from power, a footnote can be added to say the process used was flawed and there should be a discussion about the issue in the body of the article. You must remember that when you are talking about sovereign states what their sitting government says is legal is de facto and de jure legal. That is the very essence of sovereignty. Other nations may try to bring pressure, and how a nation relates to other nations may be covered in international law but their internal governmental processes are theirs to determine.Their international relations are also theirs to determine unconstrained by anything other than the price they pay when other nations react either diplomatically, with sanctions or through war.

There is no neutral (as in fair to both sides) way of dealing with this issue. You are correct that we need another way to refer to Yanukovych's removal from office other than using the term "impeach" but we can not soft sell his removal and by implication question the legitimacy of the current government of Ukraine because the overwhelming majority of reliable sources do not do so. I agree it is important to get it right and you catch things I would overlook and may have different, valid, views on Misplaced Pages policies. That is what collaboration is about, it would be a crappy encyclopedia if everyone agreed all the time. We have our policies, rules and overarching principles so that when people disagree on content they can agree on why something is included or excluded regardless of their personal feelings on the subject.

I apologize for the lengthy text I just wanted to give you an idea of where I am coming from. JBH (talk) 03:16, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

@jbhunley Yes, I believe I could find reliable sources to document the divergent political positions that I described. But I'm disinclined to spend the time to do that. I say that for two reasons. One, in my limited, recent experience with Misplaced Pages rules police, I've gotten the impression that the interpretation of the rules is quite fluid. If you want to know what I mean, please read back over all our discussion, going back to the pages the precede the exchange on this page. Second, what the two sides in question are saying is not the point. The truth is the point. The documentable truth. Right now the article is presenting only a fraction of it. Please look over again the RFE/RL article that I pointed to earlier. Are you saying that it is unreliable? If so, please make your case. When I get your answer, I'll comment further. Thanks for your willingness to persist in this debate. Tikva2009 (talk) 03:37, 7 February 2015 (UTC)tikva(2009)

@Tikva2009: I will read the article, right now the site says it is down for maintenance. Reliable or not it is only one article so you will need others. I, personally, am interested in your viewpoint so I hope you do chase up some good sources.

As to Misplaced Pages "rules police" no one editor has more power here than any other. If you would like more input here is a list of the primary editors of this article with over 1000 edits on Misplaced Pages. I do not know what their viewpoints are I just used Wikichecker to see who the top editors were.

Alex Bakharev, Triggerhippie4,Volunteer Marek, Nickst, Yulia Romero, DDima, Lvivske, Lihaas, Aleksandr Grigoryev

Go to each of their talk pages and post this message There is new discussion at Euromaidan about how to address Yanukovych's removal from office. in a new section titled Request for input. Do not state your position on the issue and put exactly the same message on all of their talk pages. By doing this you will be able to draw more attention to the page without being guilty of WP:CANVASSING. This will give you more opinions than just mine. I have started a new section below for that discussion. JBH (talk) 04:31, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

@Tikva2009: OK, I read the source you mentioned, RFE/RL has been used here so it looks like it has been accepted as a RS on this subject. There is really not much in it that has not been covered by other sources. What do you want to use this to support?

The constitution question seems moot, I have seen nothing that explains how one is better or worse for removing the President and from my cursory reading of both in translation I do not see anything that would. The Rada did not claim they were using impreacment (see the big green quote in the section below.) they used their power to call elections. This was a Legal Fiction used to get arround an the intractable situation the Ukraine was faced with.Although, baring RS saying so, it would be OR to place that in the article. It could be good to use in a section talking about the constitutioal crisis that came about because of the protests. JBH (talk) 15:19, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

How to address Yanukovych's removal from office

The discussion started in "New Section" above. JBH (talk) 04:31, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

@Tikva2009: I made this change to the lead as a way to get us started. Basically I changed "impeached" to "removed from office". I know it is not perfect but it gets rid of a legal term I think you will agree the RS do not support. JBH (talk) 05:12, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Actually RS do use the term "impeachment". Typical example: . So yes, RS do support it. Anything else is OR.Volunteer Marek (talk) 05:38, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

@Volunteer Marek: Yes, however how do we represent all of the sources which avoided the use of the term "impeach" such as these, none of which describe what happened as an impeachment:

• Christian Science Monitor parliament voted on Saturday to remove President Viktor Yanukovich from office
• Reuters Ukraine's parliament voted on Saturday to remove President Viktor Yanukovich
• Reuters Ukraine's parliament voted to remove President Viktor Yanukovich
• BBC Ukrainian MPs vote to oust President Yanukovych

"The vote to "remove Viktor Yanukovych from the post of president of Ukraine" was passed by 328 MPs.Such ballots, passed by what is called constitutional majority, are binding and enter into force with immediate effect, the BBC's Ukraine analyst Olexiy Solohubenko reports."

I came to this article with the same view you are expressing however as I looked into the sources I have found more high quality sources avoiding the term entirely. While I do not support watering down the claim nearly as much as Tikva2009 wants to I think we have a situation where some/many sources used the term "impeachment" improperly. No source that reports on the actual vote uses the term and the Rada itself did not use the term as near as I can find.

If I am mistaken in this and this issue has been previously discussed here or elsewhere would you please give me a link to it so I can read it? I am not wedded to changing the term but as near as I can tell the Rada used a different method to remove Yanukovich from office rather than formal impeachment proceedings. How do we proceed with this? JBH (talk) 06:26, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

@Volunteer Marek:The only accademic treatment of what happened I have been able to find is this which describes how the Rada removed him from office.

"The Rada did not follow, or claim to follow, the impeachment route. They passed a resolution that established that Yanukovych had removed himself from fulfilling his constitutional duties. The resolution stated that due to the fact that Yanukovych had unconstitutionally stopped fulfilling his presidential duties, the Rada was calling early presidential elections as is their right under Article 85/7. It seems that nothing in the constitution prohibits parliament from passing such a resolution, which has the full legal force of a law, according to Article 91. The speaker of the Rada signed the resolution, again in accordance with the constitution (Article 88/3)."

While I admit it is OR for to say in the article that many news agencies used the term "impeachment" because of a misunderstanding it is not OR to consider that in conjunction with other sources to inform out editorial judgement. What do you base your objection to changing "impeachment" to "removed from office"? JBH (talk) 14:05, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jbhunley I object to your characterization of my commentary about this article as "watering down the claim." You are imputing upon me a motive that is not mine. Actually, I have been trying to correct inaccuracies. I presume that the "watering down" comment was just a slip of the tongue and that you will correct it. The change that you attempted to make about what to call the removal of Yanukovych is a step in the right direction. The Ukrainian constitution is available on Wikisource. Article 111 spells out all the criteria that must be met before impeachment can occur. I have never seen any reliable source report that the requirements for impeachment were ever met. That makes those reports that refer to impeachment verifiably false. It is true, as Volunteer Marek points out, that many so-called reliable sources have used the term. You have cited others that have avoided it. Perhaps those outlets that are persistently reporting an easy-to-verify falsehood should be officially considered as unreliable sources. Tikva2009 (talk) 18:47, 7 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

@Tikva2009: I apologize if you took offence at my idiom, none was intended, I struck the term above. It is simply shorthand for the continium of how to refer to the Presidents removal.There is the 'strong' claim using "impeachment" that carries the implication that his removal falls fully within the process secified in the Constitution; The "removed from office" which makes no implication as to the legitimacy of the removal; And the 'weak' (watered down) claim, which I understand is your view, that his removal was totally illigitimate, has no Constitutional basis and therefore implies that the current government of the Ukraine is illegal. In my opinion both extreme claims are equally wrong for us to make. Read the green text above it is as clear a statement of what occured as I can find. Do you have a source that says otherwise? JBH (talk) 19:29, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Well, the word "impeached" has to appear somewhere in there, as that's what the Ukrainian Parliament did. Whether they followed all the rules and the letter of the law is, I guess, an open question, and there are sources which discuss it. In the lede the best thing to do would be to say something about "controversial impeachment". In the rest of the article we can use "removed from office" except in the sentence which explicitly discusses the impeachment.Volunteer Marek (talk) 21:06, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

@Volunteer Marek I'm having trouble making sense out of your position. If there is a constitutional procedure for impeaching a president, and that procedure is not followed, then the president has not been impeached. It is illogical to say that he was impeached, but just not according to the rules. For instance, if you want to get a license to drive, you must pass a written and road test as prescribed by law. You can't claim yourself to be licensed without passing those tests and explain that you're licensed but simply didn't follow "all the rules and the letter of the law." Did you read Article 111 of the constitution? If the procedure there is not followed, there is no impeachment. You've accused Jbhunley and me of weaseling. Could you explain why that is not what you are doing now? It's really quite ironclad: No written and road test, no drivers license. No compliance with the constitutionally mandated procedure for impeaching, no impeachment. You are dancing around the fact that he was not impeached. Thrown out, yes; impeached no. Tikva2009 (talk) 01:49, 8 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

If there is a constitutional procedure for impeaching a president, and that procedure is not followed, then the president has not been impeached. - Maybe. But we, as Misplaced Pages editors, do not make that call. If reliable sources say he was impeached, then we say he was impeached. If they say he wasn't, then we say he wasn't. If they say that he was impeached but there were problems with the procedure, then that's what we say. You don't get to evaluate whether he was impeached or not (even if you are a constitutional lawyer or something, which I seriously doubt).Volunteer Marek (talk) 03:29, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Agree JBH (talk) 03:46, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jbhunley You are raising a separate issue of the legitimacy of the present government. I think there are arguments both for and against that. Indeed, as we speak, a deadly war is being fought over that issue. But I think we should for now stick strictly to the question of impeachment. Please see my explanation above to Marek. There is no "strong" claim for using "impeachment" if there is no evidence that it occurred. Newspapers that have misreported something are not reliable sources. If we can't agree that the word "impeachment" must go, let's take this to a higher authority. I think it's been discussed enough here. How can we take this to a higher authority? Tikva2009 (talk) 01:49, 8 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

@Tikva2009: Looks like I used a confusing idiom to try to clear up my earlier confusing idiom. I thought I had made it clear I was using 'strong' and 'weak' to describe the implications each term has for the legitimacy of the sitting Government of Ukraine. You can not decouple the legitimacy question from the method used to transfer power. That is why this is a contentious issue and I have a hard time believing you do not see that.

You are welcome to take the issue to Dispute Resolution JBH (talk) 03:21, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jbhunley One last thing, regarding your quote from www.ponarseurasia.org: The writer is correct when she says "The Rada did not follow, or claim to follow, the impeachment route." The rest of her comments are not at all about the topic of impeachment. She is talking about the procedure for calling a presidential election. We're not discussing that, we've been talking about the faulty claim of impeachment. The very woman that you quoted states that the "Rada did not follow, or claim to follow, the impeachment route." I've shown you by citing Article 111 of the constitution that the "impeachment route" involves steps that no one claims were followed. How can there be any reasonable disagreement about that? Marek claimed that the Ukrainian parliament claimed it impeached Yanukovych, but he did not support his claim. It seems to me that you are suspending reason and logic in order to preserve a very misleading version of what happened. Won't you stop? Tikva2009 (talk) 02:13, 8 February 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

@Tikva2009: Please read the entire article. It also describes how by abandoning his office Yanukovich was able to place the Rada in a constitutionally untenable position ie a Constitutional crisis. They resolved it using a Legal fiction, the calling of early elections, to remove him from office in the best way they could. In my opinion we have two equally impotent concepts to get across. The Rada did not follow the constitutional requirements for impeachment and Yanukovich was legally removed from office by the Rada the only question is how to fairly present these seemingly contradictory facts without using OR like I did above. @Volunteer Marek: do you agree with/have comments on my statement of the issue? Just to make sure we are all talking about the same issues.... JBH (talk) 03:21, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, but this needs to come out of a reliable secondary source. Also, this is something that's best covered in detail in main text. In the lede we need to be succinct. Hence "controversial impeachment" there works best.Volunteer Marek (talk) 03:30, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

OK, unless there are objections I will make some edits either tonight or in the morning (or someone else can). I'm willing to either self revert on request of we can start another BRD cycle. I definitely agree that this deserves its own section in the article and would like to collaborate with all here to write it. JBH (talk) 03:46, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

@Jbhunley I can't support calling Yanukovych's departure an impeachment. No matter how you slice it, there was no impeachment. I've gone over and over the facts of the matter. It was not a "controversial impeachment." There was no kind of impeachment. The Ukrainian government even admits there was no impeachment. Its ambassador to Washington said in a letter to our Congress that "on February 22, 2014 Viktor Yanukovych fled the capital and de facto removed himself from his constitutional authority." (http://usa.mfa.gov.ua/en/press-center/news/19064-letter-of-ambassador-of-ukraine-to-the-usa-o-motsyk-to-the-us-congress) Ambassador Mostyk's assertion that Yanukovych "removed himself from his constitutional authority" is double talk and has no constitutional basis. I can prove that, but I think it's an unnecessary detail. But Mostyk's circumvention of the truth about the transition is not why I'm offering the quote. It is cited simply to indicate that the Kyiv government does not consider there to have been an impeachment. Therefore, why should you? The fact is that he was deposed by a revolutionary movement that took control by force. You are also jumping ahead to infer that an absence of impeachment means the Kyiv government is totally illegitimate. That's not the case. The international community has accepted the Kyiv government, despite how it came to power, as the successor to the fallen, democratically elected Yanukovych government. Most of Ukrainians have accepted the transition, too. (Notably those in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine have not.) But the transition was neither democratic nor constitutional. That doesn't mean that it wasn't time for Yanukovych to go. But I don't think we should misrepresent the circumstances. For some reason the Kyiv government is trying to portray this as a constitutional transition. But if you read the constitution with an open mind, you'll see that it was not. So by removing the term impeachment, we're not delegitimizing the Kyiv government, we're just being honest. There are probably reliable sources that can be found that will support calling the transition a revolution. I'm not going to spend my time searching for them only to have you guys reject the citations for reasons that lack logic. But I'd encourage you to look. But we don't even have to use the term revolution if you object to it. Here's what I think would give readers an accurate picture: "A parliamentary majority voted to impeach Yanukovych, but the vote failed to meet the constitutional requirements for removal. Lawmakers then took the initiative to depose the unpopular Yanukovych extraconstitutionally. The resulting transition has been recognized by most world governments and by most Ukrainian citizens. The government of Russia and citizens of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine are notable for rejecting the legitimacy of the transition." I won't hold out for using those exact words. But that's the basic message that represents the truth. And I think that reliable sources can be found to support such an explanation. Tikva2009 (talk) 06:50, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Tikva2009

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