I did read the sources, at the time it was happening. And I, too, am shocked at the total and successful rewrite of recent history the western media and government establishments have pulled off. It is stunningly Orwellian and extremely scary.

Now. Please show me where a shot was fired during this so-called "invasion" of Crimea? Please explain to me why all the evidence suggests that the people who live there are happy to have been "invaded"? These are simply not normal uses of the word "invasion", which normally involve shooting rather than voting.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-af...

2. How can I be so sure? I remember what was reported at the time. There were plenty of news stories that covered what was happening. I remember fact checking and them often discovering blatant propaganda inside, but the whole "Russia invaded Ukraine and Crimea and you're crazy if you remember otherwise" line didn't start until long after the events in question. If you go back and read the stories in the press at the time they only talked about "pro Russian forces" or "pro Russian rebels". No invasion, no army.

I remember noticing newspapers just starting to repeat one day that what had happened was not in fact a civil war between pro-EU and pro-Russian forces, it was an invasion, but that happened after Ukraine had dropped out of the daily news cycle. I remember at the time the sequence of events that led to the breakout of civil war there. The overthrow of the rather poor but still democratically elected government by people who wanted Ukraine to align with the EU, the outbreak of fighting, the supposedly free and fair "elections" that happened whilst the revolutionary government was busy shelling its own citizens. The flight of refugees from east Ukraine towards Russia instead of away from it.

What actually happened is not a secret. You can go re-read original coverage, original sources, go do some research. Here, I'll help you. Here's a story from 2014 in the fanatically pro-EU and anti-Russian Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/10/donetsk-refere...

Read this article and observe the following things:

1. The fight is described as being between Kiev and separatists/pro-Russian forces, or in Kiev's term, "terrorists". Not the Russian army.

2. The only mention of Putin or the Russian government is in a paragraph saying the separatists had possibly wanted to delay the independence referendum they were trying to organise there, because Putin was signalling he was not willing to lend them military support or absorb the region.

Where in this story is there discussion of a Russian invasion? It isn't there because no such invasion ever happened. At most, small groups of special forces were sent in to aid the rebels covertly in a proxy war, which is no more than what the west did (the US and UK sent soldiers and equipment to support the Ukrainian army). Talk of an actual invasion appeared much later.

Now, saying my viewpoint is the accepted perspective of the Russian government is pure ad hominem. So what? By stating that my views are revisionism and that in fact there was an invasion, you are doing the same thing: repeating the words of clearly self interested parties, namely the western governments and the media who support them, who want Ukraine to have close relations with the EU instead of Russia.

You can read an essay with a similar viewpoint by an American journalist here:

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/02/09/wretched-us-journalism...