He was overthrown because he didn't kowtow deeply enough in EU negotiations. As in, they wanted to install full-blown IMF-style austerity and privatization of public assets, and they wanted to do it all yesterday. Yanukovich tried to go slower and bargain for more aid and less austerity. He thought they might come back with a counter-offer. Nuland and her masters grew impatient with EU negotiators, then chose a different option...
This is the point in the discussion at which we usually suffer tired invocations of "Ukrainians had agency!" Sure they did, but if we had polled even the most violent of the protesters as to whether they wanted to import enough NATO weapons to cause a war with Russia, very few of them would have agreed. (Probably more would have agreed that it was good to start killing Russian-speakers in Donbas? Well if the poll was taken in Kiev.) Ukraine was a weak polity, without the sort of solidarity required to resist American (and Russian) exploitation of civic divisions. Maybe they imagined that they would escape the fates of similar polities in Hungary, Georgia, Afghanistan, etc. They have not.
This is the point in the discussion at which we usually suffer tired invocations of "Ukrainians had agency!" Sure they did, but if we had polled even the most violent of the protesters as to whether they wanted to import enough NATO weapons to cause a war with Russia, very few of them would have agreed. (Probably more would have agreed that it was good to start killing Russian-speakers in Donbas? Well if the poll was taken in Kiev.) Ukraine was a weak polity, without the sort of solidarity required to resist American (and Russian) exploitation of civic divisions. Maybe they imagined that they would escape the fates of similar polities in Hungary, Georgia, Afghanistan, etc. They have not.