There is a lot of bickering on here, with folks trying to put blame on one party or another. But, as in most hotly contested disputes, things are not black and white, as people usually tend to categorize them. It helps to know (and analyze) the facts before rolling down the path of barking out at each other small, insignificant to the larger picture facts.
There are some facts to remember, that are foundational to the problem. Ukraine's economy and the well being of the masses has been miserable after the collapse of USSR. More importantly, there has been no positive dynamics in the situation - people like to see things moving in a positive direction. So, were Ukrainians unhappy with Yanukovich's government? Yes, broadly, from east to west. That's a fact. Were the Ukrainians unhappy with his predecessor's government? Yes, just as broadly and passionately, from east to west. And the same goes for all post-USSR governments they had. That's a fact. And the shitty socio-economic situation in the country is the fundamental reason why. And what happens when a populace is unhappy with their quality of life? All kinds of antagonistic voices start to emerge and feed into the discontent. And the biggest of these voices in Ukraine is the nationalistic one. It's always been a part of the Ukrainian culture - to blame others for their misfortunes. Even the national anthem proclaims something like "we will defeat our enemies and then we will start to live well". Don't know why, probably because of the unfortunate history of the people that were subjugated, intermixed, assimilated, beaten by all of the neighbors around them for centuries. But, as a consequence, it transforms into nationalism, chauvinism, and all kinds of ugly emotions. In Soviet Union it was the Jews that were the source of all evil (now they're mostly gone from there) - which is, btw, a big part of why all the extreme right wing trash like Right Sector exist. Now that the annoyingly successful Jews are gone, the nationalists turned to Russia as the source of all their misfortunes. In the beginning of this blame campaign (late 80s - early 90s) it was Russians eating all of Ukraine's food (Ukraine was the Soviet "breadbasket", owing to it's unusually rich soils and mild climate). Later, when everyone realized that "the bread" ain't making them rich, it was the gas that the Russians have and they don't (and have to buy from Russia). Then the nationalists' blame got more generalized, as in "they are in the east, we are in the west, they are holding us back because they are not rich like Europeans to the left of us, they are messed up like the east to the right (or whatever) of them".
Back to the Yanukovich time. The nationalistic anti-Russian sentiment in this country had nothing to do with the majority of population, at least with the majority outside of the western Ukraine. But as mentioned above, what everyone was unhappy about was the government's (current and past) inability to cope with the problems. And Yanukovich - that asshole was particularly easy to get angry about - he's a former convicted criminal, corrupt, lying. Basically he was just like every other leader of Ukraine, plus with an official criminal record, making him only superficially different from his predecessors, but very susceptible to public antipathy. And on top of that, he happened to be from the party favored by the Kremlin. Easy food for the nationalists (and the western "friends") to feed to the public.
So what happened? The public anger against the corrupt government turned into an uncontrolled revolt, bringing together the extreme nationalists, ordinary citizens, and intelligentsia with a SEEMINGLY united goal. This situation was (and still is) exploited by the west with a disgusting hypocrisy. Again and again American and European officials keep emphasizing how the will of the Ukrainian people was manifested in the government overthrow of last year. The will of the people. How is it that the leaders of the countries with centuries-long experience of representative democracy come out on world stage and proclaim with a straight face the will of the people in a country so deeply divided on the very subject of what that "will" resulted in? Across the entire country, starting with a small minority in the west, and ending with a large majority in the east, an unignorable part of the Ukrainian citizens felt betrayed, alienated, and marginalized by what happened as the result of Maidan. The will of these people was NOT manifested in that revolution. Their general desire to have a better government coincided with that of most Ukrainians, but a violent overthrow of a fully legitimate and democratically elected government (confirmed as such by all western observers) with a nasty nationalistic sentiment at the center of it, with installation of a government heavily populated with Russia-hating nationalists - that was NOT the will of nearly half of the country. But the shameless lie about the will of the Ukrainian people keeps being used by the west as the basis for justification of the revolt's legitimacy.
Just as shameless as the Russian justification of annexing Crimea - protection of citizens from fascists. Even though Russia got much better lately at adopting the western PR tactics of using moral high ground for justifying aggression, it was still an ugly act of aggression. But this was also not black or white kind of a situation. It would be weird if no one in the Kremlin asked themselves why US for so many years has been so keenly interested in democratizing the countries lying on Russia's borders. Of all the undemocratic countries in the world, why is Georgia, with a couple million people population, or the similar sized Baltics, or bigger but still average-sized Ukraine - are all at the heart of US foreign policy of democratization? Is it the genuine concern for the well being of these people? Or maybe it's abundant natural or geographic resources? Nope. Their geopolitical importance is in the dick-measuring contest that is an ugly leftover of the cold war. The more allies US has on the Russian borders, the weaker is Russia's geopolitical position. People on this forum have been arguing about NATO expansion. Can anyone blame the eastern Europeans for being scared of Russia and wanting to protect themselves with NATO? Given the history, no. But the more important question is this: why did the big players in NATO, the western Europeans and US, so eagerly want the eastern Europeans to join? In the early 90s they were given a golden chance to destroy the cold war attitudes which lost their core source - the ideological differences. Instead, they expanded eastward a military alliance that was born to defeat Russia, not exactly a very skillful way of forming trust. Then many major disagreements on foreign policies with Russia of the 90s were resolved in a similar fashion - largely ignoring Russian interests as irrelevant (it's good to remember that "the evil lunatic" Putin was nowhere near the power at that time). What did they expect in the west? That Russia would continue to be so weak as to be treated as irrelevant? What if it became stronger again, like it did later on? How was that policy of the 90s going to play out in that case? It's hard not to call those policy makers idiotic. Or simply so bureaucratic and inertial was the NATO apparatus that they just kept rolling on with the outdated policies of the cold war.
And now they have a proud and pissed off Putin on their hands. Really pissed off. Doing what he thinks he needs to do to stave off NATO from the Russian borders. With a typically Russian heavy-handed approach that irks off the West so much. There's nothing to conclude this with, it's just tragic that the people in Ukraine have to suffer because of these geopolitical chess games and dick-measuring contests.
