Ukrainian-Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski's book, The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine: The Mass Killing that Changed the World, clearly proves that the western narrative of peaceful protestors killed by the pro-Russian government's Berkut police is wrong and was nothing other than a politically motivated false-flag operation largely orchestrated by the Ukrainian far-right/nationalists and anti-government oligarchic interests. 

[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-67121-0]

This does not exonerate Russia from invading Ukraine in 2022 but it does show that western leaders and western media have colluded in presenting a false narrative (aka fake news) of what was clearly a major crime with enormous global consequences.

His final concluding paragraphs deserve quoting in full:

[Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)]

The denial of the false-flag Maidan massacre in spite of such overwhelming evidence is politically motivated. The book shows that the Maidan massacre narrative that was propagated by the governments and the mainstream media in the West and Ukraine, as well as Wikipedia was false. They called the Maidan a peaceful protest and presented the massacre of the Maidan protesters as perpetrated by the government snipers on the orders of Yanukovych and his government. The prosecution, Maidan victims’ lawyers, and the mainstream media with some notable exceptions denied presence of snipers in Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings, their shooting of the Maidan protesters, and the far-right involvement in this mass killing and claimed that this was “a conspiracy theory” and “propaganda.” Similarly, the Russian government claims that this was a fascist or Nazi coup are also false.

This false-flag killing of the protesters and police, along with several assassination attempts that followed, led to Yanukovych fleeing Kyiv and then Ukraine and to the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government. The false-flag massacre was a key part of the violent undemocratic overthrow of the government in Ukraine and a major human rights violation and crime.

9 CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS … 257

The massacre of Maidan protesters and the police was a trigger or a tipping point in the conflict that spiraled into other major conflicts in Ukraine and conflicts between Ukraine and Russia and between the West and Russia, in particular, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, the illegal and devastating Russian invasion and the war with Ukraine, which also became a dangerous proxy war between the West and Russia. The Maidan massacre does not justify the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. Conversely, the Russian invasion does not justify the Maidan massacre of the police and the protesters.

Therefore, the Maidan massacre and the failure to ensure justice ultimately have significant indirect global consequences, which can further
increase in unlikely but not excluded case of a direct war between NATO and Russia with a danger of a nuclear war over Ukraine. The different narratives of the Maidan massacre and regime change in Ukrainehave complicated peaceful resolutions of the conflicts in Crimea and Donbas and Russia-Ukraine and the West-Russia conflicts, which esca-lated, respectively, to the largest war in Europe since World War II and a proxy war between largest nuclear powers. Bringing the actual perpetrators and organizers of the Maidan massacre in Ukraine to justice can help resolving these dangerous conflicts.

Katchanovski's forthcoming book The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins: From the Maidan to the Ukraine War (Rethinking Political Violence) should also be interesting.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russia-Ukraine-War-its-Origins-Rethinking/dp/3031987233]