Especially when they confirm what we always knew to be the case, even before we had any facts.
Yes, there were fascists involved. Most of them set up a base a few blocks away from the Maidan. That's where some of the really violent early acts were done. The Euromaidantsy themselves basically had no use for them and rejected them.
Yanukovich and his Berkut didn't draw a distinction. The two groups merged--the Maidantsy spread, to be sure; but when both were attacked they had a common defense against a common foe. It's hard to distinguish between the two groups when they mingle. And the fascists were more given to violence, so they were at the heart of much of the violence: Not that they necessarily started it in all or even most cases, but they were more likely to stand their ground than run with their tails between their legs. This garnered them some support. It also caused a lot of people that *weren't* fascist to team up with Svoboda.
What's amusing is the truth in what, of all people, Khodorskovsky said: Yes, there were fascists and Nazis in the Maidan, but probably not a really different percentage than you find in Moscow or Crimea.
Which is the point that's been missed. We only see what confirms our bias. We overlook the fascists in Crimea, in Russia--those who chant "Rossiya! Rossiya!" when they hear of Russian troops doing something to insult, humiliate, or threaten Ukraine or Tatars. We overlook the majority of non-fascists in the Maidan, to the point of letting unanswered go as to how that anti-Jewish Nazi Jew Yatseniuk can be in charge of such a Nazi government. The answer produces cognitive dissonance. They are nationalists but not Nazis, just as Banderists were "Nazi" in that they fought the Red Army and were allied with Hitler, but as soon as space opened up in the Ukraine for them to fight the Wehrmacht they turned on the Wehrmacht and fought both the Russians *and* the Germans. Both occupied Ukraine, which had been occupied for centuries. (A lot of "liberation movements" are very, very nationalistic. It's the whole them-versus-us thing, setting up group boundaries.)
Let's look at a parallel in the US. There were anarchists in the OWS movement. There were also progressives, liberals, all sorts. It wasn't a solely anarchist movement, controlled, peopled, motivated purely by anarchists. If you look at some media on the right, though, they point to anarchists and anarchist-led events and say, "See--all anarchists, all the time. OWS was pure anarchism, led only by anarchists." They have evidence to support their views. It's what they want to believe. Voila: It's proven, QED. Except that they get to their "QED" by selective picking of the facts. It fails the critical-thinking test. Anarchists were at the core of the OWS movement; they were not the entirety of the core of the OWS movement, and their role in the OWS movement changed over time as the OWS morphed. OWS had a different trajectory in the US than the Maidan did (with, no doubt, some loons somewhere trying to claim that OWS was a foreign plot), but had the response to it been more violent you'd have found more violent types playing a bigger role, an evolution caused by external factors and self-selection (less than natural selection).
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