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Only if you believe that 90% of the political parties in Ukraine were accused of being pro-Russian. Alas, this was not so, and other parties remain in place to fill their place and are interested in furthering their place in the 2024 election.
Ukrainian political parties are not static or slowly-changing alliances like in the United States or more established Western countries. Over the last decade they have functioned far more like east asian parliamentary parties, being alliances of various factions spear-headed by key influence leaders, aka oligarchs. The current 'Servant of the People' ruling party, which has 239 of the 450 seats, is not an institution like the Democratic Party, and it's not Zelensky's personal fiefdom either. It was a political alliance, the people of the alliance will, and continue to, politic for their advantage, and a way that they will engage in politics is through the maneuverings of elections, which will be used to break, shift, or reaffirm political alliances. Were it not for the war, I wouldn't have been surprised if it fractured into a dozen different parties- or gone through an incessant number of rebrandings, as most Ukraine parties have over the electoral cycles.
As stated, I believe the purges will affect pro-Russian parties (which many of your listed were associated with, accused or in fact), and that opposition will take the framework of an anti-Russian format that resists that labeling. For parties who made their pre-war reputation as being pro-Russian parties looking to improve or normalize relations with Russia, like the Opposition Platform - For Life, this was obviously a doomed sell when key members such as Rada representative Illia Kyva responded to the Russian invasion by... supporting the invasion. This was a political death sentence when the Russians were not, in fact, greeted as liberators.
But I am sure you are aware of it, just as you are aware you were citing the first month of Ukrainian politics after the invasion, and not the following ten.
Similarly, there's a reason why you're raising a scandal from before 2020. Which, yes, I would believe, because it was kind of a thing in the previous American presidential administration. Key word being, previous.
If you wanted to discuss more recent legal corruption dynamics in Ukraine, after all, you'd be hard pressed to raise one as more timely or relevant for the discussion as Zelensky shutting down the Kyiv District Court in December 2022 not even two months ago... a court that was notoriously corrupt, but whose closure could also, of course, be claimed to be an act of corruption.
That's an interesting claim, especially considering Yanukovich fled before he could be stripped of power by the legislature for supporting the live-firing on protestors, which is as antithetical to a coup as the meaningful definition of a coup can take it.
When your own personally appointed, Russian-educated, former communist functionary refuses to have the police shoot the protestors and sides with the elected parliament, you're facing many things but a coup is not one of them.
And...?
I make no claim that anti-corruption will be motivated by the goodness of the heart or by people of pure and innocent motive. I have a pretty established record of being suspicious of the sincerity of anti-corruption campaigns. It doesn't change that I expect counter-corruption campaigns to find corrupt people, while also purging the political system of pro-Russian interests and undermine anti-Zelensky coalitions.
The claim isn't really supported by either source, but okay.
Edit: And seems you edited in some elements since I loaded paged, or I just didn't see them.
I disagree, as the nature of attrition issues are different. Russian attrition has been diminishing it's most capable assets, to which resupply from stockpiles is bringing in less capable systems, while Ukrainian attrition has been diminishing it's least capable assets, to which resupply from western sources is bringing in more capable systems. Earlier in the war Russia had a qualitative and quantitative overmatch that was squandered in the initial offensive, but across last year the qualitiative edge has consistently dulled and quantitative advantages have decreased as well, even as the accessible Ukrainian equipment sets has expanded.
The dynamic I predict is that as the qualitative balance shifts against the Russians, their quantitative edge will give way to penetration capability by Ukrainian forces to commit specific breakthroughs, and then move in infantry with anti-armor systems more than capable of resisting counter-attacks by less capable Russian stocks.
And yet, last year's campaign season ended with two Ukrainian offenses, and progressive Russian withdrawals. 'And will' is disproven, while 'should' is the quibbling point.
The Russian lines have indeed stabilized since the mobilization, but the dynamic of shortages is changing. Last year, Russia had the kit, but not the manpower. This year, Russia has the manpower, but has already lost the operational precision munition capabilities and has been steadily losing the quality kit. How much quality kit will remain next year is a question, and the answer is what determines the ability of the Ukrainians to attack, and the political payoff for doing so.
And who's arguing on the strength of Ukrainian production?
This is why last year's increases in anti-air capability shipments, the new year's gift of tanks and IFVs, and the now-emerging discussions on aircraft is relevant. Ukraine's defensive capabilities don't derive from the Ukrainian budget- they derive from the NATO Cold War surplus, which has started opening up entirely new categories that were previously closed to them most of last year.
Thousands will be unnecessary, particularly since there's no need for Kursk 2.0. Russia can't supply all it's potential re-activated armor across the front, and Ukraine doesn't need to fight it.
What Ukrainian armor needs is the ability to penetrate Russian lines enough to compromise the artillery and allow exploitation forces to take strongpoints that infantry and precision munitions can use to defend against armor or mechanized counter-attack. Once breakthroughs are operationally possible, maneuver becomes the operational counter to artillery, and as Russian artillery precision degrades due to attrition or replacement by older and older systems, other forces become increasingly vulnerable in turn. There's a reason that the Russian advances since last april have been limited to the areas with overwhelming artillery concentration.
I'm sure you think so.
What happened in Ukraine is as if the January 6 protestors were much more numerous, armed, and violent; if the Capitol police decided to side with them instead of shooting Ashley Babbit; and if they successfully terrorized Congress into installing Trump while Biden fled.
When the democratically elected president is chased out of office by a violent mob of his political enemies, that is the central example of a coup.
Bar the being much more armed, much more violet, terrorizing Congress, or installing Trump-analog.
Only if you redefine a coup away from a "sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government, often by the military" to a different space to cover "imminent legislature legal action against sudden, violent, and unlawful use of government power to kill citizens at foreign behest, which the military refused to participate in."
At the end of the day, it was the Ukrainian interior ministry that was deploying snipers even before they issued a decree to start shooting protestors in mass, and it wasn't the Rada that was supporting that escalation, but Russia. As far as own-goals, a pretty bad one by Putin in a series of own-goals, but that's what happens when you very publicly sanction the a country and play with aid-bribes to drive crackdown escalation.
We are citizens protesting. You are insurrectionists. They are rioting.
It's not up for debate whether the Maidan protesters were more armed and violent than the Capitol protesters. No one at the Capitol was throwing Molotov cocktails at police or throwing firebombs into the Capitol building.
For one, the 'more armed, more violent' is vis-a-vis the Ukrainian forces, not the Jan 6 protestors. For another, you seem to still be skipping over the context that the Maidan protestors were being shot at with live ammo.
The January 6 metaphor is bad in a number of ways.
The violence documented in the links I provided precedes the shooting and provides important context for why the "protesters" would be suppressed with live ammo.
And yet misses the most relevant factor of 'because Putin applied public and other forms of pressure, including monetary incentives, for Yanukovych to reverse policy and start shooting constituents of his new unity government.' The government formation of which was itself a framing context of your AP article.
Governments facing molotov cocktail protests do not, in fact, need to issue decrees without legislature support for the police to start shooting people they've been successfully holding off for months. And no, a Guardian article conflating support across 3 magnitudes (50,000 facebook members! Wow!), does not really drive that. The Ukrainian government of Yanukovych did not resort to lethal force decrees out of existential necessity, but as a policy choice, and government policies are always going to be prone to government review and sanction by other parts of the government in any system with meaningful separation of powers.
Yanukovych made a failed gamble that he could divide and conquer the opposition and drive them into infighting by inviting some into the government. When that failed- and this is the regular reminder that the leaded US embassy phone call from Euromaidan was a discussion of who and how to approach for inclusion to a stable government after Yanukovych's offer- Yanukovych then assented to Russian pressure (or, if you prefer, the pressure of his pro-Russian internal security minister, concurrent to Russian pressure including sanctions) to start shooting protestors.
At which point it became very quickly clear that 'shoot the protestors' was the minority position of the Ukrainian elite oligarchs. And one of the reasons oligarchies are oligarchies and not just emergent dictatorships, is precisely because oligarchic minorities don't get to unilaterally escalate state violence against others without consequence.
And the Jan 6 comparison remains bad, and even worse, for lacking these meaningful contexts.
This is even worse than your eliding over the violence that forced Yanukovich to flee. It's obvious to anyone who reads the transcript that the U.S. was telling their Ukrainian puppets who to install after the coup.
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug, but no, the transcript does not suggest a timeframe of implementation after a coup, it suggests a timeframe during which Yanukovych is still in power, hence the transcript saying-
"The problem is going to be Tyahnybok [Oleh Tyahnybok, the other opposition leader] and his guys and I'm sure that's part of what [President Viktor] Yanukovych is calculating on all this."
...when talking about members who could provide for a viable inclusion into government, as opposed to people to be outside... of a government still including Yanukovych, who's involvement is still be considered later on.
"Pyatt: No, exactly. And I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, that the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it. And again the fact that this is out there right now, I'm still trying to figure out in my mind why Yanukovych (garbled) that. In the meantime there's a Party of Regions faction meeting going on right now and I'm sure there's a lively argument going on in that group at this point. But anyway we could land jelly side up on this one if we move fast. So let me work on Klitschko and if you can just keep... we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing. The other issue is some kind of outreach to Yanukovych but we probably regroup on that tomorrow as we see how things start to fall into place."
This is not a discussion of a coup for the violent overthrow of government, of maneuvering fighters and identifying security forces to flip to force the government to retreat. This is discussion of the then-contemporary offer of Yanukovych to bring opposition members into the government, which was recognized at the time as a possible lure to try and sow division within the opposition ranks by encouraging infighting over access. The americans are discussing who could be viable in the government versus who should be kept out from a position of personality conflicts, but their worry is not security forces or a crackdown if exposed- it's that if a viable offer is too slow, behind-the-scenes manipulations by not-the-state-being-'couped will torpedo a formation.
Moreover, the timeframe of concern in the discussion isn't weeks forward, which in history is after the fall of government, but is in immediate context and concurrent to an undecided Party of Regions faction meeting- Yanukovych's party- where 'lively argument' reflects nonconsensus before the internal defections that came later when interior ministry started shooting in earnest. The transcript is still engaging in how Yanukovych will be continued to reached out to- not written off or replaced.
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