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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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