Those are incomparable. One is a political influence via civilized methods, money and propaganda. The other is a brutal military aggression.
The proper acceptable course of action for Putin & Co. was to compete economically and propagandistically, not invade with soldiers. They tried before with Yanukovich, but in 2014 these russian collaborators lost grip on power, and Putin & Co., instead of folding up graciously, or trying with another helper later again, went insane and tried to force their interests with military methods. That is an escalation that has no moral justification.
Overthrowing a democratically elected government in a foreign country is hardly a civilized method.
And yes, Putin was competing economically and propagandistically, but when he won and Yanukovich declined to sign a bad [0] agreement, the US, instead of "folding up graciously" like the EU did, said "Fuck the EU" [1] and went ahead with the escalation and supporting the 'revolution'.
"has no moral justification"
Of course, only Western escalations are always morally justified.
So an hypothetical sad event where Ukrainian pawns burned 42 people in Ukraine, and few Ukrainian neo-Nazis resisted Ukraine police is comparable or justifies multi-year military agression by RUSSIA that killed hundreds of thousands of people and devastated east/south of Ukraine? Do you think this is a civilized argument?
That's what escalation is. The American sponsored coup was an escalation. The reunification with Crimea and support for Eastern Ukrainian rebels was an escalation.
There was no coup in Ukraine. Yanukovych was removed from office by the constitutional majority of Ukrainian parliament with votes 328-vs-0. Not even a single member of his own party supported him.
"Finally, the constitution demands that at least three quarters of the constitutional membership of the Verkhovna Rada vote for the removal of the President in the final step. However, instead of the required 338 parliamentary deputies only 328 voted for the removal of the President." [0]
The internationally accepted standard is 2/3. Not a single country besides Russia recognized Yanukovych as the president of Ukraine after the vote, and even Russia gave up being a sore loser after a few months.
No I don't. If you want to nitpick, then for starters the Ukrainian parliament didn't go through the formal impeachment process (which requires 4/5 majority), because the Ukrainian constitution has no provisions for a situation when president and cabinet ministers just burn documents to hide tracks, run away into another country and become internationally wanted criminals.
Instead, the parliament passed a declaration saying that the government had abadoned their duties and called for early elections, and did so within the bounds of Ukrainian laws, and with an internationally recognized margin of majority for such drastic steps. There is no domestic or international case for calling early elections a coup. The whole "coup" sob story has been dead and buried for a long time. The transition of power was as clean as you can hope to get in a severe political crisis.
If you are looking for something to call a coup, then the Russian invasion of Crimea was a textbook coup.
