Aggressors may initiate, sponsor, and covertly coordinate a violent change of power in the colonized society. By overthrowing the legitimate government using the forces of internal opposition, radical groups, or recruited military officers, the colonizer artificially creates a political crisis. This allows it to swiftly install a puppet regime without having to launch an open, full-scale military intervention.
The Bolsheviks' provocation of an uprising of the Arsenal plant workers in Kyiv itself at the very moment of the Red troops' offensive: it was "an armed action organized by the Kyiv committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Bolsheviks) against the Ukrainian Central Rada," and "it was planned for the moment of the approach of Soviet troops to Kyiv in the course of Soviet Russia's war against the UNR of 1917–18"[1].
An armed seizure of power: the GKChP statement of 18 August 1991 announced the transfer of the USSR president's powers: "In connection with the impossibility, for reasons of health, of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev performing the duties of President of the USSR and the transfer… of the powers of the President of the USSR to Vice-President Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev… to form the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR"[2]. The putsch was timed to derail the treaty-based reconstitution of the Union: "The formation of the GKChP was preceded by the so-called Novo-Ogaryovo process - negotiations begun on April 23, 1991 by USSR President Gorbachev at his suburban residence of Novo-Ogaryovo with the leaders of the union republics on the signing of a new Union Treaty"[3] - the coup cut this process short.
An attempted armed seizure of power in the spring of 2014 by storming regional administrations: the UN recorded that already "in mid-April 2014" "groups of armed men unlawfully carried out a well-organized and coordinated seizure of public buildings and police and security service offices in towns and villages of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," and "in order to retain control of the seized areas these groups erected barricades and checkpoints"[4]. In Kharkiv the coup was quickly suppressed.