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.
In January 1918, while the troops of Soviet Russia were advancing on Kyiv, the Bolsheviks raised an uprising inside the city itself. On Sunday 15 (28) January, workers and armed Bolshevik detachments seized the "Arsenal" plant in Pechersk (a district of Kyiv)[1]. The next day, 16 (29) January, the Kyiv committee of the Bolshevik party issued a printed leaflet to the workers and soldiers of the city against the General Secretariat (the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic under the Central Rada). It said: "The gentlemen from the General Secretariat are preparing here, in the heart of Ukraine, the dispersal of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and think that soldiers will be found here who will carry out this black deed. No, this shall not be!"[2]. The leaflet called "to the defence of the revolution" and ended with the appeal "Down with the counter-revolutionaries grouped in the Central Rada and the General Secretariat". On 19 January (1 February) Ordzhonikidze, the extraordinary commissar of Soviet Russia in Ukraine, telegraphed the government of Soviet Russia: "In Kyiv there is an uprising of workers and of soldiers of the Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Shevchenko regiments. The Arsenal is in the hands of the workers. Today Soviet troops will enter Kyiv"[3]. The uprising inside the city and the offensive from outside stand in one telegram and in one calculation.
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"[4]. 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"[5] - 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 set up barricades and checkpoints"[6]. In Kharkiv the coup was quickly suppressed.