We can click through and read wikipedia just like you did. They held that vote after he had fled the nation due to the violent occupation of many government buildings. In fact they held that vote while the parliament building was so occupied.
"Settled history" is for fools. I'm on the side of Ukrainians who want to live in peace and prosperity rather than suffering violence and privation. For that particular interest, it seems that holding elections could be superior to violently occupying government buildings. This "Revolution of Dignity" smelled even more CIA than January 6 did. Mrs. Robert Kagan was just one of the many spooks who left her bloody fingerprints on this supposedly sovereign nation. You call Yanukovych a stooge literally because he negotiated too firmly with EU. This seems similar to Trump being impeached because he delayed sending the same armaments to Ukraine that Obama had refused to send his entire time in office. (It seems maybe those armaments have not had the advertised effect?) Any molehill can be puffed up to a mountain, when the USA military-industrial complex might thereby grind more human lives into dollars...
Goodness, it's enlightening to be told what I mean. Yes you've consistently avoided answering the question with which I started this thread: are elections better than violent coups?
One guess how I'm inclined to take that...
The vast majority of Ukrainians are not responsible for their misfortunes over the last decade. Certainly they have my sympathy. Violent coups usually harm the societies in which they occur, so the tiny minority of Ukrainians who took part in that coup have harmed their nation and their fellow Ukrainians. That harm has taken the form of a Russian invasion, but if it had happened somewhere else at some other time (e.g. Iran, in 1953) the harm would have come anyway.
Eventually, if we survive long enough, humans will learn to organize (and re-organize!) ourselves without large-scale violence. Some had imagined that democracy might be a part of that, but few today seem to agree.
