Russia yesterday warned allies across the former Soviet Union of the dangers of aligning with the United States after what Moscow described as a Western-backed coup attempt in Georgia similar to Ukraine's 2014 "Maidan" revolution.
Russia's authority has been questioned in several neighboring countries and traditional allies of Moscow after President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine in February last year, Reuters points out.
In Tbilisi, thousands of Georgians took to the streets for three nights in a row to protest a "foreign agents" law that threatened to undermine the country's efforts to forge closer ties with Europe.
"It is very similar to the Kiev Maidan," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday on state television, referring to the 2014 Maidan revolution in which the pro-Russian president of Ukraine was overthrown. "It seems to me that all those countries that are located around the Russian Federation should draw conclusions about how dangerous it is to take the path towards entering the zone of responsibility, the zone of interest of the United States".
Reuters points out that these comments indicate the degree of nervousness in Moscow about the weakening of authority starting from Armenia and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia.
Putin described the war in Ukraine as an existential struggle with the West for the future of both Russia and the former Soviet states, over which the United States, NATO, the EU and China have been fighting since 1991.
Washington, Brussels and NATO argue that they are legitimately building ties with states that became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union - and that many of them fear a much more powerful neighbor, Russia.
For centuries, Russia has been the supreme arbiter of events in the territory that was an integral part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union for almost three centuries, Reuters points out.
However, at the moment the Russian army is busy in Ukraine. Putin's opponents argue that the war could trigger a new phase of Soviet collapse that could wreak havoc across Russia and allow rivals to turn Moscow's former satellites either westward or toward China.
Lavrov said that Washington and the West in general want to punish Russia because they consider it "too independent a player" that challenges the hegemony of the United States. He said that the events in Georgia were orchestrated from outside and motivated by the West's attempt to hijack Russia's traditional allies.
He said that the Georgian law on foreign agents, which the parliament abandoned, was used as a prelude to "the beginning of what is essentially an attempt to forcefully change the government." Lavrov did not support his claims with evidence, and opposition politicians and protesters in Georgia deny that they are anyone's puppets. They claim that they simply do not agree with the bill and that they want a western future that Russia, which went to war with Georgia in 2008, does not offer.
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