Lavrov: Collective West Trying to Unleash a Color Revolution in Georgia - The South Caucasus News

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the “collective West” of “provoking internal conflicts and trying to unleash a color revolution in Georgia” while speaking at the 20th meeting of the heads of security and intelligence services of the CIS member states.

He said, as quoted by the Russian government-controlled TASS news agency: “The collective West provokes internal conflicts, hotbeds of tension, does not disdain various dirty geopolitical technologies – from the organization of large-scale information wars to the direct unleashing of color revolutions, as they are now trying to do in Georgia.”

Lavrov alleged that the West is actively using an “extensive network” of civil society organizations “to destabilize the internal political situation in the states of the global South and the global East”. He added that “it has come to the point that the West is using the resources of extremist forces to implement its destructive geopolitical plan, including in the CIS region.”

At the same meeting the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, said that the Georgian authorities “have faced another attempt at a color revolution, that is, a coup d’état’.”

“Let us hope that it will fail, just as the brazen Western attempts to undermine Belarus and Kazakhstan,” Naryshkin said.

Events in Georgia featured high at the meeting, as the above messages were echoed by one more participant of the meeting, the director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov, who also claimed that the special services of the West were trying to carry out a new color revolution in Georgia, while at the same time “forcing the results” of the presidential elections in Moldova to their [the West’s] advantage.

He is quoted by the Russian state-controlled media RIA as saying: “The subversive activities of Western secret services, diplomatic agencies, non-governmental organizations and media controlled by them are expanding as part of the implementation of the aggressive policy of the North Atlantic Alliance in the post-Soviet space.” He further said: “Just recently, for example, through their concerted efforts they literally forced the results of the presidential elections in Moldova, which were favorable to the West, and attempts were made to carry out another color revolution in Georgia.”

The FSB director further concluded: “All this shows that flirting with the West is associated with significant security risks, which can develop into a full-fledged threat to sovereignty and constitutional order in case of any deviation from the Euro-Atlantic vector.”

The accusations leveled at the West by key Russian officials are not new and have been made before. This time they come amid the political crisis in Georgia that followed the disputed parliamentary elections of October 26, which were largely viewed by the population as a choice between the pro-European opposition and the Russia-leaning Georgian Dream, whose policy has damaged the relations with Georgia’s Western partners and suspended the EU membership process of the country. The election results were rejected by the President, who called the elections a “Russian special operation”, the opposition, and the local observers who gathered ample evidence of systemic violations and exposed rigging schemes.

The ruling GD party has continuously accused the West of interfering in the country’s internal affairs and carrying out a “color revolution”, conspicuously repeating the Kremlin’s narrative word for word. Meanwhile, there are multiple indications that Russia allegedly interfered in the parliamentary elections.

On November 25 the Georgian Dream party convened the first session of the Parliament despite the protests outside the Parliament building and the two complaints, including the President’s, to the Constitutional Court challenging the legality of the elections.

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