Russia warned its former Soviet allies on Friday about the dangers of aligning with the United States after what Moscow called a Western-backed coup attempt in Georgia similar to Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan revolution, Reuters reported.

Russia, embroiled in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, has seen its rule challenged by a number of traditional neighbors and allies since President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine last February.

In Tbilisi, thousands of Georgians took to the streets for three straight nights to protest a law on “foreign agents” they said was inspired by Russia and threatened to derail the country’s aspirations for closer ties with Europe.

“It’s very similar to the Maidan in Kyiv,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on state television, referring to the 2014 Maidan revolution that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president.

“It seems to me that all the countries surrounding the Russian Federation should draw their own conclusions about how dangerous it is to take the path of employment in the area of ​​responsibility of the United States, in the area of ​​their interests,” he said. .

Comments from Putin’s top diplomat indicate Moscow’s level of nervousness about weakening its grip everywhere from Armenia and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia.

Putin presents the war in Ukraine as an existential battle with the West over the future of both Russia and its former Soviet and imperial satellites, which have been courted by the United States, NATO, the EU and China since 1991.

Washington, Brussels and NATO say they are legitimately forging ties with countries that became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that many of them fear their much more powerful neighbor, Russia.

Post-Soviet battle

Russia was the supreme arbiter of affairs in the vast territories that for almost three centuries formed the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.

But the war in Ukraine, which Putin presents as a watershed moment when Moscow finally repelled Western attempts to contain it, has tied up the Russian army.

Putin’s opponents say the war could eventually be the start of a new phase of the Soviet Union’s collapse, one that could wreak havoc across Russia and allow rivals to turn Moscow’s former satellites either to the West or to China.

Washington and the West, Lavrov said, wanted to punish Russia for being perceived as “too independent a player” to challenge US hegemony.

Lavrov claims that the events in Georgia were orchestrated from outside and motivated by the West’s attempt to alienate Russia’s traditional allies.

He said Georgia’s law on foreign agents, which parliament repealed on Friday, was used as a pretext “to start what is essentially an attempt at a forced change of power.”

He did not provide any evidence to support his claims. Opposition politicians and protesters in Georgia deny they are puppets.

They say they simply do not agree with the proposed law and want a Western future that is not offered by Russia, which went to war with Georgia in 2008.

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