The US enthusiastically supports regime change whenever it can benefit from the process, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told RT. If a protest movement targets a government more pliant to American interests, Washington will inevitably reject it, the diplomat added.
There have been numerous attempts at regime change around the world in recent years and they were “met with a different response on the part of the US, depending on who was in power and who was trying to carry out the coup,” Lavrov said in an interview on Monday.
“Where the West is happy with the current government, in such situations no protest can be legitimate. But where the government doesn’t reflect the interests of the hegemon and is pursuing the national interests, in those cases we see various unlawful forces are being stimulated [to attack the authorities],” the diplomat added.
An example of such a differentiated approach by the US and its allies was the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 and the conflict in Yemen the next year, Lavrov pointed out. The so-called Maidan coup in Kiev was a “revolt that happened against the legitimate president” and which was marred by “bloody provocations against the unarmed police,” he said.
Ukraine’s democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovich had been forced to flee violence despite his government and the opposition reaching an EU-sponsored agreement on settling the crisis just hours before that, the diplomat recalled.
“There were no protests against that insurgency from the US or its European allies. So, they just recognized it as a zig-zag in the democratic process,” he said.
“All those years, all our attempts to bring the Ukrainian situation to a political settlement were met with the response [from the Americans and Europeans] that Yanukovich left the country,” Lavrov said.
At the same time, when Yemen’s Western-backed leader Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi “ran to Saudi Arabia” in 2015 from advancing Houthi rebels, “we’ve heard the West saying that he’s still a legitimate president and that he needs to be installed back in Yemen. And only after that the settlement process will start,” he pointed out.
The top Russian diplomat also said there was an attempted coup in Gambia in 2014 and “the White House announced that the US will never recognize the forces that seized power in the country by unconstitutional means.”
Lavrov also mentioned some of the more recent events when the Americans and their allies outright rejected protests against the “puppet” government of Maria Sandu in Moldova, but fully backed the demonstrations by the supporters of former president Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia, where the West “doesn’t like the current government.”