Russia Still Cannot Combat Color Revolutions

Nicholas J. Myers

Security, Eurasia

Russia's new countermeasures against Color Revolutions do not seem to be succeeding.

At least since the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Russian Federation has planned to counter the “color revolutions.” These uprisings involved the overthrowing of post–Cold War dictators in Yugoslavia 2000, Georgia 2003 (rose), Ukraine 2004 (orange), and Kyrgyzstan 2005 (tulip). Since then, the term has become somewhat passé in the West, but Russia remains obsessed with them even in 2019. Given that all four of those case studies listed above reflected the fall of a Russia-aligned government, this fixation makes sense.

Since 2005, regime changes in semi- to un-democratic states with a pro-Russian policy have avoided the “color” label: the 2010 April Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the 2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, and the 2018 protests in Armenia could be considered spiritual successors to the original wave. In the ten years between the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan in Ukraine, Western commentators frequently claimed Putin had closely watched the progress of events in 2004 and was planning how to prevent them occurring in the future.

Between the 2012 suppression of protests in Russia at Putin’s “castling” back into the Kremlin and the Russian incursions into Ukraine in the aftermath of the Euromaidan in 2014, it certainly seems that Russia did make plans to counter color revolutions. And it is not just military policy as well: since the 2018 protests in Yerevan brought down the government of Serzh Sarkisian, Russia has frequently brought the new Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan to Moscow to ensure he does not deviate from the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union.