For the Kremlin, the outcome was a powerful warning of the existential threat from “color revolutions.” Ukraine’s Orange Revolution had been preceded by the “Rose Revolution” in newly independent Georgia, which had swept anti-Russian reformers to power. These color revolutions, as Moscow saw it, were supported by Western nongovernmental organizations and, Moscow suspected, by Western “security services” that were aiming to dislodge Russia from its “privileged sphere” in the rest of the former Soviet Union.
