Interviewed today on Russia’s well-known Channel 1 “Great Game” TV broadcast, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov charged that protests that occurred in Tbilisi, Georgia this week against a bill that would have required individuals or entities receiving more than 20% foreign funding to register as foreign agents, “closely resembles Kiev’s Maidan coup.” There’s no doubt, he said, that “the bill was nothing but a pretext for essentially launching a coup attempt,” RT reported him as saying.
When the bill was passed by Georgia’s Parliament, it was immediately denounced as “Russian,” “Putin-style,” or “Kremlin-inspired,” in the words of U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell labeled the bill by EU candidate Georgia “incompatible with EU values and standards,” which Lavrov asserted was crass hypocrisy, since many European nations have much stricter regulations in this area than anything the Georgian Parliament had proposed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that the so-called “Russian” law (per Ned Price) is actually modeled on the U.S.’s 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act.
