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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There have been numerous attempts at regime change around the world in recent years and they were \u201cmet 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,\u201d Lavrov said in an interview on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhere the West is happy with the current government, in such situations no protest can be legitimate. But where the government doesn\u2019t 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],\u201d the diplomat added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201crevolt that happened against the legitimate president\u201d and which was marred by \u201cbloody provocations against the unarmed police,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ukraine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAll 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,\u201d Lavrov said.
At the same time, when Yemen\u2019s Western-backed leader Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi \u201cran to Saudi Arabia\u201d in 2015 from advancing Houthi rebels, \u201cwe\u2019ve heard the West saying that he\u2019s still a legitimate president and that he needs to be installed back in Yemen. And only after that the settlement process will start,\u201d he pointed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The top Russian diplomat also said there was an attempted coup in Gambia in 2014 and \u201cthe White House announced that the US will never recognize the forces that seized power in the country by unconstitutional means.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lavrov also mentioned some of the more recent events when the Americans and their allies outright rejected protests against the \u201cpuppet\u201d government of Maria Sandu in Moldova, but fully backed the demonstrations by the supporters of former president Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia, where the West \u201cdoesn\u2019t like the current government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n