Russia's Defense Ministry Takes 'Color Revolutions' in Their Sights

The General Staff Academy of Russia’s Armed Forces is set to work out a complex manual on countering so-called “color revolutions”, which will incorporate the expertise of Russian military experts who developed counterterrorist operations in the North Caucasus and of civilian experts from the country’s leading educational establishments.

The General Staff Academy of Russia’s Armed Forces has been working on the topic since the end of 2014 and is now set to develop a complex manual on countering “color revolutions”, Russia’s daily newspaper Kommersant reports on Wednesday.

One of its purposes is to define the most considerable threats to Russian security up to 2020 and come up with a unified set of tactics for revealing, preventing and counteracting the technique of using “color revolutions” to facilitate regime change, the newspaper quotes its sources in the Defense Ministry as saying.

The experts will also work on the “soft power” method (non-contact impact on potential enemy), asymmetric operations and measures to strengthen Russia’s political system and the political culture of the politicians, civil servants, businessmen and other residents of the country.

Last week Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told reporters  at the Army-2015 political forum that the military will sponsor a major project to research coups conducted through mass protest – so called ‘color revolutions’ – to prevent a repeat of the situations that Russia faced in 1991 and 1993.

“Some people say that the military should not be involved in political processes, while some say the exact opposite. We will order a study of the phenomenon of color revolutions and the military’s role in their prevention,” the minister then said.

Possible ways and means of counteracting “soft power” and “color revolutions” have been on the agenda of the forum.

The forum concluded that the “color revolutions” are now taking form of armed brawls and are being developed under the rules of the art of war, which makes it necessary for the Defense Ministry to take part in methodological research.

Moreover, the participants in the discussion also came to the conclusion that the Western countries have intensified their attempts to impose  their “recipes for internal transformations” on other nations, without taking either national traditions or national peculiarities into account.

The term "color revolutions" refers to coups instigated from the outside and characterized by widespread unrest in countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia or Egypt.

They are believed to be conducted with the help of the United States and other Western countries, with the appointed leaders serving as a medium in advancing Western interests.

This phenomenon gave rise to another term, "the export of color revolutions." It denotes the Western support of opposition forces to influence domestic politics.

'Color revolution 'technology

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