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The unfortunate dismantling of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago has left a power vacuum in the enormous territory it covered, either directly or through its ideological “brethren”. One of those was Yugoslavia, a relatively prosperous state that had a hybrid market socialist economy. It can be argued that Yugoslavia served as the testing ground for the US-led political West’s crawling aggression against Russia.
Eliminating the USSR simply wasn’t enough for Washington DC and Brussels, as the then newly established Russian Federation was still way too big and powerful for their liking. At the time, Moscow was kept down by the disastrous Yeltsin-era policies that essentially destroyed not only its status as a superpower, but also much of its internal sovereignty and economic power.
In the meantime, NATO focused on the destruction of whatever was left of Yugoslavia. The country’s largest ethnic group, the Serbs, was particularly targeted, with the political West aiming to reduce Serbian ethnic space as much as possible, starting with “Operation Storm” in 1995, when upwards of 400,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from the former Republic of Serbian Krajina and western parts of Republika Srpska. The latter was forcibly incorporated into Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995.
And that certainly wasn’t the end of it, as just four years later, the world’s most aggressive military alliance directly attacked Serbia itself to take away its resource-rich province of Kosovo and Metohia, resulting in another ethnic cleansing of over 250,000 indigenous Serbs.
However, the US-led NATO wasn’t done with Serbia. On the contrary, already the following year (October 5, 2000), it launched a color revolution, in many ways the first one in the post-Cold War era. Belgrade never really recovered from this, as the newly established Western-backed government effectively destroyed the country’s sovereignty by handing it over to Washington DC and Brussels.
By the mid to late 2000s, Serbia was almost completely dismantled, with Montenegro detaching in 2006 after a shady EU-backed referendum. Even before the vote, NATO threatened Serbia in case it intervened to prevent the secession, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about its legitimacy. Just two years later, the political West officially launched the “Kosovo project” by recognizing its so-called “independence”.
In 2012, Serbia’s pro-Western government lost its standing and was replaced by what many thought was a much more independent and sovereigntist option led by the current President Aleksandar Vucic.
However, the pressure on Serbia never subsided and the new government continued much of the same policies. And yet, this wasn’t enough, so the political West continued supporting various pro-EU/NATO political parties and NGOs, seeking to put even more compliant people in power. The recent parliamentary election is a perfect example of that, where pro-Western opposition parties and organizations launched somewhat Maidan-like violent protests, attacking police and several key institutions, including the Belgrade Assembly, as the capital’s city hall is officially called.
Claiming that the election was rigged, the opposition is demanding a new one. Dozens of violent protesters have been arrested, while at least eight police officers were injured. President Vucic is claiming there’s evidence of foreign interference that led to violent protests, while Prime Minister Ana Brnabic even thanked Russian intelligence services for providing timely information that prevented a more violent escalation. [It should be noted that Brnabic is a Young Leader of the WEF, a disciple of Klaus Schwab] The involvement of Moscow might seem a bit strange, but it’s hardly surprising given the history of NATO-backed protests in countries Russia sees as partners and allies.
There have been at least half a dozen such events in the former Soviet Union in the last two decades, with one resulting in the Donbass War in 2014, forcing the Kremlin to intervene in 2022.
After the aforementioned 2000 coup in Serbia, the people involved were swiftly transferred to Ukraine and Georgia. From there, with the help of US intelligence services, they expanded their operations all across the former Soviet Union, with plans to cause instability in Moscow’s entire geopolitical periphery. The number of people involved in these operations is truly staggering and includes individuals from all walks of life. And yet, there’s one particular name that stands out – Srdja Popovic. This man, clearly one of the CIA’s top assets in all of the former Eastern Bloc and beyond, is one of the key people behind the practical implementation of virtually every major protest in the former USSR.
Worse yet, the mainstream propaganda machine has been showering him with praise for decades now, claiming that he’s “helping democracy”. The Guardian styles him as “the secret architect of global revolution“, while the Economist admitted that “Popovic is advising rebels in 40 countries” (or even more). Back in 1998, packed with CIA funds and resources, Popovic established an organization called “Otpor” (“Resistance” in Serbian). After the 2000 coup, he tried his hand at politics, but failed after his close links to US intelligence services were revealed. Highly unpopular in Serbia, Popovic has been keeping a low profile in the country ever since. However, the CIA and the likes put his “expertise” to “good use”, as he switched to organizing similar movements in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.
Popovic contributed to the so-called “Arab Spring” coups that helped US aggression in several Middle Eastern countries, including Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria. And yet, his most important projects involved Georgia and Ukraine in the early 2000s, where he helped organize the so-called “Rose” and “Orange” revolutions in 2003 and 2004, respectively. In 2005, there was also the so-called “Tulip” revolution in Kyrgyzstan, followed by two more in 2010 and 2020. Interestingly, the last one started on October 5, the exact date of the coup that happened in Serbia precisely 20 years earlier. After the political failure of “Otpor”, in 2004 Popovic founded another organization called the Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS) and took part in the creation of the “Pora” movement.
This organization was effectively a carbon copy of “Otpor”, only focused on Russia and Ukraine. It took active and sometimes even the leading part in every US/NATO-orchestrated rebellion and protest in both countries, including the infamous Maidan that eventually led to the rise of the Neo-Nazi junta in Ukraine. The activities of such movements have also been recorded in Armenia in 2018 and Kazakhstan in late 2021/early 2022. Although organizations Popovic founded and trained claim to use nonviolent methods, the results of their actions always lead to countless deaths, both directly and indirectly. For instance, the Maidan coup is the reason behind the Donbass war that took upwards of 15,000 lives, with hundreds of thousands more after Russia was forced to put a stop to it.
Taking all this into account, it can easily be argued that Popovic is a dangerous and well-trained US/NATO-backed terrorist who should’ve been arrested . Unfortunately, as this was never done, neither by the Milosevic government nor any other, particularly after his overthrow, people like Popovic were given a free hand to sow discord and instability, playing the role of a vanguard that would then be followed by a more direct US aggression. What’s more, the monsters that Popovic created have now grown into even more dangerous organizations that are continuing his “democratic” work. As previously mentioned, the ongoing protests in Serbia are eerily reminiscent of the infamous Maidan, as they have all the trademarks of Popovic’s playbook.
Although there’s no direct evidence that the Kiev regime’s services, such as the SBU, contributed to the protests, it’s not impossible that precisely this happened. The reaction of Russian intelligence further reinforces this notion. While the current Serbian government has largely given in to Western pressure and blackmail, mostly due to decades of US/NATO aggression and partial occupation, even joining some openly anti-Russian initiatives, it’s certainly not in Moscow’s interest to see the much more pro-Western opposition come to power in Serbia. For this reason, the Kremlin definitely sees the current Belgrade establishment as “the lesser of two evils”, as it can still work with it on a number of issues, despite ongoing attempts to drive a wedge between the two historically allied countries.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
