Moscow has sent a message to Belgrade - or at least that is the claim of the secretary of Russia's Security Council Sergei Shoigu, who said the West is preparing a "color revolution" in Serbia, similar to Ukraine's Euromaidan of 2014. According to him, the anti-government protests in Serbia in 2025 and 2026 bear "all the signs of preparation for a color revolution."

Shoigu described three phases of such processes: preparatory (from months to several years, with the building of protest infrastructure), active (coordinated protests escalating to civil disobedience and the seizure of state buildings), and final (the opposition forms new structures and seeks international recognition). As examples he cited Hong Kong, Bangladesh and Indonesia, and as a counter-example - Belarus in 2020, where, according to him, Lukashenko prevented such an upheaval through "decisive action."

Here it's worth pausing. When a government - Russian, Serbian or any Balkan one - frames every grievance on the street as a foreign conspiracy, it is in effect telling its own people that their anger isn't real, but staged from somewhere outside. That is a convenient thesis for anyone who doesn't want to answer the question of why people came out to the square at all.

Whether there are foreign fingers behind the protests or not - that is a question that requires evidence, not just statements from Moscow. The Balkans know all too well the game in which each side accuses the other of "outside meddling," while the real causes of discontent - corruption, distrust, exhaustion - go unexamined. Shoigu talks about the phases of a revolution; rarely does anyone talk about the phases of how a government loses its own people.