Though Ukraine may seem far from the Middle East — and even peripheral to it — the two are in fact inextricably linked in the minds of many senior Russian officials. This has important implications that others with interests in the region cannot ignore.

For Moscow, the connection is a clear and dangerous one. As Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu put it during a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tajikistan earlier this year, “a scenario similar to the Arab Spring was used” to oust former President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.

Nikolai Bordyuzha, a former senior official in the KGB and later Russia’s border security agency who serves as secretary-general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (a security association including Russia and five other post-Soviet states), was more explicit several days later, tying together “mechanisms of foreign interference” and “models of provocation” in Russia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, according to a report in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian government. According to his press secretary, Bordyuzha’s remarks — at a roundtable discussion in Minsk, Belarus, on the topic of “Government and Social Cooperation to Work Against Foreign Interference and 'Color Revolutions'” — went on to “underline that no one any longer doubts the planned and directed character of almost all of the world’s recent events connected to the violent overthrow of governments.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself articulated a similar view in a high-profile opinion article for The New York Times arguing against US military action in Syria. Referring to the revolutions in both Eurasia and the Middle East, Putin wrote: “Clearly, the people in those nations, where these events took place, were sick of tyranny and poverty, of their lack of prospects; but these feelings were taken advantage of cynically.” Who took advantage? The same people who “hit Afghanistan, Iraq, and frankly violated the UN Security Council resolution on Libya, when instead of imposing the so-called no-fly zone over it they started bombing it, too.”