Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Macedonia, the New U.S.-Russia Battlefield

Kremlin sees anti-government protests as threat to pipeline plans.

May 19, 2015 at 1:52 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Power to the people.
Photographer: Robert Atanasovski/AFP/Getty Images

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Macedonia is a poor, landlocked Balkan country of about 2 million. To the Kremlin, it's also the newest front in an ideological battle, with the U.S. fomenting regime change to counter Russia's influence. As is often the case, that view is correct to the extent that Russian interests are aligned with those of a corrupt authoritarian ruler.

Here's what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had to say last week: