Where to begin?
The Kremlin views the US as a threat only in a contingency sense, and a not very likely one. What it views as a very clear and pressing danger is collapse of the Central Asian regimes and their subsequent Talibanization, followed by further attempts to destabilize Russian by exploiting religious and ethnic fractures. In fact, Moscow proposed a joint strike against the Taliban to Moscow in 1999, and, according to FM Ivanov, Putin personally appealed to Islam Karimov to allow US troops into Uzbekistan. Andrei Piontkovsky wrote some decent opeds on this a few years ago in Novaya Gazeta and the Russia Journal and probably since. Everybody in the region is in favor of US troops being there except for radical Islamist sections of society. Moreover, it is hard to see how they could pose a threat to Russia, whose defense strategy is based on its nuclear shield. Any hypothetical attack by the US and Russian interests would quite likely quickly develop into the end of the world. And Russia's influence on the region is based on its economic power, not military weight.
"The pro-Russian Kyrgyz regime." All central Asian regimes are pro-Russian. They have to be. They are excresences of the Russian economy.
"Anti-Russian revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyryzstan." Kyrgyzstan had nothing to do with Russia at all. Contrary to popular myth, Yushchenko did not run an anti-Russian campaign, although it was spun that way. Yanukovich ran an anti-Western campaign in order to scare ethnic Russian voters in E. Ukraine. Yushch., on the other hand, was careful not to raise hackles in his divided country. Ira Straus has written some decent opeds on this, including in the Moscow Times. Saakashvili is not "anti-Russian' either -- he is pro-unification of what he believes to be Georgian territory (though Ossetes and Abkhaz would beg to differ) and is not doing too well at it. He got Adjaria back. What was Adjaria? A feifdom run by one family with zero popular support existing largely on Luzhkov's largesse. S. Ossetia and Abkhazia are areas grafted onto Georgia by the Bolsheviks who violently oppose becoming under Tbilisi's sway, and proved it in the civil war (albeit with Chechen and Cossack help). S. has made zero progress with them and he does not appear to be getting any Western help at it. In fact Russian and Georgian cooperation against Chechen militants -- Georgia used to deny there were any in Pankisn until the US and France made them fess up -- is at an all-time high. It is actualy quite possible that Washington has been a restraining influence on Saak. Oh, and Georgia gets its power from the Russian electricity grid. Did I mention that the primary investors in Georgia are Russian businesses, and that 20% of the money flowing into Georgia comes from migrant workers and traders in Russia? And Ukraine and Georgia have been (fruitlessly) trying to join the EU and NATO ever since the USSR collapsed. It has nothing to do with Yushchenko or Saakashvili.
"Western NGOs." Western NGOs are not the Gnomes of Zurizh. It is absurd to think that George Soros (not an arm of the US gov by the way) got hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to occupy Kiev for months. Even if it were, Timoshenko's got enough money to do it herself.
"Not wanting to live under an authoritarian regime like Putin's." Um, Putin is the most popular Russian leader since the tsarist era, discounting the Stalin Cult. Russians are not liberal democrats (neither are Georgians or Ukrainians, and certainly not Kyrgyz.) They have nothing against authoritarian leaders if they believe that they are doing a good job, and the Russian economy is growing now for the seventh year straight. In fact, accoding to the last opinion polls I've seen, 70-80% of Ukrainians view both Putin and Russia in general either "very positively" or "somewhat positively." Why? Wages in Russia are over twice as high.
Finally, citing the Guardian (!). Foreign Affairs would have been more appropriate.
I could go on and on.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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