Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has praised the Georgian Government for passing the foreign agent law, claiming that by doing so Georgia was resisting the West’s aims to maintain their global hegemony through the promotion of queer rights.

‘What the Georgian government is doing now is […] realising their national identity and understanding that the Georgian people have the same values ​​of Orthodoxy, national culture, which will be eroded, erased, and subjugated by the “rules” that the West imposes on everyone’, Lavrov said in an interview with RBC on Thursday.

Russia passed its own foreign agent law in 2012, and the legislation has since been used as part of the Kremlin’s crusade to crush civil society, independent media, and all dissent.

Lavrov added that the Georgian people were ‘not happy with the unbridled imposition of the LGBT agenda’.

‘The Georgian people, whom I know well and value their love for life — Georgia was one of the leading cultural centres during the Soviet Union, our common Motherland — carefully guard their history. For this, I think, they have earned reproaches from the West.’ 

He went on to say that many countries were beginning to understand that ‘this funnel of liberal democracy, into which the West is sucking them, contradicts the roots, the traditions of their ancestors’.

He said that the West wanted to replace these traditions with ‘non-traditional values’ in order to maintain their hegemony.

Georgia’s foreign agent law states that non-profit and media organisations that receive at least 20% of their revenue from outside Georgia should register as organisations ‘carrying out the interests of a foreign power’. It also allows the Ministry of Justice to access internal documents and communications and to demand the identities of confidential sources.

The government’s passage of the law has led to a widening split between Georgia and the West. Since it was passed, the EU and US have withdrawn aid to the Georgian Government, the US has imposed travel bans on a number of people, and the EU has said Georgia’s EU membership bid was on hold.

On Wednesday, the Georgian parliament passed its queer ‘propaganda law’ in its second reading. The legislation is also similar to a law passed by Russia in 2013.

[Read more: Georgia queer propaganda law passes second reading in parliament]

Read in Azerbaijani on Meydan TV.