Maria Zakharova says European leaders are telling on themselves when they try to link the cause of the protests to Russia: “Certain sections of the population are being denied the very right that their regimes claim to uphold — namely, the right to express their point of view. They do not have that opportunity. Everything that is happening there is, in essence, just decoration for what they call democracy. Accordingly, all of this keeps building up and building up, and then, so to speak, the gates, the doors, the barriers come off their hinges — the crowd bursts into the streets, smashing and wrecking things, letting off steam.”