Ukraine's revolution marks a watershed moment in Vladimir Putin's 14-year domination of Russia and its neighbours, Georgia's defence minister said on Thursday.
In an interview with the Guardian, Irakli Alasania said that the drama in Kiev over the weekend meant that Ukraine had turned irreversibly towards the west and the EU, and that the impact would reverberate across the region.
"It's done. There's no way back for Ukraine. It's a first strategic failure for Putin," he said. "This is a tectonic geopolitical shift in eastern Europe."
As a Black Sea littoral country invaded and partitioned by Russia in 2008, Georgia is closely following events in Crimea, Ukraine's Russian-majority region and base for the Kremlin's Mediterranean fleet.
Alasania, a key negotiator for the Georgians with the Russians over the 2008 war, was sanguine about the potential for trouble to escalate. "There's a lot of rhetoric and chest-thumping. It's not unusual. But Russia won't go into military confrontation. I don't think there's a military option on the table for Putin."
The Ukrainian crisis erupted in November when toppled President Viktor Yanukovych ditched years of negotiations with Brussels on political and free-trade pacts and turned to Russia for a $15bn (£9bn) bailout and cheap gas supplies. The sudden U-turn stunned EU leaders, who saw their policies towards post-Soviet countries on their eastern borders shredded.
Georgia and Moldova are due to sign similar deals with the EU by August, Alasania said, meaning that much attention is being focused on how the Kremlin reacts. In recent months, Putin has managed to prevent Armenia and Ukraine from signing the agreements aimed at greater integration with the EU. There are pro-Russian stirrings in Moldova opposing the EU deal.
But Kiev has signalled that it will promptly reverse Yanukovych's pro-Russian policy and sign up to the EU pacts at a Brussels summit next month.
Kostiantyn Yeliseyev, the Ukrainian ambassador in Brussels, told senior EU officials on Thursday that the new administration in Kiev wanted to get the EU deal signed quickly. That would bolster Ukraine against pressure from Moscow, he told the EurActiv website in Brussels.
Such a move would also embolden other countries in the region and have a ripple effect, diminishing Putin's influence, Alasania said.
But the official media in Moscow predicted trouble ahead.
The official Voice of Russia said this week: "The European Union has been forcing its values upon Tbilisi within the framework of the so-called Eastern partnership programme, while offering nothing in return, no dividends, rights or privileges, in an apparent bid to destroy whatever ties may still exist between Georgia and Russia and expand the EU influence in the region. Naturally, Russia cannot remain unresponsive to these far-reaching plans. Western politicians are seeking to provoke Moscow into making some rash and ill-considered steps in Ukraine, which would hopefully discredit Russia in the eyes of the world.
"The political turmoil and uncertainty in Ukraine smooth the way for other geopolitical projects, Georgia being one of them. It's a fine moment to frighten Georgians with a Ukrainian scenario."
Alasania said he expected pressure from Moscow over the issue of association with the EU, but maintained that Russia had a lot less leverage over Georgia than over Ukraine because of Kiev's dependence on Moscow for energy supplies.
Georgia is to send 150 infantrymen to the Central African Republic next month as part of an EU deployment, the country's first direct participation in EU security policy-making.