Vyacheslav Kovalenko

Vyacheslav Yevgenevich Kovalenko (; born 27 March 1946) is a career diplomat and a former Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to Armenia. He served as ambassador to Georgia until the breakdown of diplomatic relations between Georgia and Russia in the wake of the August 2008 war.

Kovalenko graduated from the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University in 1972, and went on to work in various diplomatic posts in the central offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and abroad.

In 2004, Kovalenko was appointed Director of the Second Department of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, On 29 August 2008, Georgia ordered all Russian diplomats to leave the country. Kovalenko left Tbilisi on 30 September with 22 Russian diplomats on a flight to Moscow.

Kovalenko speaks Russian, Arabic, Belarusian and French.

The statements sparked public outrage in Georgia, and Kovalenko was summoned by Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for explanations while the opposition factions in the Parliament of Georgia demanded the withdrawal of Kovalenko from Georgia. Georgian Parliamentary Chairperson, Nino Burjanadze, responded to the ambassador’s prediction: "Maybe, certain forces in Russia really want to see the extinction of Georgian nation, but this will not happen… I would advise Mr. Kovalenko to think about Russia and its demographic problems and we will ourselves take care of Georgian problems, including the demographic ones."