On the eve of a third major anti-government demonstration, a trusted aide to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said that Russian intelligence services “two or three years ago” predicted the recent outbreak of street protests in Moscow, suggesting that a blueprint for political unrest had been drawn up in foreign capitals.

The aide, Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, said in an interview on Thursday that the authorities saw the protests as evidence of growing demands for political participation, especially among the urban middle class, and would introduce “significant changes in terms of liberalizing and modernizing our political system.”

But he also reiterated Mr. Putin’s earlier claim that the United States has played an important role by sending money “to provoke the situation.” He said that intelligence services had long warned that protests were planned, using information gathered “from all over the world.”

“Listen, we knew two or three years in advance that the next day, after parliamentary elections, we will have a scandal and we will have people going out and saying ‘Listen, guys, these elections are not legitimate, because there are hundreds of violations and they have stolen our voices,’ ” Mr. Peskov said. “We knew this in 2010. We knew that it would happen.”

“And we know now that on the fifth of March we will have the same scenario,” Mr. Peskov added.

He said that the authorities knew of Web sites prepared to publicize election violations, including fabricated ones, after the March 4 presidential elections, and that they have the wording of the statement that will be issued by election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“It’s so ridiculously predictable,” he said.

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