Georgia is swept into the orbit of the Kremlin

These days it is the Kremlin that is praising Georgia, a country it invaded in 2008, for toeing its line and refusing to join Western sanctions against Russia. Mr Saakashvili, 55, is fighting dementia and muscular atrophy in hospital on the outskirts of Tbilisi. His mother, who visits him daily, says he has a poor memory and needs a frame to walk. “I am in very bad health,” Mr. Saakashvili wrote to your correspondent in a letter. Mr Saakashvili believes he has been poisoned, and says he first fell into a brief coma after being taken to a different prison hospital. In December his legal team delivered a toxicology report to identify the presence of heavy metals in his body, with the toxicologist expressing the opinion that he had been poisoned. On 31 January his aides said he had been moved to intensive care, although officials denied this.

Mr. Saakashvili modernized Georgia, but was also mired in scandal and repression. Standing down once he was ousted as president, he fled in 2013 fearing arrest at the hands of Bidzina Ivanishvili, a reclusive businessman who made his money in Russia, as prime minister Served briefly, and effectively ruled Georgia from then on. Although he does not hold any formal government position. Mr. Saakashvili, subsequently stripped of his Georgian citizenship, moved to Ukraine and took a Ukrainian passport, but in October 2021 he returned to Georgia in hopes of rallying protests in his favor, despite an outstanding warrant for his arrest. Instead he was sentenced in absentia for abusing his powers as president and is serving a six-year sentence.

The European Parliament and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have asked Georgia to release Mr. Saakashvili, who once served as governor of Odessa and is still chairman of the National Reform Council in Ukraine, who is seeking medical treatment outside Georgia. There is an advisory body for According to Amnesty International, his imprisonment and abuse appears to be political vendetta, and a favor for Vladimir Putin, who waged a short war against Georgia in 2008 and once promised to hang Mr Saakashvili “by his balls”. did.

Georgian Dream, the party that Mr. Ivanishvili founded, has seized power, fueling turmoil and fears of Mr. Saakashvili’s return to power. But while Georgians may be disillusioned by their former president’s politics, they are also repulsed by the inhumanity of his treatment. Iago Kachchishvili, a Georgian sociologist, states, “People are more supportive of Saakashvili as a politician than they are of Saakashvili as a prisoner.”

Mr. Saakashvili’s misbehavior Hitch The possibility of Georgia’s integration into Europe. Other breaches of the rule of law include the imprisonment last year of Nika Guaramia, who runs a prominent private TV channel critical of the government, on apparently trumped-up charges. Political opposition is monitored. Georgia’s bid to be granted candidate status by the EU was sent back last June with a list of 12 demands, which the government is in no rush to address.

“Georgia used to be America’s and the West’s favorite toy. Now the toy is broken and nobody pays much attention to it,” says Shota Utashvili, a former government official who is now a fellow at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Tbilisi. The Georgian Dream Now The coalition governs many of its former members who have established a more radical and openly anti-Western movement in parliament called People Power. Its rhetoric and policies, including a proposed bill to stop “foreign agents”, policies, look like a carbon-copy of its Kremlin strategy. The movement has also blamed the US for efforts to overthrow Georgia’s government.

Georgia is still less authoritarian than Russia or Belarus, but it is drifting increasingly into the Kremlin’s orbit. To appease Mr Putin, its government has refused to join sanctions against Russia or return an anti-aircraft missile system Ukraine gave to Georgia in 2008. a former commander of US forces in Europe said on a recent visit to Tbilisi.

Many Georgians object. Ukrainian flags are a common sight, as is graffiti in the house that reads, “Georgia is Ukraine; Ukraine is Georgia. DREAM has seen pro-Ukraine protests marginalize the opposition by arguing that they risk dragging Georgia into war with Russia.

The picture is further complicated by the presence of some 100,000 Russian exiles who have taken refuge in Georgia from the same regime that still controls 20% of the country in the two enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. For the most part, these are educated youth who openly support Ukraine and are against the war, but stay out of Georgian politics.

Nowhere are the new alliances and divisions more apparent than in Gori, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. Its main tourist attraction is a museum dedicated to the Georgian-born Soviet dictator. The government had removed the giant statue of Stalin from Gori and planned to turn its museum into a grim condemnation of Stalinism rather than a celebration of his life. But, as a clearly embarrassed tour guide tells his group of Russian-speaking tourists, the plan was aborted: “de-Sovietization and de-Stalinization” stalled since Mr. Saakashvili left power a decade ago. Is.

A dozen new statues and plaques have recently been erected across Georgia in memory of Stalin. The dictator who destroyed Georgia’s democracy and freedom by helping the Bolsheviks to take over Georgia in 1921 is now being promoted as a Georgian hero. The Kremlin must be thrilled.