They do not want to give up. The demonstrators who take to the streets of Tbilisi night after night refuse to allow Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man, to use his parliamentary majority to compel the opposition forces to declare themselves “foreign agents”.

This has already been done in Moscow, and the consequences are well known. Consequently, all free press disappeared, any criticism of the government leads to imprisonment or even death, fear returns and a dictatorship is established – this is the “Putin model”.

So, what Tbilisi is protesting against is nothing other than the Kremlin’s latest attempt to re-establish Russia’s imperial borders. As early as 2008, there was an initial attack on Georgia, which saw two of its provinces fall back under Russian control. Then came the annexation of Crimea, the secession of Donbass and the invasion of Ukraine, and now Vladimir Putin is once again targeting Georgia through his vassal Ivanishvili, an intermediary who is obliged to him.

It is, of course, chilling. It is all the more terrifying because the intelligence services seem to have every reason to attribute the sabotage operations that are multiplying in Europe to the Kremlin. Democracies must not lower their guard in Ukraine, now less than ever. They must not allow Putin to win there but there is another conclusion to be drawn from this Georgian arm-wrestling match.

Not only is Georgia demonstrating its independence and democracy, not only is Georgia in its turn demonstrating the universality of the aspiration to freedom, but as in Ukraine, 80% of its population wants to join the European Union. Between the Russian Federation and the European Union, whose flags are waved in Tbilisi, the Georgians have made such a resoundingly clear choice that Ivanishvili’s party, the Georgian Dream, has had to declare itself in favour of joining the Union, with which negotiations are now open.

In other words, it is because Vladimir Putin and his regime are seeing their grip on power weakened by the contagion of democracy that they have to get their claws out. They are committing murder in Ukraine and could crack down hard in Georgia, but could they succeed in Tbilisi what they are failing to do in Kiev?

The answer is no. The victory that the Kremlin is failing to achieve on one front would be even more unattainable on two fronts at once. The Russian President does not have the means to re-establish the Empire of the Tsars, not even the USSR, because his dictatorship is driving away from Russia the former Soviet republics that he would so much like to re-annex. For Russia, the only way to remedy this situation would be to democratise, but until Vladimir Putin is forced to withdraw from Ukraine and hand over the reins of power, this will only be a dream.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Français Deutsch Magyar Polski