Georgia's crisis and Russia's interference

Georgia’s halting journey from the wreckage of the Soviet Union has delivered her, three decades on, into the grip of a single oligarch and his political instrument; the country’s most recent democratic experiment appears to have stalled; and, absent heavy Western intervention, she will continue to inject instability into the Caucasus. How did we get here?

Georgia’s independence arrived early and violently. A referendum on 31 March 1991 delivered an overwhelming vote to secede from the USSR. What followed was not an orderly transition but a descent into factional conflict and coup. The presidency of Zviad Gamsakhurdia collapsed amid street battles in late 1991 and early 1992, inaugurating civil war and empowering paramilitary figures who would scar the state’s legitimacy for years. 

Eduard Shevardnadze’s return from Moscow promised stability but brought sclerosis. Under his rule, secessionist wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia froze into unresolved conflicts that Moscow learned to use as weapons against Tbilisi; corruption became systemic; and voter confidence ebbed. In November 2003, after another tainted parliamentary election, the Rose Revolution toppled Shevardnadze and elevated a new cohort—Mikheil Saakashvili, Nino Burjanadze and Zurab Zhvania—on a platform of anti-corruption and Western integration. 

The Saakashvili decade was transformational and contradictory. It delivered dramatic police and administrative reforms and a rhetorical embrace of NATO and the European Union. It also cultivated an increasingly domineering executive, culminating in a 2007 crackdown on protest and an ill-starred confrontation with Russia in August 2008. The European Union’s post-war fact-finding mission (the “Tagliavini Report”) apportioned blame across both parties, but faulted Tbilisi for opening hostilities in South Ossetia, a judgment Moscow subsequently used in its favour. The conflict entrenched Russian forces in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and exposed the fragility of Georgia’s security bet on the West. 

Enter Bidzina Ivanishvili, a pro-Moscow oligarch. Having amassed a fortune in Russia’s turbulent privatisations, he founded the Georgian Dream party (GD) and won the 2012 parliamentary elections, ending the United National Movement’s rule. Although Ivanishvili briefly served as prime minister, he soon stepped into the shadows while retaining decisive influence as the party’s patron and financier. A decade later, a cross-section of scholarship and reporting describes him as Georgia’s “informal leader”—an oligarch exercising power through loyalists in the cabinet, parliament, prosecution service and security apparatus. 

From 2019 onwards, cracks in the post-2012 settlement widened into a pattern. The “Gavrilov Night” protests—triggered when a Russian MP addressed parliament from the Speaker’s chair—were dispersed with force and foreshadowed a harder line against civil dissent. The 2020 elections yielded a bruising standoff; the arrest of opposition leader Nika Melia in February 2021 prompted the resignation of the prime minister and a European Union-mediated agreement to defuse the crisis. All of this coincided with incremental judicial capture and the consolidation of party control over regulatory bodies and public media. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reshaped Georgia’s strategic environment but did not reverse her internal trajectory. In December 2023 the European Council granted Georgia candidate status on conditions—nine steps of institutional reform and de-polarisation. In 2024, the ruling party moved the other way. Parliament overrode a presidential veto to enact the “Transparency of Foreign Influence” law, a Russian-style registry aimed at organisations receiving foreign funding, and later advanced further restrictions on external grants to civil society. The United States and European institutions answered with visa bans and sanctions on officials implicated in abuses, and warned that Georgia’s EU path would stall unless the laws were repealed and democratic standards restored. 

The October 2024 parliamentary election was the inflection point. Observers recorded intimidation and unequal conditions; the ruling party declared victory; the opposition alleged fraud; protests filled Rustaveli Avenue in central Tbilisi; and Brussels declined to open membership talks. Washington suspended elements of its partnership; additional sanctions followed. GD then hardened its course—tightening controls on funding, speech and association. By mid-2025, reports from respected institutions described a slide into autocratic governance centred upon Ivanishvili’s network, capped this month by the appointment of a ruling-party hardliner to lead the State Security Service. 

How did a democratic experiment that began with roses devolve into rule by purse-strings? Part of the answer is structural. A small, highly polarised state wedged between Russia, Turkey and Iran is susceptible to external pressure and internal patronage. War losses and unresolved territorial disputes created security dependence without alliance guarantees. Economic vulnerability—exacerbated by emigration and capital scarcity—made foreign money, whether Western grants or remittances routed through Russia, a political weapon. In such soil, an oligarch with near-unlimited resources could supplant party competition with patron-client relations and, over time, subordinate courts, prosecutors and media to a single pole of authority. 

Another part is cyclical. Georgia’s parties have tended to win on reformist promises and then centralise power. Saakashvili’s United National Movement overreached after real achievements; Georgian Dream repeated the pattern at lower administrative temperatures but with deeper institutional entrenchment. The result is a sequence of mobilisations and disappointments that teach voters to distrust pluralism and accept strongman brokerage as the only route to stability. The 2019 protests, 2021 EU-brokered compromise, and 2024-25 street movements all show a society still committed to European norms; the state, however, has been recalibrated to outlast those surges. 

The crisis now has three fronts. First, institutional capture: the judiciary, election administration and security services serve partisan imperatives. Second, legal repression: foreign-agent and grant laws stigmatise and starve civil society while chilling independent media. Third, geopolitical drift: rhetoric against “Western blackmail” is paired with quiet accommodation of Moscow, even as most Georgians remain pro-EU. Each front feeds the others, leaving Georgia neither aligned with the West nor placated by Russia, but precariously balanced and internally brittle. 

What, then, should be done? Light admonitions have failed. If the objective is a Georgia that no longer exports instability—through refugee flows if protests are crushed, through opportunistic Russian pressure in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, or through criminal and financial networks that thrive in grey-zone politics—then the remedy must be heavy Western intervention of a principled kind.

First, deploy targeted, escalatory sanctions against decision-makers and financiers who engineer repression, including restrictions on oligarch-linked assets routed through European and offshore jurisdictions; enlarge visa bans to families and proxies; and make any rollback reversible only after legal repeal and verifiable institutional safeguards. 

Secondly, condition every element of Western assistance and market access on benchmarks: repeal of foreign-influence and grant-restriction laws; restoration of media freedom; an agreed electoral code with balanced commissions; and measurable de-polarisation initiatives. Candidate status should be preserved but frozen until compliance (Tbilisi itself has put the process on ice but all benefits should be halted as a result); the benefits should be visible when progress occurs and withdrawn swiftly when it reverses. 

Thirdly, the West should finance society, not the state. Scale up direct support to independent media, legal-aid organisations and election observers, routed through robust European and American instruments designed to withstand hostile regulation. Provide secure technology, emergency legal defence, and insurance facilities that raise the cost of repression. 

Fourthly, apply security policy with clarity. While NATO membership is not on the table, Western partners can expand training, cyber defence and border-monitoring support, and commit to punitive measures against any fresh Russian encroachment. The aim is to reduce Moscow’s leverage without granting Tbilisi a licence for domestic illiberalism. (The lessons of 2008 are that ambiguity invites adventurism and that post-crisis hand-wringing is no substitute for pre-crisis signalling.) 

Finally, speak to Georgians. The overwhelming public preference is for a European future. Western diplomacy must move beyond closed-door démarches to public conditionality spelled out in Georgian and delivered through universities, municipalities and business associations. When sanctions bite, explain why; when support arrives, make it tangible. 

Georgia’s tragedy is not that she chose Europe and failed; it is that competing elites learned to use that choice for their own benefit while hollowing out the institutions that might have secured it. An oligarchic republic masquerading as a parliamentary democracy cannot stabilise a frontier with Russia, still less be a model for reform in the South Caucasus. Without heavy and coordinated Western intervention—sanctions with teeth, conditionality with timers, money that empowers citizens rather than clients—Georgia will remain what she has become: a generator of uncertainty on a strategic fault line, where the roses of 2003 have been pressed into the pages of a patron’s cheque book.