In a surprise and rare statement on the ongoing political crisis in Georgia, which was issued on March 9, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, did not mince words when it alluded to the Georgian Government’s “resistance” to the country’s Euro-Atlantic integration, which Moscow alleged was being pushed by Washington.
“Dissatisfaction is growing in Washington D.C. with the ruling Georgian Dream party, which is diverging from the path of unquestioned fulfillment of American demands,” the spy agency’s statement noted.
The SVR also said to “restore their order” in Georgia, “the Americans plan to organize systemic work to provide support to the opposition and at the same time to undermine the positions of the Georgian Dream.”
The statement is unprecedented as the SVR has never commented on Georgia’s internal politics before. It is both a power move by the Kremlin and a reflexive psychology exercise to which many of Georgia’s Western supporters have fallen.
As the Georgian electorate continues to remain largely pro-Western, any such proclamation from Moscow is intended to damage those whom it supposedly supports, as some of Georgia’s friends who dismissed the move as a mere “provocation”, have argued. While the Russians’ view their support as only adding strength to whomever they back, this thinking ignores realities on the ground that expose the alarming state of affairs in the context of how ahead Russia’s strategy and tactics in Georgia actually is.
The Georgian Dream government of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia, despite his having maintained pro-Western talk, has at the same time increasingly embraced pro-Putin extremist forces at home and refrained from pushing Georgia’s own issue on the world stage.
Ivanishvili’s flirtations with Moscow culminated in the Georgian Dream inviting Sergey Gavrilov, a Communist Russian Duma deputy to chair the Interparliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy – a Russian front body – into the Georgian Parliament in the summer of 2019, a move that sparked a popular protest that was suppressed with excessive force.
Earlier, the-then and current Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, a close confidant of Ivanishvili, had publicly spoken against the transfer of defensive arms to Ukraine by the US.
With Russia’s occupation forces in South Ossetia, only 40 km from Tbilisi, the SVR statement is also a power play that bets on the fear of war inside Georgia’s borders. Fear of war with Russia, should the Georgian Dream lose power, has been one of the most consistent and potent lines the Georgian Dream has pushed in the internal political discourse for years.
The move also comes amid a flare-up of the political crisis in Georgia, with the storming of offices of the country’s largest opposition political party, the UNM, and the arrest of its leader, Nika Melia, as well as the subsequent resignation of now-former Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia. It also stands out against the background of the empty-handed return to Brussels of Christian Danielsson, an envoy of the EU Council President Charles Michel who personally intervened with a mediation mission to restart dialogue between Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream and Georgia’s opposition parties.
“If you push Ivaninshvili, we will embrace him,” is Russia’s message to those who want to see Georgia in the Western fold. But it is also a reflexive psychology exercise. If you don’t want that to happen, you should stop pushing Ivanishvili.
Labelling the statement as a mere “provocation” and dismissing it is, in fact, falling into that trick. As the recent deepening of Georgia’s democratic backsliding showed, it is time for the US and EU to use their leverage in Georgia before it becomes too late.