Russia’s Clandestine Victory in Georgia

How Putin's Georgian Dream government is destroying democracy in Tbilisi

9 March 2023

The worrying developments in Georgia have revealed that although Russia is losing its military battlefront against Ukraine, it is winning its grey-zone operations against Georgia.

Protests have erupted in Georgia. Despite repeated warnings from democracy watchdogs, international partners and Georgian citizens, Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party passed a Kremlin-style “foreign agents” bill in its first reading on 7 March. The bill requires any organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence.”

First tested in Putin’s Russia in 2012, the law aims to silence, intimidate and surpass civil society. Immediately after the plenary session on the draft law began, tens of thousands of Georgians took to the streets of Tbilisi. Although protesters waving EU and Georgia flags were met with water cannons, pepper spray and tear gas, Georgians are not planning to stop protesting and demonstrating, as they always have, that “Georgia’s place is in Europe.”

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Anastasia Mgaloblishvili

Anastasia Mgaloblishvili is a Doctoral Researcher at the Berlin Graduate School for Global and Transregional Studies, researching how semi-authoritarian regimes abuse EU democracy promotion to consolidate authoritarian rule. She has previously worked in Georgia’s pro-Western political movement Droa as a foreign relations coordinator and in the German Marshall Fund of the US as a Program Assistant trainee."

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