Russia fears that a new Euromaidan in Georgia will open an unexpected diplomatic front

This parliamentary initiative has not only caused a social earthquake, but also a political one. Promoted by the Prime Minister’s government Irakli Garibashvili and his party, Georgian Dream, has met with immediate rejection from the country’s president, Salome Zurabishvili, who has assured that he will exercise his right to veto. The gesture of Zurabishvili, the daughter of exiles in France and clearly pro-Western, will, however, have few practical consequences: the veto only serves to return the law to Parliament, where Georgian Dream has enough votes to re-approve it.

The curious thing about this dispute is that neither Garibashvili nor his party are pro-Russian, even though the legislation they plan to pass is almost identical to what the Kremlin put into effect in 2012. In fact, when the invasion of Ukraine took place on February 24, 2022, it took Garibashvili a week to apply in writing for admission of your country in the European Union. In February 2021, he had received a decoration from the president Volodymyr Zelensky for his pronouncements in favor of Russia returning Crimea to Ukraine.

Garibashvili, a socially conservative man and extremely economically liberal – normal, considering that he worked for years for the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of Sueño Georgiano and president of the country until he delegated his second in command -, has not stood out in any of his terms as president of the government for his sympathy for Putin. In fact, during the period 2013-2015, Russia was one of the few countries with which it did not hold any diplomatic summit, something that it did with the United States, Turkey or the European Union itself.

The memory of the Ossetian war

What has happened for Garibashvili to decide now that any company with more than 20% foreign participation has to declare itself as a “foreign influence agent”? Maybe fear. Georgia has a very strange relationship with Russia. On the one hand, he is his great political enemy in the area. On the other, it is its main commercial ally. If Ukraine was left without Crimea in 2014, Georgia has had a territorial dispute with Moscow over South Ossetia since 1991, reinforced by Russia’s recognition of the independence of this region and of Abkhazia in 2008. A situation very similar to the one it maintains with Moldova. by the province of Transnistria.

Georgia is afraid that Russia will try to invade the country again, as it did in 2008, in a lightning-fast ten-day war in which it occupied a fifth of the country. The excuse at that time was the intervention of Tbilisi in the border territories, but, already put in matter, Russia came in like a knife in butter and he forced a ceasefire on his terms with his troops just thirty kilometers from the capital. In a new twist to the story, the president of Georgia at the time was Mikhail Shaakashvili… who would end up as governor of oblast from Odessa, in the Ukraine, land of his ancestors, under the Poroshenko administration.

Currently, Shaakashvili is still in search and capture, but not even the good relations between Zelensky and Garibashvili have allowed their delivery. As can be seen, the conflicts in the area are constant and instability is the order of the day. Already in 2003, Georgia starred in the so-called Revolution of the Roses that ended the government of Eduard Shevernadze, former foreign minister with Mikhail Gorbachev in the last years of the Soviet Union. It is normal for Russia to view everything that happens in that country with suspicion.

Will Garibashvili be the new Yanukovych?

And what’s happening right now excessively reminiscent of the Euromaidan protests of 2014, which ended with the resignation and flight of the country of Viktor Yanukovych, Putin’s ally in the kyiv government. In Russia’s narrative of its conflict with Ukraine, all the problems stem from these protests, which were seen in Moscow as a Western-sponsored coup and led not only to Yanukovych’s ouster but immediate annexation, for alleged security reasons. , of Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luganskthus starting the war in Donbas.

In the Kremlin it is feared that the protests these days in Tbilisi will sweep Garibashvili away in favor of someone close to President Zurabishvili. It is not that Garibashvili is exactly Yanukovych, that has already been made clear, but here Putin prefers the familiar to the improvised. A new Revolution of the Roses that brings Georgia even closer to the West and that deepening the deep anti-Russian sentiment of a large part of the population would open a diplomatic front that Russia cannot afford in the midst of a bitter war with its neighbor.

[Rusia instala un centro de movilización en la frontera con Georgia en plena huida masiva]

This is not to mention a possible new attempt to occupy certain areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, taking advantage of the fact that the Russian army is practically totally committed to the border with Ukraine. Of course, this time it would take Russia more than ten days to quell the situation. It does not seem like a likely scenario, in any case, but the mere image of the candles at the door of Parliament, the protests suppressed by riot police and the European flags waving as a symbol of freedom already point to an impending civil conflict in Georgia.

For years, the Kremlin has done and undone in what it considers its “zone of influence” no matter how much accuse NATO and the West of stifling your instincts. If the fuse that was lit in Ukraine reaches Georgia and spreads through countries like Kazakhstan, always on the edge of love and hate with the Putin regime, Russia could have a serious problem at the worst possible moment.