Newsweek: Georgia – “the country that NATO and the West are losing to Russia”

Russia believes the U.S. is preparing to delegitimize the upcoming election in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in a "color revolution."

Georgia's upcoming election is scheduled for October this year, when voters will choose their representatives in Parliament.

The ruling party, Georgian Dream, has been in power since 2012 and has been accused by the opposition and some Western organizations, including the European Union, of ‘backsliding democracy in several ways’.

Now, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is preempting the U.S. government getting involved in the election, saying the White House is "extremely dissatisfied with the landscape" in Georgia, a country which has international attention on it for its strategic location and NATO aspirations.

The SVR said: "The Americans are preparing a color revolution in Georgia. At the 'Tbilisi maidan' they plan to make public 'evidence of falsifications' in voting, announce nonrecognition of the election results and demand a change of power. Law enforcement agencies will be provoked to suppress the protests by force."

The U.S. will then come up with a response to what they will call the "excessive" use of force against "peaceful citizens," the SVR said in its statement, reported by the Russian state-owned news agency TASS.

"Georgian pro-Western non-governmental organizations are recruiting a large number of people to closely monitor the voting process," the SVR went on, "they are tasked with identifying and recording 'imminent facts' of the authorities' use of administrative resources even if they do not exist. Washington is providing additional funding for local opposition youth associations, which are expected to become the 'locomotive' of postelection protests."

The SVR added: "The Americans intend to turn up the heat on the Georgian authorities on a large scale in the remaining weeks before the elections in order to weaken the electoral position of Georgian Dream as much as possible. They plan to use a 'tried-and-tested tool': personal sanctions against the top leaders of the party, their family members, as well as the party's sponsors."

On the U.S. Department of State's website, it says the U.S. is "committed to helping Georgia deepen Euro-Atlantic ties and strengthen its democratic institutions."

It comes after the capital of Tbilisi saw major demonstrations earlier this year, against "foreign agent" law which would ultimately create a register of "foreign agents" in Georgia, which would include all nonprofit legal entities and media outlets that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad.

At the time, the U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, said that the bill was based on similar FARA or any other American law."

(The American Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) has existed since 1938. So it is definitely the U.S. that set an example for the world in the legal field concerning this case. It is clear that the Georgians as well as many others just copied the American Act.)

Across the country of Georgia, the gold-starred blue flags of the European Union fly above everything from government ministries to tiny local police stations and seem almost as ubiquitous as the red and white national flag with its cross of St. George, ‘Newsweek’ notes.

Georgia's population of 3.7 million is only one-third that of its namesake U.S. state, and the Caucasus is not at the top of U.S. concerns at a time of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. But the region is strategically important. It lies on the southern border of Russia and to the north of Iran as well as being a transit route for energy pipelines. Whether the West is able to keep Georgia within its own zone of influence is being closely watched by countries weighing their options in a world in which the U.S. has lost the dominance it held at the end of the Cold War.

Pro-Western opponents of Georgia's government describe what they believe is a hybrid war for control by Russia and fear that an election in October could be the last chance to reverse the shift.

Western countries have protested what they call the increasingly authoritarian turn of the ruling Georgian Dream party, with a recently approved, Russian-style "foreign influence" law that targets activists and the media as well its threats to opponents. Georgian Dream says the new law is aimed at stopping foreign interference.

But decades of engagement with Western institutions have also not delivered EU membership to bring economic transformation. Nor have they brought membership of NATO to provide U.S.-backed security guarantees against Russia.

"The West is losing the strategic competition," Kornely Kakachia, director of the Georgian Institute of Politics, told Newsweek. "There's China, Turkey, Iran in the region as well as Russia."

"Losing Georgia to Russia's orbit would be a significant setback for the United States, NATO, and the West, with geopolitical implications both strategic and symbolic," said Laura Linderman, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.

Relations between the Georgian Dream government and Western countries have worsened rapidly in recent months even though it is still theoretically committed to joining the EU and NATO.

Its EU accession process was stopped by Brussels in July over Georgia's "foreign influence" law, which was approved in May despite weeks of mass protests that were countered with force by riot police. The EU also froze $32 million in military aid. "This is only a first step," Pawel Herczynski, the EU's ambassador to Tbilisi, said at the time.

In a show of Washington's displeasure, the Pentagon put on hold the annual Noble Partner military exercises with Georgia in the summer. The U.S. also announced visa bans on Georgian politicians it said were "responsible for or complicit in undermining democracy."

In the face of the Western criticism, the approach of Georgian Dream  has hardened.

The party said last week that if it wins the election in October, it will put the opposition United National Movement on trial. Georgian Dream's leaders have styled the opposition as supporters of a foreign-organized "Global War Party" that allegedly seeks to prolong the war in Ukraine, open another front against Russia from Georgia, and back "pseudo-liberal" ideologies such as support for LGBTQ+ rights. In its appeal to voters, Georgian Dream cited the controversial opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris as an example of why Georgia needed another new law to protect family values and minors.

"The parliamentary elections of 2024 are a kind of referendum in which the Georgian people must finally decide if they will choose war or peace, moral degradation or traditional values, slavish dependence on external forces or an independent and sovereign state," it said, arguing that only its reelection can allow relations with the EU and America to be reset.

Georgia is on the road to becoming an example for other countries on Russia's periphery, which are pro-Western in some ways and pro-Russian or pro-Chinese in others, said Donald N. Jensen, a senior advisor for Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. "Georgia may end up in a gray area of not complete obeisance to Russia, but an area in which it does have this kind of multi-vector foreign policy, which has it going in several ways at once," he told Newsweek. "That may be where a lot of these countries are going."

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