Megawatts of Fury

When defending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and meddling in other countries’ internal affairs, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allies often say that he is only pushing back against corrupt, immoral capitalists who seek to control the world from Washington, London, and elsewhere.

Georgian academic Marika Mikiashvili thinks that theory is nonsense.

“Whataboutists say the West is imperialist, so what’s the difference between the West and Russia?” she told Euromaidan Press, a Ukrainian news outlet backed by the George Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation. “One friend said that the difference is that ‘Russia makes you a public toilet.’ It’s blatant, raw enslavement with no freedom, no democracy, no prosperity, and no quality of life.”

Her sentiments explain why thousands of Georgians have taken to the streets for months in protest after their pro-Russian government suspended talks to join the European Union. In late December, thousands formed a human chain across the country.

As the Associated Press reported, Georgia was in negotiations to join the 27-member bloc when EU officials put talks on hold after Georgia’s government enacted a law that ostensibly was designed to curb foreign influence but which critics said was a crackdown on democracy and civil rights.

Police have cracked down on the protests. Hundreds, including prominent members of the opposition, have been arrested and many have been injured in “mysterious beatings” and at protests, Reuters reported.

Fueling the discord has been the perceived bad faith of the governing Georgian Dream political party, added CBS News. Led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the party initially pledged to hew to a pro-Western agenda when they first gained power in 2012. But opposition leaders claim that the party has become increasingly authoritarian and pro-Russian since then.

Georgian Dream lawmakers recently elected far-right former footballer and conspiracy theorist Mikheil Kavelashvili, a critic of the West, as country’s new president, for example, France 24 wrote. He is succeeding Salome Zourabichvili, a pro-EU politician who had been viewed as a check on Georgian Dream’s power. She says he’s not the legitimate president because of irregularities nullifying the elections last fall.

The West, meanwhile, is disunited on the issue.

The US and the United Kingdom condemned the police crackdowns, for instance, and sanctioned the Georgian officials directing them, according to Deutsche Welle. American and British officials said that the Georgian government was compromising its people’s fundamental freedoms.

But Hungary and Slovakia, where conservative, pro-Russian leaders hold sway, vetoed a proposal to impose similar EU sanctions on Georgian officials, Euronews reported. Hungarian officials called those who backed the EU proposal “hypocrites” who sought to intervene in a duly elected government’s exercising of its authority.

Meanwhile, as fury on the streets grows, Georgian leaders have a dilemma: Crack down harshly to dissuade protesters but with the risk of a backlash that brings more demonstrators onto the streets that could result in another color revolution or do nothing in the face of mounting protests – they are now slowly spreading outside of the capital.

Still, as World Politics Review noted, “internal divisions among civil society as well as opposition parties have hampered efforts to build a broad popular front against Ivanishvili’s oligarchic authoritarianism.”

However, those divisions don’t seem to matter much to those on the streets in protest. On New Year’s Eve, tens of thousands shared food, danced, and rang in the new year near the parliament building while also flying Georgian and European Union flags in protest.

“Tonight, once again proves that the Georgian people will not allow a pro-Russian government to turn our country into a Russian-style despotism,” one demonstrator, 42-year-old Ilia Darsavelidze, told Voice of America. “Putin’s puppets in Tbilisi are powerless against the will of our entire nation. We will reclaim our rightful place in Europe.”