Maurizio Donini
On the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Georgia was still officially a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) federated to the USSR, but increasingly resistant to Moscow’s central control. The definitive break came with the trauma of 9 April 1989, when Soviet special army troops bloodily suppressed a peaceful pro-independence demonstration in Tbilisi (21 dead, many of them women, killed with sapper’s spades and poisoned by asphyxiating gas). This massacre severed all psychological ties with Moscow, accelerated the nationalist momentum, and paved the way for the referendum and the full declaration of independence on 9 April 1991.
The Caucasian country’s first democratically elected presidency fell to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, already a leader of anti-Soviet dissent. Once in office, Gamsakhurdia pursued a resolutely nationalist policy under the slogan “Georgia for the Georgians,” abolishing territorial autonomies and alarming non-Georgian minorities (chiefly the Ossetians and Abkhaz). Between late 1991 and early 1992, a violent military coup led by local warlords — Jaba Ioseliani’s Mkhedrioni militia and Tengiz Kitovani’s National Guard — overthrew Gamsakhurdia, plunging the country into civil war. In an attempt to stabilise the young republic, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s former Soviet foreign minister, was brought back to power.
The new republic, however, inherited all the flaws of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus, compounded by corruption endemic at every institutional level. The result was structural paralysis, with empty state coffers, wages and pensions left unpaid for months, and crumbling infrastructure — evident in the incessant power cuts even in Tbilisi itself. Amid this profound state weakness, the two de facto republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia consolidated themselves, while the central government could not even exert authority over the south-western region of Adjara, which the local pro-Russian leader Aslan Abashidze had turned into his personal fiefdom.
The gradual drift away from the Soviet orbit favoured the emergence of new forces within Georgian society, bringing to the fore a generation of young, Western-trained jurists and political figures led by Mikheil Saakashvili (a former justice minister), Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze. The confrontation between the old post-Soviet establishment and these new reformist forces reached its climax in the November 2003 parliamentary elections. Faced with blatant manipulation of the results by the governing coalition loyal to Shevardnadze — confirmed by independent exit polls, parallel counts run by NGOs, and OSCE observer reports denouncing systematic fraud — the country took to the streets. For three weeks, hundreds of thousands of citizens demonstrated peacefully along Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi, mobilised by the Kmara! (“Enough!”) youth movement and the opposition coalition. On 22 November 2003, as Shevardnadze attempted to open the session of the disputed Parliament, the Rose Revolution (Vardebis Revolutsia) erupted: Saakashvili and the protesters burst into the chamber, brandishing red roses as a symbol of non-violence. Seeing that the army and special forces refused to open fire on the crowd, and following diplomatic mediation facilitated in part by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Shevardnadze resigned on 23 November to avoid bloodshed. The Rose Revolution was the fundamental turning point in Georgia’s contemporary history: it brought the country’s complex post-Soviet transition to a close, ushered in the era of “colour revolutions” across the former Soviet space, and durably redirected Tbilisi’s geopolitical trajectory toward a pro-Western, Euro-Atlantic axis.
Elected in January 2004 with more than 96% of the vote, Mikheil Saakashvili launched a period of radical reform aimed at transforming a near-bankrupt post-Soviet republic into a dynamic market economy open to Western investment. On the domestic front, his administration waged a determined campaign against systemic corruption: the most emblematic reform was the immediate dissolution of the entire traffic police force (more than 30,000 officers dismissed in a single day), replaced by a community police force trained to Western standards. Through deep economic deregulation, tax cuts and the privatisation of state assets, Georgia posted double-digit GDP growth rates (close to 10% a year between 2004 and 2007) and climbed rapidly in international Ease of Doing Business rankings.
This reformist momentum went hand in hand with efforts to consolidate the state: after the peaceful reintegration of Adjara in May 2004, Tbilisi regained institutional control of the Kodori Gorge in Abkhazia in 2006, re-establishing an administrative presence loyal to the central government. The new direction was not, however, free of authoritarian excesses and internal contradictions: the concentration of executive power, the unabashed use of expropriation on grounds of public utility, and the violent dispersal of opposition protests in November 2007 laid bare the hyper-presidential, top-down nature of the Saakashvili model, prompting the president to resign in order to seek early re-election (which he won in January 2008 with a more modest 53% of the vote).
Unable to counter Tbilisi’s diplomatic rise directly at the political level, the Kremlin adopted a hybrid strategy of economic strangulation and asymmetric pressure: in 2006, it imposed a total embargo on Georgia’s main exports (wine, Borjomi mineral water and horticultural products), cut direct air, postal and sea links, and launched mass expulsion campaigns against Georgian citizens residing in the Russian Federation. In the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow accelerated the large-scale distribution of Russian passports to the local population (“passportisation”), thereby creating the legal pretext for a future military intervention meant to protect “Russian citizens abroad” — a pattern that would later serve as the prelude to operations in the Donbas. At the same time, the Russian peacekeeping contingents deployed under the 1992 and 1994 agreements abandoned all pretence of neutrality, supplying heavy weapons, logistical support and command officers to the local separatist militias.
The catalyst for the crisis was the April 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. The final declaration produced a fragile geopolitical compromise: faced with opposition from Germany and France (wary of triggering a traumatic rupture with Moscow), Georgia and Ukraine were denied access to the Membership Action Plan (MAP), even as the communiqué enshrined the solemn promise that both countries would eventually become members of the Alliance. This outcome proved to be a strategic blunder: it deprived Tbilisi of the defensive cover of Article 5 while signalling to Moscow that a window had opened to militarily forestall eastward enlargement. In the months that followed, a succession of provocations, artillery exchanges along the contact lines in South Ossetia, and the build-up of Russian troops at the border (the Kavkaz-2008 exercise) tightened the trap into which the Georgian government would fall in August 2008.
As later documented by the official report of the EU’s independent international fact-finding mission, led by Ambassador Heidi Tagliavini (the Tagliavini Report, 2009), Ossetian separatist militias stepped up mortar and sniper attacks on Georgian villages in order to provoke a response from Tbilisi. On the night of 7–8 August 2008, Georgian artillery shelled Tskhinvali and launched a ground offensive to “restore constitutional order.” Georgian forces, however, failed to seal off the southern approach to the Roki Tunnel: Russia’s 58th Army poured through in force, opened a second front in Abkhazia, and split the country in two by occupying strategic towns such as Gori and the port of Poti. Despite the context of prior provocations orchestrated by Moscow, it became clear that Tbilisi had triggered a full-scale conventional war in violation of international law; at the same time, the United States and NATO did not intervene militarily, dashing Saakashvili’s calculations.
Hostilities ceased roughly forty kilometres from the capital, thanks to diplomatic mediation by the sitting president of the European Council, Nicolas Sarkozy. The six-point agreement negotiated with Dmitry Medvedev led to the withdrawal of Russian forces from undisputed Georgian territory, but Moscow maintained and reinforced its military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia: on 26 August 2008, the Kremlin unilaterally recognised their independence, prompting Tbilisi to immediately sever diplomatic relations and formalise their status as “territories under Russian military occupation.”
Since then, Georgia’s external trajectory has followed a paradoxical course. On the normative front, Parliament locked in the country’s Western aspirations by adopting, between 2017 and 2018, Article 78 of the Constitution, which obliges all state bodies to guarantee full integration into the EU and NATO. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Tbilisi formally submitted its EU membership application on 3 March 2022; after an initial intermediate phase (in which Kyiv and Chișinău secured candidate-country status while Georgia obtained only a “European perspective”), the European Council formally granted Tbilisi candidate status in December 2023, subject to nine structural reforms.
The process, however, ground to an abrupt halt in 2024 with the authoritarian turn taken by the ruling Georgian Dream party. Despite massive street protests and the veto — ultimately circumvented — of pro-European President Salome Zourabichvili, Parliament adopted the controversial “Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence,” modelled on Russia’s foreign-agents legislation. Faced with the government’s refusal to repeal the law, the European Council declared the accession process de facto frozen. The October 2024 parliamentary elections confirmed Georgian Dream’s majority, amid documented allegations of fraud, coercion and the opposition parties’ refusal to recognise the results. The crisis reached its climax when Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced a freeze on opening accession negotiations and a rejection of EU funds until 2028, accompanied by a severe crackdown on pro-EU movements.
A stark geopolitical paradox has thus taken hold: even as no de jure diplomatic relations have existed since 2008, Georgian Dream’s leadership continues a gradual, pragmatic realignment with Moscow, opening a deep rift with civil society and steering Georgia away from its constitutional obligations regarding Euro-Atlantic integration.
Rapporteur Rasa Juknevičienė (EPP, Lithuania) has taken a very firm line against the Georgian government’s direction: “Georgian Dream’s leaders continue to dismantle democratic institutions and silence independent media, holding one of the highest numbers of political prisoners in the region, including Sakharov Prize laureate Mzia Amaglobeli. This is unacceptable for an EU candidate country. We must now move forward with coordinated EU-level sanctions against those responsible for the repression and the capture of the state.”
Testifying to the vitality of civil society and its fierce opposition to authoritarian normalisation, in 2023 the pro-European people of Georgia and former Public Defender (Ombudsman) Nino Lomjaria were formally nominated for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. During her term in office, Lomjaria distinguished herself through her defence of the civil rights of the most vulnerable groups: refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had fled the occupied regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ethnic and religious minorities, and independent journalists. This nomination formalised, at the multilateral level, the distinction between the Georgian people — firmly committed to European values and human rights protection — and the authoritarian course set by Georgian Dream’s leadership.
(Part 1. To be continued)
