Vazha Tavberidze

‘What just happened – the suspension of military aid – was predictable. I expected it. It wasn’t too hard to predict,’ the former Ukrainian defence minister tells me. Oleksii Reznikov, speaking to me from Kyiv and wearing a ‘Saint Himars’ T-shirt, remains as upbeat as ever, chuckling as he recalls how, back in 2022, Ukraine was supposed to fall in three days. ‘We knew we wouldn’t. It was a matter of survival – three days became three weeks, three months, and now three years. These current events? Just another phase. We have tough negotiations ahead. This isn’t a two-player game – it’s multilateral, with competing interests and big personalities.’ Back then, among Ukraine’s allies, there was no consensus even whether Russians would invade or not.

‘They say the human body, given time, builds a resistance to pain. But after being tear-gassed six times in 21 nights, I can’t say I’ve started to tolerate it, let alone appreciate it,’ says a colleague who hasn’t missed a single night of the pro-European protests on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue since 28 November. She counts herself lucky; so far, she has avoided the brutal beatings meted out by the masked riot police, nicknamed ‘robocops’. These enforcers have become the Georgian government’s ruthless arm for crushing dissent, their mission seemingly to maim and mangle those who find the prospect of embracing the Kremlin’s Russkiy mir less than appealing and aren’t afraid to say so.

Georgia is defined by its fight for survival. Lying in the shadow of Russia, Turkey and Iran, it has navigated – not always successfully – between the great powers for centuries, longing for freedom.  The 26 October parliamentary elections were billed as the latest existential chapter in this centuries-old struggle – a choice between returning to the West or sliding further into Russia’s orbit. Instead, it became yet another interlude to Georgia’s political crisis, with high-stakes actors in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington watching on as both sides apparently pull their punches, waiting for one another to make the first mistake.

‘He wasn’t my first billionaire, so I kind of knew my way around him’, a senior US diplomat who plied his trade in Georgia told me at the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. ‘And the weirdest thing? He was starry-eyed about Nato and the West in the beginning. I remember at one meeting with a US delegation, he outright asked, “So what I” – notice the I, not we – “what I gotta do to get into Nato by 2016?” We all looked at each other, then gave him the usual line about democratic reforms and so on. He listened for a while, then interrupted, “But what do I really have to do?”’ The billionaire in question is Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest and most influential figure.