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How Georgia Went From the Vanguard of Democracy to the Front Lines of Autocracy, The New York Times Magazine

Liberty is not built on the doctrine that a few nobles have a right to inherit the earth. No! No! It stands on this principle: That the meanest and lowest of the people are, by the unalterable, indefeasible laws of God and nature, as well entitled to the benefit of the air to breathe, light to see, food to eat and clothes to wear as the nobles or the king. That is liberty… and liberty will reign in America!

–John Adams, 1775, HBO

Today is Independence Day in Ukraine. Having just re-watched the HBO series John Adams, one is reminded of what is being fought for and about in Ukraine, for themselves, and for freedom and democracy and basic needs and rights everywhere.

One is also reminded of the heart-wrenching and terrifying chasm between 1775 and 2025.

The US has done wonderful and terrible things since its founding. But it had remained the last best hope.

Will it be? Will it keep its republic as Benjamin Franklin posed the question after it gained it? Will it lead the world as the bullwark of democracy, human needs and human rights in the future?

In our last post we were reminded by the cover article in The Atlantic next month that the worst war in the world is not in Ukraine or Gaza, but in Sudan, and that this most exemplifies, not least by its inattention, the breakdown in the liberal world order since World War Two.

But Ukraine remains the place where this breakdown will most likely be turned around or lead to global destruction as yet unseen.

We had the privilege shortly after the Russian invasion in 2022 of meeting with and interviewing and filming many Ukrainians–refugees and activists. We salute all the courageous Ukrainians today. We intend to see them again in Ukraine soon.

What follows are the speech in Kiev today by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, a riveting opinion piece by Thomas Friedman in The New New York Times a few days ago, and an in-depth, timely, enlightening piece by Scott Anderson in The New York Times Magazine today on another forgotten place where the intentions of Vladimir Putin to rebuild the collapsed Soviet Union into a new Russian empire began:

Address by the President on Ukraine’s Independence Day, August 24, 2025

Dear Ukrainians! Dear people!

Today is Ukraine’s Independence Day.

I am here now, in the heart of Kyiv, on Independence Square. And it is here that one can best feel what independence truly means, why it is so important to us. And why Maidan is much more than just the main square of our country. For it is a symbol: a symbol of independence, its guardian. This is the place where history is always made, where the energy and strength of our people are born in times of threat to our independence.

And now, as the full-scale war for independence continues, it is here, on Maidan, that one can find such powerful symbols. Symbols of how we fight, what we fight for, and how we overcome this war.

These symbols are all around us, in this Monument of Independence. Inside, it has a reinforced concrete frame and can literally withstand a hurricane. Just like our Ukraine has withstood the great calamity that Russia brought to our land. Here, at the “Zero Kilometer.” This is the starting point, where distances to Ukrainian cities are marked. To our Donetsk, our Luhansk, our Crimea. And today, these markers have an entirely different meaning. They are no longer just about kilometers. They remind us that all of this is Ukraine. And our people are there, and no distance between us can change that, and no temporary occupation can alter that. And one day, this distance between Ukrainians will disappear, and we will be together again as one family, as one country. It is only a matter of time. And Ukraine believes it can achieve this – secure peace, peace across its entire land. Ukraine is capable of it.

Because Ukraine has character. Rock-solid endurance, a gaze we do not avert, and hands scorched by fire and time, yet strong. Hands that hold the shield and defend what is theirs: their land, their culture, their millennia-old history, testified by the legacy of Kyiv’s founders. And we defend our future, for which our heroes have given their lives.

These are names we will never forget or betray. Names that defended our independence. And it is here, on Maidan, that Ukrainians often bid farewell to heroes on the shield. And everyone who has ever been to such a farewell, and everyone who has lost someone in this war, carries a personal reckoning with Russia forever and has vowed never to forget their heroes.

The embodiment of that vow is this field of national memory – a field of great strength, for in every small flag lies someone’s remarkable story, action, and choice: a choice in favor of Ukraine, in favor of the future, specifically, the freedom of peace and the peace of freedom. This is the philosophy reflected in our culture through the image of Cossack Mamai, who earned his freedom and can therefore set aside his weapon and take up the kobza, while keeping his saber close, just in case, yet returning to peaceful, civilian life. This is what we all aspire to. And we know: no one will simply give it to us; it can only be won.

This is exactly what we have been doing for 1,278 days of this war – the war for independence. For each of these days, I want to thank you: the Ukrainian warrior, the Ukrainian volunteer, the doctor, the rescuer, the teacher, our youth, our parents, every Ukrainian. Thank you all. For what we have already endured. And for the Ukraine we are creating together. For the Ukraine it has already become. That came of age on February 24. That took its fate into its own hands and armed itself. It had no time to hesitate, no right to be afraid. And it truly stopped the world’s second-ranked army. And we will keep saying this. We will because it shatters the myth of the invincible Russian army.

We have proven it. And we continue to prove it today. Each person in their own place. Each who bears independence within themselves. Who defends our right to be Ukrainians – through their work, their deeds, their achievements. Today, independence is forged on the battlefield. Independence shields the skies each night. It saves lives in hospitals. It extinguishes fires. It teaches. Independence does not sleep, working around the clock at defense enterprises, because it is so important that our warriors have everything they need, that independence has everything it needs to defend itself. Independence is behind the wheel, on the road to those in need. Independence fights in the ring, on global arenas and stages where Ukrainians perform. It is on the pages of books and in the words of poems written by Ukrainians.

When we hear from the enemy every day: “There is no such state, there is no such nation.” And when, every day, we prove the opposite. We prove that Ukrainians exist – and Ukrainians will remain on this land, on this square, where our future generations will stand a hundred years from now. And a hundred years from now, they will celebrate Ukraine’s Independence Day here.

It will be so. It will be so because Ukraine is different today. Ukraine is stronger and has self-respect. And Ukraine does not wait for gestures of goodwill, but it has its own will to put into life what is necessary for us. And when Russia wants to take the Sumy region, the Armed Forces appear in the Kursk region. When the enemy strikes our energy infrastructure, trying to leave us without light or heat, then its oil refineries burn. And no one can forbid us such strikes because it’s justice itself that delivers them. Just as when Russia attacks us every day – our peaceful cities, our hospitals, our schools, killing our civilians, our children – it receives the “Spiderweb” in response. And this is how justice strikes. This is how Ukraine strikes when its calls for peace are ignored. How many times have we proposed a ceasefire? How many times have we said: “We want silence, we seek peace?” But a dignified, all-encompassing peace – and that is why we count on the strength of the entire world.

This is the Ukraine of today. And such a Ukraine will never again be forced in history to endure the shame that the Russians call a “compromise.” We need a just peace. Our future will be decided by us alone. And the world knows it. And the world respects it. Respects Ukraine. Treats Ukraine as an equal.

Ukraine that can, indeed, in a single day, gather and unite the world’s leaders around itself. Ukraine with which the United States – and the entire world – wants to co-produce drones. Ukraine that has restored the unity of Europe and the United States and now serves as the foundation of this alliance. Ukraine that stands its ground and can defend itself. And that is why Ukraine is heard, Ukraine is taken into account, and Ukraine is listened to. Its place is at the table; it is not told, “Wait outside the door.” It is said, “The decision is yours alone.”

It was exactly this Ukraine that I had the honor of representing in the United States a week ago. Today, both the U.S. and Europe agree: Ukraine has not yet fully won, but it will certainly not lose. Ukraine has secured its independence. Ukraine is not a victim; it is a fighter. Ukraine does not beg; it offers. Alliance and partnership. The best army in Europe. Advanced defense technologies. Experience in resilience. We say: “We need the EU.” And we do. But the EU needs us just as much. And everyone acknowledges this. And this is how Ukraine is seen – not as a poor relative, but as a strong ally.

This is precisely what the Coalition of the Willing is about. This was what Washington was about. About that and about ensuring a sustainable, reliable, long-lasting peace. Ukraine will achieve it because it will receive security guarantees – so strong that the thought of attacking Ukraine would never cross anyone’s mind.

This is not just our goal – it is exactly what we want and must pass on as a legacy to our children and grandchildren: a strong Ukraine, an equal Ukraine, a European Ukraine, an independent Ukraine.

So that the closed cycles of history are finally broken, those in which every generation lacked something to preserve their independence, and each new generation would enter a new turn, again forced to take up arms, again having to defend itself and reclaim its freedom. We must not pass this burden on to our descendants. We are building a Ukraine strong and powerful enough to live in security and peace. So that here, on this square, on our Independence Square, beneath our flags, on our land, our children and grandchildren will celebrate Independence Day. In peace. In calm. With confidence in the future. With respect. And with gratitude to all those who defended Ukraine in this war for independence. To those who endured, who prevailed, who gained victory. Such a goal is worth living for. And this is what we stand for.

Happy holiday to you, great people of a great country! Happy Independence Day!

Glory to Ukraine!

. . .

OPINION

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is

Aug. 19, 2025, The New York Times

Listen to this article · 8:49 min Learn more

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

I am really trying to be fair in analyzing the Trump-Putin-Zelensky-Europe drama that has been playing out the past few weeks. I am trying to balance President Trump’s commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine with the utterly personalized, seat-of-the-pants, often farcical way he is going about it — including the energy that everyone involved has to expend feeding his ego and avoiding his wrath, before they even get to the hellish compromises needed to make peace.

For now, the whole thing leaves me deeply uncomfortable.

I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I have never seen one where one of the leaders — in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.

When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work?

Especially when every bone in my body tells me that Trump does not get what this Ukraine war is truly about. Trump is unlike any American president in the past 80 years. He feels no gut solidarity with the trans-Atlantic alliance and its shared commitment to democracy, free markets, human rights and the rule of law — an alliance that has produced the greatest period of prosperity and stability for the most people in the history of the world.

I am convinced that Trump looks at NATO as if it’s a U.S.-owned shopping center whose tenants are never paying enough rent. And he looks at the European Union as a shopping center competing with the United States that he’d like to shut down by hammering it with tariffs.

The notion that NATO is the spear that protects Western values and that the European Union is possibly the West’s best modern political creation — a vast center of free people and free markets, stabilizing a continent that was known for tribal and religious wars for millenniums — is alien to Trump.

Indeed, I agree with Bill Blain, a British-based bond trader and economic analyst, who wrote on Monday: “However much European leaders pile on their flattery of Trump, it’s clear the fundamental bond of trust that underlay the 80-year success of the trans-Atlantic economy, that served the U.S. so favorably for decades, is now ruptured. The end of the trans-Atlantic economy will change the global economy utterly — favoring Asia and new trade relationships.”

So, it is also no wonder to me that Trump doesn’t feel any gut need to bring Ukraine into the West or understand that Putin’s invasion was just his latest march to break up the West as revenge for its breaking up the Soviet Union.

How do I know that Trump is deaf to all that? Just listen to the interview that his special envoy to Putin, Steve Witkoff, gave to Tucker Carlson in March, after Witkoff’s second meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. Here is just an excerpt:

Carlson: “What did you think of him?”

Witkoff: “I liked him. I thought he was straight up with me …. By the way, how would we settle a conflict with someone who is the head of a major nuclear power unless we establish trust and good feelings with one another?

“In the second visit that I had, it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It’s been reported in the paper, but it was such a gracious moment. And [Putin] told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kinds of conversations?

“And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right?”

It gets worse. Trump is so deluded as to Putin’s nature that during his summit with European leaders on Monday he was overheard on an open microphone telling President Emmanuel Macron of France about Putin: “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”

Can anyone identify a single U.S. diplomat in Moscow or C.I.A. analyst who is advising Witkoff and Trump today? My bet is there are none, because no serious analyst or expert on Russia would tell them: “We have concluded that you are right and all of us have been wrong: Putin is not a bad guy, he just wants a just peace with Ukraine — and when he tells you he went to church and prayed for President Trump, you should believe him.”

Sorry, if Putin really prayed for Trump’s life, it is because he knows that no other American president could possibly be manipulated as easily as Trump has been. Putin is not and never has been looking for “peace” with Ukraine. He is, as I have written before, looking for a piece of Ukraine — in fact the whole piece if he can get it.

That is both the “root cause” of the war in Ukraine, to borrow one of Putin’s favorite phrases, and the “root cause of Trump’s meandering and floundering efforts to arrange peace in Ukraine — his inability to understand that Putin wants not peace but victory,” Leon Aron, a Russia scholar and the author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” said to me. “Putin must have Ukraine for all sorts of ideological and domestic political reasons. And he will not stop seeking it and sacrificing for it — unless the West makes the cost of the war prohibitive, militarily and economically.”

So, I end where I began: Trump and Witkoff are not wrong to want to stop the war and all the killing. And it is not wrong to be in regular communication with Putin to do that. I am all for both. But to stop this war in a sustainable way, you have to understand who Putin is and what he is up to. Putin is a bad guy, a coldblooded murderer. He is not the friend of the president. That is a fantasy that Trump chooses to believe is real.

Once you understand those things, they lead you to only one conclusion: The only sustainable way to stop this war and prevent it from coming back is a massive, consistent, Western commitment to give Ukraine the military resources that will persuade Putin that his army will be chewed apart. The United States also must provide the security guarantees that would deter Russia from ever trying this again and encourage our European allies to promise that Ukraine will one day be in the E.U. — forever anchored in the West.

Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.

But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency and his deputy on the advice of a conspiracy buffoon, Laura Loomer, and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence?

Who will tell him the truth? No one.

No one but the wild earth of Ukraine. In the trenches in the Donbas, there is truth. In the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Kyiv says Putin has abducted, there is truth. In the roughly 1.4 millionRussian and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded as a result of Putin’s fevered dreams of restoring Ukraine to Mother Russia, there is truth. In the Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian drones at the same time that Trump was laying out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, there is truth.

And the longer Trump ignores those truths, the more he builds his peace strategy — not on expertise but on his hugely inflated self-regard and his un-American anti-Westernism — the more this will become his war. And if Putin wins it and Ukraine loses it, Trump and his reputation will suffer irreparable damage — now and forever.

. . .

How Georgia Went From the Vanguard of Democracy to the Front Lines of Autocracy

Two decades after the Rose Revolution, the former Soviet satellite is turning away from the West and back toward Russia. What happened?

Anti-government protests in Tbilisi, Georgia, in March 2025.Credit…Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum, for The New York Times

By Scott Anderson

• Aug. 20, 2025, The New York Times Magazine

Twenty years ago, on a clear spring afternoon in May, President George W. Bush appeared on an outdoor stage in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to the rapturous applause of tens of thousands. For the tiny republic, which had seceded from the Soviet Union only to suffer through many years of stagnation, stolen elections and war, it was a moment of great hope. Just 18 months earlier, dissidents clutching roses marched on Parliament and peacefully forced the tainted government out. Thanks to what had become known as the Rose Revolution, Bush declared, “Georgia is today both sovereign and free, and a beacon of liberty for this region and the world.”

Listen to this article, read by Robert Petkoff

Standing alongside Bush that day was a beaming Mikheil Saakashvili — “Misha” to most of his countrymen, the fervently pro-Western political leader who engineered the Rose Revolution and was now Georgia’s president after winning an astonishing 97 percent of the vote in a clean election just 16 months before Bush’s visit. In that short time, he initiated a major anti-corruption effort, accelerated the nation’s drive to join both the European Union and NATO and quintupled the number of Georgian troops serving alongside the Americans in war-shattered Iraq. As Bush continued that day, “Your courage is inspiring democratic reformers and sending a message that echoes across the world: Freedom will be the future of every nation and every people on Earth.”

That bright future has, alas, not come to fruition. In the years since then, every other nation that Bush mentioned that day as emulating Georgia’s march to freedom — Afghanistan, Iraq, ​​​​Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Ukraine — is now either a brutal dictatorship, a failing state or at war. What’s more, it now appears that Georgia itself is descending a similar path. Over the past two years, Georgia’s democratic structures have been steadily dismantled, and a single political party now has near-total control. As for Misha Saakashvili, he is in a Georgian prison serving more than 12 years on questionable charges of embezzlement and abuse of power.

Georgia’s tumble toward autocracy has come with a most peculiar twist. As might be expected, Georgia has long existed in the shadow of Russia, that great colossus to its immediate north. Since gaining its independence in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, Georgia has seen Russian-supported separatist forces carve out two mini-republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, amounting to nearly 20 percent of its national territory, through force of arms and murderous ethnic-cleansing campaigns. The wounds from those wars have never healed — tens of thousands of war refugees remain displaced today — nor have Russian protestations of innocence gained much traction.

For these and other reasons, most Georgians stoutly insist on their affinity and attachment to the West, often describing their west Asian homeland as the easternmost corner of Europe. A main thoroughfare in Tbilisi still bears the name George W. Bush Street. Polls consistently show that upward of 75 percent of Georgians wish to join the European Union, while only slightly fewer also want to join NATO. So unswerving is this Western orientation that it is enshrined in the national Constitution.

Yet today, if Georgia is indeed rushing toward dictatorship, it appears to be one in both the mold of its reviled Russian neighbor and in its service. Since 2012, the government has been led by a conservative political party named Georgian Dream, or G.D. Founded by a shadowy billionaire, Georgian Dream assumed many of the same accouterments of the new right-wing formations popping up in Europe at the time: an aspirational name; a gauzy appeal to nationalism and traditional values; nostalgia joined to slick modern messaging and optics heavy on oversize, undulating flags. The party put cosmopolitans at ease by declaring that it strongly supported the country’s pending application for E.U. membership while also averring that the nation’s future lay squarely in the West.

But little by little, things appeared to shift: Georgian Dream officials talked of recognizing the Orthodox Church as the state religion and backed away from the party’s earlier support of progressive causes like L.G.B.T.Q. rights, neatly mirroring the same trends in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

What had been a trickle became a torrent. In early 2023, the Georgian Dream-controlled Parliament proposed a law requiring nongovernmental groups and media outlets that received more than 20 percent of their funding from foreign sources to register as foreign agents. Known as “the Russian law,” because it was largely similar to a 2012 decree that Putin used to eviscerate his domestic opposition, it provoked such ferocious opposition, with tens of thousands of protesters taking to the streets, that the proposal was shelved — at least for a time. In national elections the following year, Georgian Dream was returned to power despite exit polls showing it was headed for a resounding defeat and reports of significant and systemic fraud.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to distinguish the strategy Georgian Dream has employed in consolidating its rule; it consists of the same three broad tracks that others have used in their march toward autocracy. The first is to relentlessly blame all of a nation’s ills, past and present, on a preceding political party or leader — in this case, Misha Saakashvili. Closely tied to this vilification campaign is pounding home the notion that only the current party or leader can undo that damage and lead the way to a more prosperous, harmonious or pacific future. From here, the third track becomes self-evident: Because the goals of the ruling party are so obviously beneficial to all, anyone who opposes them is either a fool at best or a traitor at worst, an agent of those seeking to destroy the nation.

In carrying all this out, the party has also been greatly assisted by two critical developments beyond Georgia’s borders. As counterintuitive as it might seem, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 helped propel Georgia back into the clutches of its historical nemesis. More recently, the return to the American presidency of Donald Trump has hastened the process. In observing the avalanche of foreign-policy changes adversely affecting Georgia initiated by the Trump administration this spring, one veteran protester told me: “Before I believed we might still be able to change things back. Now I think we’re finished.”

One of Tbilisi’s odder features is a sprawling modernist glass-and-steel complex perched on a ridgeline just above the old quarter. It could easily be mistaken for a convention center or corporate headquarters, but it is actually one of the homes of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire plutocrat who founded Georgian Dream in 2012. Once a small-time businessman in Moscow — he reportedly imported some of the Soviet Union’s first touch-tone telephones — Ivanishvili capitalized on the chaos of post-Soviet Russia to found a bank and buy up mining assets at fire-sale prices. By the time he returned to his native Georgia in the early 2000s, Ivanishvili was a multibillionaire.

After serving briefly as Georgian Dream’s first prime minister, Ivanishvili stepped down and ostensibly left politics behind. His retirement was short-lived; in the years since then, he has twice more taken to center stage to reinvigorate his party and handpick its leaders. With a wealth once estimated to be as high as $5 billion,equivalent to a staggering one-third of Georgia’s annual gross domestic product, Ivanishvili is often referred to by foreign journalists as “the man who bought a country.”

But Ivanishvili can make for a frustrating target. Famously reclusive, he can go months without providing so much as a glimpse of himself or even an utterance. It’s rumored that he spends most of his time in a heavily guarded compound in the western reaches of the country, where, according to a former close associate, he has undergone a variety of experimental anti-aging treatments. (A lawyer for Ivanishvili has denied this.)Paradoxically, this bashfulness serves to undercut the opposition’s portrayal of Ivanishvili as a would-be despot and Kremlin stooge: How to persuade the public the man is a danger when, rather than bask in the adoration of crowds, he seems more intent on maintaining his self-care routine?

What Ivanishvili has done, however, is to turn Georgia’s distinctive national mythology — and the endless trauma it contains — to his own benefit.

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Georgia, throughout its history, was marched over and burned through, hostage to powers and events beyond its frontiers. Yet it always managed to survive. Ruling at the intersection of three great imperial powers — the Persians, the Ottomans and the Russians — Georgian kings and queens were able to play their imperial neighbors off one another, and hemmed in by mountains to the north and south, it was a place where tribes and ethnic groups could find refuge from would-be conquerors and maintain their own cultures largely undisturbed. Despite being smaller than South Carolina, Georgia is home to three distinct languages and at least eleven ethnic or tribal groups.

But if it was a protection in the past, this geographically imposed diversity has been at the root of most of Georgia’s modern sorrows. The man chiefly responsible for that unhappy turn was born some 50 miles west of Tbilisi, in Gori, then a bucolic agricultural town. His name was Joseph Dzhugashvili, but he became better known to the world as Stalin.

Today a trickle of tourists still come to visit Stalin’s birthplace, but Gori is known more recently for being on the front lines of Georgia’s most recent secessionist war. On its outskirts are a series of displaced-persons settlements housing some of those ethnic Georgians who were forced to flee from South Ossetia in 2008. In that conflict, Russian cluster munitions were blamed for killing nearly 60 civilians in and around Gori, as Russia’s soldiers seized control of the town. Today the partition line with South Ossetia, a mere eight miles away, is delineated with concertina wire, army garrisons and land mines.

Officially, the Soviet Union was composed of 15 distinct republics. In fact, one method the early Soviets used to win over minority groups — as well as set them against one another when necessary — was to grant different peoples and regions varying degrees of autonomy, elements of self-rule that could be strengthened or withdrawn as obedience to the Communist state merited. (Stalin took this a step further by forcibly transferring some three million Soviet citizens among the various regions.) The result was a bewildering patchwork of political designations within many of the 15 republics — a hierarchy of autonomous republics and oblasts and krais, along with something called okrugs — each with its own governing framework and bureaucracy. As might be predicted, with the Soviet Union’s disintegration, some of these internal demarcation lines became violent flash points, as one version of nationalist identity crashed up against another. This was certainly the case in Georgia. Within its national borders, two provinces had the status of autonomous republics and a third that of an autonomous oblast, and it was precisely along these fault lines that armed conflict broke out shortly after Georgian independence.

But the divide-and-rule system didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, Russia continued to promote these divisions to neutralize its enemies or expand its influence. In short order, Russian troops were assisting separatists in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia in their wars against the Georgian state.

One person directly affected by the secessionist wars is a handsome, silver-haired man named Murtaz Kartozia. An ethnic Georgian from Abkhazia, he joined the national army when Abkhazian separatists went to war against the state in 1992. As a veteran of the Soviet Army, Kartozia was put in the front lines, which is where an anti-tank grenade found him in the very last days of fighting in September 1993. Severely wounded, he underwent multiple surgeries to partly recover his eyesight and has spent the past 32 years living on a meager soldier’s pension in a crumbling — and officially condemned — former hospital on the outskirts of Tbilisi. To Russia’s continued claim that its troops went into Abkhazia as peacekeepers, Kartozia gave a caustic chuckle. “They told the Abkhazians what to do,” he claimed. “There were three cease-fires, and it was the Russians who broke all of them — not us or the Abkhazians, the Russians. The minute Russians open their mouths, that’s when they start to lie.” (As with all things in the region, the truth is hard to obtain. U.N. military observers have blamed Abkhazia and Georgia for violating some cease-fires.)

While Abkhazia broke away completely in 1993, mediators in South Ossetia managed to cobble together a fragile half-in, half-out arrangement to keep the peace. That ended in the summer of 2008, and this time the Russians dispensed with even the pretense of neutrality. In early August, they crushed Georgian forces with an all-out assault in South Ossetia and carried on into Gori. After five days, the Russian forces halted their invasion — Putin, then prime minister, dubbed it a “peace enforcement” — and they eventually withdrew to the South Ossetia provincial boundary line. There they have remained ever since, with the microstate South Ossetia diplomatically recognized only by Russia, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela and the Pacific island nation Nauru.

While the number of ethnic Georgians expelled from South Ossetia was far smaller than in Abkhazia — nearly 30,000 by some counts compared with a quarter-million — they tell similar stories of ethnic cleansing. For the past 17 years, Gaioz Babutsidze, 86, has lived in one of the displaced-persons settlements a few miles from Gori. An affluent farmer from the Caucasus foothills, he eschewed the pleadings of his wife and children to flee as the 2008 fighting drew near their home, choosing to stay behind to protect his lands and cattle herd. Taken prisoner by Ossetian militiamen, he was hauled to a neighboring ethnic Georgian village littered with bodies and ordered to dig a mass grave. “There were about 50 that they had killed,” he said, “men, women, young children. I buried them all. When I finished, they said, ‘Go, tell your people what you saw, and never come back.’” As he recounted his story, Babutsidze’s eyes welled up with tears. He looked down at his folded, calloused hands. “I had a very strong family, and I was wealthy. Now I am the poorest one here.”

Babutsidze, too, holds the Russians ultimately responsible: “Of course it was them. They were in charge of everything in Ossetia. It couldn’t happen if they didn’t want it.”

The near-unanimity with which this view is held in Gori and its surroundings underscores the core paradox that is Georgian politics. Since shortly after Georgian Dream’s creation, the opposition has branded it with the pro-Russian label — presumably the kiss of death in such a Russophobe nation — but Georgian Dream has easily carried the Gori district in every election since 2012. Even allowing for some shaving in the disputed elections of 2024, how to account for the party’s taking nearly 60 percent of the vote in Gori that year while none of the fractured opposition parties managed to garner even 10 percent? In a country where Russians seem to be almost universally reviled, how was a supposed pro-Russian political party able to win any elections at all?

The short answer, according to David Razmadze, the Georgian Dream chairman of the Gori Municipal Assembly, is that the party isn’t pro-Russian in the least; that’s merely a lie promoted by its enemies. What’s more, blame for the South Ossetian conflict doesn’t rest with Putin or the Kremlin but somewhere else entirely. “It was all Misha’s fault,” Razmadze said, referring to Mikheil Saakashvili. “He deliberately provoked the situation. This was just one of so many problems he caused.”

Indeed. Over the course of a 90-minute interview in Gori’s City Hall, Razmadze managed to blame Saakashvili for everything from a decline in church attendance to cost overruns on municipal water fountains.

In contrast to his darling status in Washington, Saakashvili steadily shed support within Georgia. Almost every day over the course of his time in office, it seemed, he was announcing some new grandiose plan to propel Georgia into the 21st century and to leave the era of Soviet somnolence behind. The young reformists he gathered around him gained a reputation for arrogance and corruption. An unfettered press filmed demonstrators being beaten by police officers and wrote exposés on the brutality in Georgia’s prisons. Perhaps most reckless of all, Saakashvili upended the traditional go-along-to-get-along way of doing things in Georgia, curtailing the elaborate patronage system that permeated most levels of government; in the process, he made enemies of those powerful businessmen and politicians who benefited most from the crony-capitalism arrangements of the past. Then came the tripwire of South Ossetia.

Saakashvili’s efforts to pressure South Ossetian leaders into returning to the Georgian fold not only threatened to unravel the fragile cease-fire in place since 1992 but also played into the hands of a Russian leadership eager to slap down the pro-Western upstart in Tbilisi. Amid spiraling tension and violence, Saakashvili’s decision to send troops into Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s principal town, provided the secessionists and their Russian allies all the inspiration they needed to take up arms. The result was South Ossetia’s secession and another chunk of Georgia gone.

“It was the darkest time,” Razmadze recalled, “and it was all because Misha made threats he couldn’t fulfill.” As for the Russian shelling and occupation of Gori, Razmadze saw matters in a decidedly munificent light. “They came here as peacekeepers, and thank God that they did, because Misha’s hooligans were looting right across the city,” he said. “They even stole a priest’s car, if you can believe it. If the Russians hadn’t come, who knows how much more damage they would have caused.”

So successful has Georgian Dream’s vilification campaign against Saakashvili been that even his dwindling band of supporters tend to defend him in apologetic tones: “Yes, he made a lot of mistakes, but . . .” is a refrain heard constantly. This tarnishing campaign has also yielded spectacular results at the ballot box: In the four national parliamentary elections spanning 2012 and 2024, the share of Saakashvili’s United National Movement plummeted to 10 percent from 40 percent.

Simultaneously, Georgian Dream has tirelessly presented itself as the guardian of peace, the protector of the nation against both the reckless schemes of men like Saakashvili and meddling outside forces. The best way to maintain this, it says, is to pursue an “evenhanded” policy with Moscow. After all, what is to be gained by provoking a superpower?

This constant drumbeat has resonated with many Georgians, including at least some of those expelled from Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Now living in the displaced-persons community Khurvaleti, Alisia Bestaev, a 29-year-old mother of three young boys, was 11 when her family was driven from South Ossetia in 2008. “Our whole village was burned to the ground,” she said. “We had to flee with only what we could carry.”

Bestaev spoke of having flashbacks of “the pain I saw in the war,” an affliction surely not relieved by the fact that Khurvaleti lies just a few hundred meters from the South Ossetia frontier, so close that nonresidents are allowed in only by special permit and with a police escort. Living with the constant knowledge that, in the event of renewed fighting, her settlement would probably be overrun in minutes, Bestaev strongly supports Georgian Dream’s conciliatory approach to Moscow. “The most important thing is to stay in peace, and this government has done that,” she said. “I think they have been very responsible and careful.”

Such sentiments are very familiar to Lia Chlachidze. “I used to think this way, too,” she said, “but then I saw how G.D. was using this fear in people, this fear of more war, to run over the opposition.” While a common view among Georgian Dream opponents, what made Chlachidze’s appraisal intriguing was that until quite recently, she held elected office as a Georgian Dream party member, a colleague of David Razmadze’s on the Gori Municipal Assembly.

Not only is Chlachidze’s village, Ergneti, adjacent to the South Ossetia frontier; her home is quite literally the last one in Georgia. Just 50 meters up the road, an army garrison stands guard over the demarcation line from sandbagged pill boxes. Chlachidze, a middle-aged widow, has converted the basement of her home into a museum about the 2008 war. It contains fragments of bombs, melted bottles, posters of people fleeing for their lives. Most of the artifacts are things Chlachidze has collected near her house. She calls it the Museum of Remembrance. “I am worried that the young people will forget what happened here,” she said. “I wanted to show the everyday things — the shoes, the family photographs — that people lose in war.”

Chlachidze was among the first people to be affected by the Georgian secessionist wars. In 1991, amid the first outbreak of sectarian violence, her husband was serving as a neighborhood watchman when he was shot by a sniper. He was rushed to the hospital in Gori but died along the way. Shortly after that, Chlachidze fled with her three young children to her current home in Ergneti, only to flee again after an arson attack there. When a cease-fire finally took hold, she came back to rebuild and found that her home now stood at the edge of a de facto no man’s land. “Officially, there was no division, but this wasn’t true,” she said. “The people had already separated into Ossetian and Georgian. I never went to Tskhinvali again.”

In the wake of the 2008 war, and with her grown children now out of the home, Chlachidze threw herself into advocacy work, trying to help others in the Gori region displaced or left destitute by the conflict. In 2012, she took note of the reformist political party being established by Georgia’s wealthiest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Chlachidze of course knew who Ivanishvili was; everyone in Georgia did. After the Rose Revolution, he became a close ally of Saakashvili’s — he is said to have bankrolled many of Saakashvili’s more ambitious capital projects — before the two men had a bitter, if never fully explained, falling-out. After Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream bested Saakashvili’s party in the 2012 elections, Ivanishvili soon passed the prime ministership off to an underling and announced that he was retiring from politics.

“So he was seen as a rather strange man and hard to read,” Chlachidze said. “I think most everyone understood he was still running things behind the scenes but believed he had good intentions.”

Chlachidze was drawn to Georgian Dream’s moderation. In contrast to Saakashvili’s fevered and self-aggrandizing style, Ivanishvili and his lieutenants were pragmatic and sober-minded. Further, Georgian Dream wholeheartedly endorsed those foreign-policy initiatives that an overwhelming majority of Georgians supported: membership in the European Union and joining NATO. What wasn’t to like? In 2014, Chlachidze stood for the Gori Municipal Assembly on the Georgian Dream list and won.

Disenchantment crept in slowly. While the party continued to endorse positions that were important to Chlachidze — further integration with Europe, increased social-welfare spending — she felt a kind of orthodoxy setting in. “Even at the city-council level, we weren’t expected to have our own opinions, but to just rubber-stamp whatever came down from Tbilisi,” she said. “People were becoming increasingly nervous about speaking out, and when they did, word would quickly get back to the party bosses.”

She also grew steadily more suspicious of the shadowy figure of Ivanishvili. Having announced his retirement from politics in 2013, he abruptly returned in 2018. In 2021, he retired again. With Ivanishvili still hovering in the background, there was a rotating cast of mostly nonentities at the top levels of government, their one commonality being that they were friends or associates of his. Charges of vote-buying and illegal campaign contributions by Ivanishvili and his associates seemed to multiply with each election.

By the start of 2022, Chlachidze was so disillusioned she contemplated relinquishing her seat on the Gori Municipal Assembly and leaving politics altogether. “I was getting a very uneasy feeling about what G.D. was doing,” she said, “these moves, one after another, to block the opposition, to make sure it never lost power.”

Then, in February 2022, came the greatest jolt of all: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a manner few could have foreseen, Georgian Dream was to capitalize on that invasion to pull off one of the most astonishing turnabouts in modern political history.

It started small, and with a logic almost unassailable. Within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States and the E.U. instituted a roster of economic sanctions on the Putin regime. While denouncing the invasion, Georgia refused to sign on to the sanctions. With some justification, Georgian Dream officials argued that such an embargo would hurt Georgia far more than Russia. Many Georgians — perhaps even most — agreed with the government’s decision. Alisia Bestaev, the young mother in the Khurvaleti refugee settlement, held a common view. “What is there for us to gain by angering Russia?” she asked rhetorically. “We were traumatized by the last war, we lost everything, and the war in Ukraine has opened our traumas again. We must stay in peace.”

But the sanctions kerfuffle had set a peculiar dynamic in motion. As the Ukraine conflict ground on, the Georgian government steadily became less a neutral bystander and more a Kremlin enabler. A change in banking laws allowed Tbilisi to become both a depository for Russian flight capital and a middleman conduit for the Moscow-bound transfer of products subject to sanctions. In response, the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the E.U. began slapping sanctions on those Georgian officials they held responsible for the workarounds. Chief among them was the nation’s most famous banker, Bidzina Ivanishvili. Georgian Dream officials portrayed these foreign actions as an attack on national honor. “Why does the United States and Europe interfere with our personal affairs?” David Razmadze, the Georgian Dream municipal assemblyman, asked heatedly. “What right do they have to tell us what to do?”

At the same time, a new strain of conspiratorial thinking began taking root among the Georgian Dream constituency. For a number of years, ultra-right-wing groups in the United States and Europe have been peddling the idea of a shadowy international cabal at work to take over the planet and create a godless one-world government. In the vanguard of this cabal are progressive nongovernmental organizations, or N.G.O.s, like George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, along with a variety of governmental agencies that promote liberal social or political ideas.

As promulgated by a mid-list moppet-haired Georgian Dream functionary named Irakli Kobakhidze — soon to become the next Georgian Dream prime minister — the danger facing the Georgian nation was something called the Global War Party. Made up of both powerful individuals and nations intent on enslaving the world, the Global War Party’s specific goal in the Caucasus was for Georgia to open up a “second front” in the war against Russia and in that way seal its own doom. Precisely why the Global War Party wished to see this was left vague, as were the identities of its key actors: Mikhail Saakashvili, most certainly, but revealing any names beyond that, Kobakhidze told reporters, “could create a problem for our national security.”

With this narrative in place, in early 2023 the government introduced its infamous foreign-agent registration law, holding that any Georgian organization receiving more than 20 percent of its funding from foreign sources had to register as working for foreign interests — a not-at-all-helpful label, what with the Global War Party skulking about. Georgian Dream’s opponents instantly saw the proposal’s parallels to the 2012 law that Putin used in Russia to shut down an array of progressive institutions and effectively gut his domestic opposition.

At last, the opposition was galvanized. For weeks, many thousands of demonstrators gathered before the Parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue to protest the proposed law, there to do battle with the police and squads of black-clad titushky, masked enforcers backed by the state. Rather than be cowed, though, the protesters fought back. By March 2023, opposition to “the Russian law” had grown so fierce and widespread that Parliament simply shelved the matter.

At least for a time. Then Ivanishvili emerged from the shadows again.

On April 29, 2024, Ivanishvili took to a stage in front of Parliament to fully embrace the Global War Party conspiracy theory and to excoriate his political opponents. Not just excoriate; Ivanishvili promised that if Georgian Dream were returned to power with a strong enough mandate in the next elections, a whole host of opposition parties would be outlawed. This would instantly disqualify Georgia from joining the European Union, a functioning democracy being a prerequisite for membership, but incredibly, Ivanishvili insisted the precise opposite: that such a move would ensure Georgia’s E.U. admittance, a cherished hope of the nation that only Georgian Dream could fulfill. At the conclusion of his speech, Ivanishvili vowed that, with his party at the helm, E.U. membership would be achieved by 2030. His message for the upcoming elections would be: “Peace, Dignity and Prosperity to Europe.”

Events moved very swiftly after that. In the days that followed, and with Kobakhidze, the chief promoter of the Global War Party conspiracy theory, now brought in as prime minister, “the Russian law” was given a new name and reintroduced to Parliament. Despite another wave of protests, this time it easily passed.

Just as occurred in Russia a decade earlier, a number of foreign N.G.O.s operating in Georgia were forced to shut down, leaving many more domestic organizations — independent media outlets, think-tanks and even public-health groups — without the means to continue. One casualty was a project Lia Chlachidze helped spearhead that involved bringing Georgian and South Ossetian women together to start a cross-border dialogue. “It was shut down because of the Russian law,” she said, “so it meant this last very thin string of Georgian-Ossetian relations was cut. This was exactly G.D.’s plan with this law.” By then, Chlachidze had left Georgian Dream and resigned from the Municipal Assembly. Struck by the opposition’s slogan that “silence is collaboration,” she also began joining anti-Georgian Dream protests.

By the autumn of 2024, the opposition had every reason to feel optimistic that the Georgian Dream wave had crested. According to exit polls conducted by two independent American polling firms during the Oct. 26 national elections, Georgian Dream support barely reached the 40 percent mark. Consequently, it came as a considerable surprise to many when the party was returned to power with 54 percent of the vote. Amid widespread calls of voter intimidation and fraud, the government faced another round of denunciations from foreign capitals and another round of mass demonstrations in front of Parliament, especially after an E.U. monitoring agency confirmed major electoral irregularities.

Once again, though, Georgian Dream was about to exploit Europe’s opprobrium to remarkable effect. In the wake of the tainted vote, the E.U. insisted that Georgia hold new elections, properly monitored, or see its application for membership permanently shelved. Touting this threat as an affront to national dignity — and proof that the Global War Party’s tentacles ran very deep — Georgian Dream countered by announcing that it was unilaterally withdrawing Georgia’s E.U. application for the next four years. Even this, though, didn’t change the party’s core message. In an Orwellian turn, a new round of Georgian Dream posters and billboards soon went up extolling Georgia’s future unification with Europe, once Europe came to its senses, and boasting that it remained the party that would achieve it.

Not everyone in Georgian Dream seemed up to date on their party’s increasingly complicated pro-Europe posturing. “Personally, I don’t want to become part of the E.U. and have them tell us what to do,” Razmadze said. “Just as the Soviet Union collapsed, I now want to see the E.U. fall down because it’s against us.”

Throughout the interview in Gori’s City Hall, four or five other men sat silently around the edges of Razmadze’s expansive office. All were powerfully built and wore black pants and black T-shirts. In contrast to the unfailing graciousness typical of Georgians, none of them either introduced themselves or shook hands with a visitor. At the conclusion of the meeting, one of the men came forward to whisper something in Razmadze’s ear. Either Razmadze misheard the comment or he had decided to add a new wrinkle to his party’s up-is-down messaging. “The reason we have always been careful about joining the E.U. is because we know it is full of K.G.B. agents,” he said.

On a visit to Tbilisi in March, I went down to Rustaveli Avenue to observe the nightly march of anti-government protesters. One group formed in front of the national broadcasting center around 8:30, and they spent the next half-hour chanting about issues they felt the state-run media should be covering but was not. They then marched down Rustaveli to join a second group of protesters before the Parliament building. With the police closing that section of roadway to traffic, the demonstrators engaged in another round of chanting, their call-and-response punctuated by the beating of a kettle drum and the waving of the Georgian national flag.

In the peak days of protest, demonstrators on Rustaveli numbered in the tens of thousands, but on that night, I estimated the crowd at around 600, and instead of a wall of security forces in riot gear, there were two dozen or so police officers tasked to monitor the gathering, who passed the time staring at their cellphones. Observing the tranquil scene, one young demonstrator, a college student, turned downcast. “The regime thinks we’re not a threat anymore,” she said, “that if they just wait us out and do nothing, eventually we’ll lose hope and stop coming.”

But to the student’s way of thinking, these marches were no longer about getting Georgian Dream to change — that was a lost cause. Instead, the goal was to play to an international audience. “We need to remind the West, and especially the United States, that we’re still here, that we’re a part of your world and need your help,” she said.

Even at the time, this seemed a forlorn hope. On the day President Trump took office in late January, he began gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, the primary American governmental institution funding social-welfare programs in Georgia. Its demise had been preceded by the departure of even more foreign N.G.O.s because of strictures of “the Russian law.” Nor was help likely to come from the European Union. With the Georgian government having turned the tables by abruptly shelving its E.U. application, there was precious little that European capitals could now do to bring pressure to bear.

When I returned to Georgia this July, the outlook had only grown bleaker. The rubber-stamp Parliament had passed legislation to ban any political group the government deemed “hostile.” Bands of anti-government demonstrators still marched down Rustaveli every night, but their numbers had dwindled further. Perhaps the protesters were intimidated by the new crop of facial-recognition cameras installed all along the boulevard. The Georgian outlet of Voice of America, a principal source of nonpartisan news from abroad, faces the threat of being shuttered. Adding insult to injury, although Georgia’s gross domestic product ranks 106th in the world, the Trump administration has just placed a 10 percent tariff on all its goods.

About a half mile down from the Parliament building is Freedom Square, the site of George W. Bush’s triumphant appearance in 2005. Toward the end of his speech, Bush turned to soaring rhetoric: “We are living in historic times when freedom is advancing, from the Black Sea to the Caspian, and to the Persian Gulf and beyond. As you watch free people gathering in squares like this across the world, waving their nations’ flags and demanding their God-given rights, you can take pride in this fact: They have been inspired by your example, and they take hope in your success.”

Read by Robert Petkoff

Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by Devin Murphy