Is Georgia on the brink of a colour revolution?

"Foreign Agents" bill, presidential veto, protests, etc.

You may have heard about the political turmoil and social unrest in Georgia and, in particular, in its capital, Tbilisi, due to the so-called “Foreign Agents” bill, which requires media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad. I briefly touched upon it in one of my previous articles, almost two weeks ago:

Just a few days ago the Georgian Parliament finally approved the “Foreign Agents” bill on its third reading - see for instance this BBC article - and, as you can imagine, this fuelled even more protests on the streets of Tbilisi, as reported by Associated Press. Yesterday (18th May 2024) Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili vetoed the bill (see for example this Guardian article), however the Georgian Parliament will probably override her veto, since the ruling party, Georgian Dream, has the majority.

What is “funny” in this situation is that Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili, was born and raised in France by Georgian parents. According to her biography on Wikipedia, she had dual French and Georgian citizenship until August 2018, when she relinquished French citizenship to participate in the presidential election, which she later won. I think it is safe to say that she has always been a “foreign agent” in Georgia and that she renounced her French citizenship only to become president of Georgia and then pursue the interests of the Outlaw US Empire and its NATO vassals.

What is even “funnier” is that literal foreign agents have joined the protests against the “foreign agent” bill in Georgia. In the video below you can see the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, addressing Georgian people protesting against the “foreign agent” bill:

By the way, he was not alone! He was in “good” company, with the Foreign Ministers of Estonia and Iceland, as reported by TASS.

Doesn’t it remind you of something?

Yes, exactly: EuroMaidan 2014, when American politicians addressed Ukrainian protesters! In case you need a refresher, here is late US Republican senator John McCain in Kiev “encouraging the crowds to continue their peaceful protest in support of greater ties with the European Union”, as The Guardian wrote in the description of this video:

I suppose we may soon see Victoria Nuland brining biscuits to the protesters in Tbilisi, as she did in Kiev back in 2014 (see photo below).
Yes, I know that she resigned from her post as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs earlier this year, but… hey, who knows?

Victoria Nuland handing out cookies in Kiev during EuroMaidan (2014).

The Outlaw US Empire may try to stage a new colour revolution and a coup in Georgia, as they did back in 2003 (the so-called Rose Revolution) or in Kiev in 2004 (the so-called Orange Revolution) and then in 2014 (EuroMaidan), however, as former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson pointed out in his latest blog post (which I invite you to read in full)…

Russia, in light of its failure to respond to the Maidan revolution in 2014, is not going to sit passively and see how things work out. At a minimum, Russia’s intelligence service is probably passing information to its intelligence counterparts in Tbilisi about the identities of foreign operators working to manufacture chaos and the source of the funds pouring into Georgia.

So, in summary and to respond to the question in the title… yes, Georgia may be on the brink of a new colour revolution, but this is unlikely to happen. Russia is already very busy in Ukraine and the last thing Putin wants is the opening of another front in Georgia. If anything happens in Georgia, Russians will deal with it immediately, rather than waiting for a new coup and then a new proxy war.

Maria Zakharova.

I will conclude with a witty post that Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, released a couple of days ago on her Telegram channel:

The European Union called on the Georgian authorities to ensure the right of citizens to protest.

The European Union should be consistent and call on the authorities of, for example, the United States, Armenia and Moldova to ensure the right of citizens to protest.

Otherwise, this could be interpreted as interference in the internal affairs of a State with a view to regime change.

The protests in US, Armenia and Moldova she is referring to are respectively…

• ongoing students’ protests against US foreign policy, especially regarding the ongoing genocide in Gaza, being violently repressed;

• demonstrations asking Armenian Prime Minister (PM) Nikol Pashinyan to change course on land concessions to Azerbaijan, with protest leader seeking to impeach the current PM - see this article, for instance;

• protests against Moldovan Government and Prime Minister Maia Sandu (by the way she also has dual citizenship: Moldovan and Romanian), who labelled them as pro-Russia - see this article, for example.

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