Georgia’s aspirations to become an EU member are going nowhere fast. EU leaders effectively put the brakes on negotiations in June, in response to democratic backsliding. It also froze €30 million destined for the Caucasus country of some 3.7 million people.
In so doing, the EU faces a dilemma: Upholding its democratic values, some regional analysts say, could benefit undemocratic adversaries. That means foremost Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“Russia will be very happy to see [a] more isolated Georgia,” Kornely Kakachia, the director of the Georgian Institute of Politics, a Western-funded think tank, told The Parliament from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. “It gives chances to illiberal powers like Russia, China to influence Georgian politics.”
Regardless of what the Georgian people might want — some polls indicate nearly 90% of the population favour EU membership — their government may be happy to strike a balancing act between Brussels and Moscow. Given its geographic proximity to Georgia and history of overseeing it during the Soviet era, the Kremlin is in a strong position to "exercise control over [it], and it knows how to do it," Natalie Sabanadze, a senior research fellow in Eurasian affairs at London-based Chatham House, told The Parliament.
Kremlin’s quest for ‘sphere of influence’
Russia is already physically present in part of Georgia, occupying the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia since a swift invasion in 2008 helped Russian political allies there establish breakaway republics. Few countries recognise them as such.
Most Western observers look back at the 2008 invasion and see it as a blueprint for the much larger one of Ukraine in February 2022 — what Kakachia called Russian President Putin’s expansionist vision to reestablish Russia as a global power. As now with the EU, Georgia then was flirting with Western integration. Just months before Russia's invasion, NATO floated the idea of bringing Georgia into the military alliance, which was founded to confront the extinct Soviet threat.
Exerting more control over Georgia, which borders the energy-rich and strategically important Black Sea, would expand Russia’s “sphere of influence,” Sabanadze said. As it is, Russia appears to have plans to build a naval base at the port of Ochamchire, in Abkhazia.
Doing so would add to the Russian presence around the Black Sea, a commercial gateway to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Military occupation of parts of Ukraine and Moldova, EU candidate countries, already afford Russia some amount of control of the region. Further south, Russia still has troops in Syria, where it is allies with President Bashar Assad.
“This situation with occupied territories and the question of status will never be resolved because it's one of the pressure mechanisms that Russia has over Georgia and will maintain it,” Sabanadze said, referring to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
With EU accession talks halted, she said, Russia's control of that Georgian territory remains largely a domestic issue.
Georgia never restored diplomatic relations with Russia as a result of its assault. What Putin could not achieve militarily, Kakachia said, he is now trying to do with soft power. This includes spreading pro-Russian and anti-Western propaganda. At least some of the Georgian population, especially those in rural and economically depressed areas, may be receptive to it.
Pros and cons of halting EU accession
The case for the European Council’s recent decision to halt Georgia’s progress towards EU membership is clear enough. Georgian Dream, the party that dominates national politics and is ambivalent towards Russia, passed a foreign agents law in the spring, which democracy advocates have criticised for targeting civil society and free media in the same vein of a similar law in Russia.
Massive public protest in Georgia failed to stop its implementation, which EU leaders consider a “backsliding on the steps set out in the Commission’s recommendation for candidate status,” according to the European Council’s conclusions published last month.
The reversal came barely six months after greenlighting accession negotiations.
The EU’s decision so far appears to have had little impact on Georgia’s political elites. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze brushed off concerns, saying in June that European integration “remains the main foreign policy priority” and that “by 2030, Georgia will be prepared better than any other candidate country.”
Ironically, it is the Georgian Dream that applied for EU membership shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. The party’s influential founder and one-time Georgian prime minister, the billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili, is eyeing developments there closely since “the outcome of the war in Ukraine will decide a lot of things, including the fate of Georgia and European security,” Kakachia said.
“He thinks that the West is weak, so he needs to accommodate Russia's geopolitical interests,” he added.
The European Council did not comment on how its move may benefit Russia, even if inadvertently. The EU is in a delicate situation, Kakachia said, needing to enforce democratic norms required for membership on one hand without pushing Georgia too much on the other. High levels of public support in Georgia for the EU are not the same as embracing democracy; at least some of that domestic EU spirit, he said, is pure economic interest with little regard for democratic development.
Elections to test EU mood in Georgia
The Brussels-Moscow pendulum should become clearer in October, when Georgians vote in parliamentary elections. Georgian Dream is hoping to have successfully thread the needle of competing interests and stay in power.
“The opposition will try, together with the president, to frame these elections as a referendum on Georgia's European future,” Chatham House's Sabanadze said, referring to Salome Zourabishvili, the Western-leaning president whose veto of the foreign agents bill the Georgian Dream-dominated parliament overturned to make into law.
“Georgian Dream will frame it as a choice between war and peace,” she added.
The narrative could prove effective. Georgia's experience from 2008, like Ukraine's since 2014, shows that Putin will not hesitate to interfere militarily if he feels a country in his backyard is straying from his influence. That fear among voters could be enough to bolster Georgian Dream’s electoral chances, thereby diminishing the EU’s reach.
In a recent campaign speech, Ivanishvili capitalised on those fears.
“We need an especially strong victory, which is equal to the constitutional majority, to finally put an end to the war party, the network of agents, radicalism, polarization and liberal fascism in Georgia,” he said.