Who is running Georgia?

Arshan Barzani is a student at Yale Law School, where he is an editor of the Yale Law Journal. His writing has appeared in outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Lawfare, and his book “Chronicles of Caesar’s Wars” is the first translation of Napoleon’s history of Julius Caesar.

It’s impossible to go very far in Georgia without seeing a Ukrainian flag.

Blue and yellow decks out email signatures and hotel bills, the menus of chic Tbilisi wine bars and the walls of rural huts. Rude graffiti calls for Russian vacationers to pack their bags, while a placard on a restaurant’s door bans fans of Russian President Vladimir Putin — inside, its tables are full.

Russia conquered 1-in-5 acres of Georgia in a five-day war in 2008, and it still holds these lands — the long-restive Abkhazia and South Ossetia — today, with troops stationed just an hour’s drive from the capital.

That war turned out to be only the first in Russia’s revanchist trilogy, followed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the now ongoing war in Ukraine, as Moscow intervened within a neighbor’s territory at each turn, all ostensibly to defend ethnic minorities — but really to punish Western ambition.

Small wonder, then, that nine in 10 Georgians back Ukraine and view Russia as a major threat. The mystery is why their elected government doesn’t.

The ruling Georgian Dream party currently refuses to sanction Russia or arm Ukraine; it has blocked Georgians from joining the thousand-strong Georgian National Legion in Ukraine, and it has kept Putin’s critics from reentering the country. Meanwhile, Georgia itself has turned into a hub for sanctioned goods, sneaking their way on the old military highway to Russia.

And though government officials insist they’re enforcing Western sanctions, even if they don’t impose their own, Washington’s not so sure. After all, Georgia isn’t known for its impenetrable borders. In 2021, Mikheil Saakashvili — the former Georgian president and Ukrainian governor — snuck back into the country in a sour-cream container. He’s now detained and, he alleges, poisoned in a Tbilisi hospital.

But Georgian Dream politicians say their lukewarm support for Ukraine is common sense. Georgia’s small, just 32 years independent and too toothless to bite the bear that surrounds it by land to the north and east, by sea to the west and by its base in Armenia to the south.

The party’s proud to have presided over the only peaceful decade in the country’s post-Soviet history too — an accomplishment it repeatedly heralds — contrasting oh-so nicely with the hotheadedness of Saakashvili, under whom the European Union found Georgia to have started its war with Russia in 2008. A conclusion the West seems to have forgotten.

Amid all this, some Georgian Dream members also think Russia is winning. “Ukraine is on the way to becoming a totalitarian rump state,” a member of parliament told me on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, pointing to the country’s ruined economy and battlefield losses. “We have been a country for 30 years. Russia has been a country for hundreds of years, and it will be here for hundreds of years more.”

The logic here goes that if Putin prevails in Ukraine, Georgia will have rightly appeased him. And if he loses and has to save face, what better way to do that than to overrun a puny non-NATO neighbor?

But look closer at Georgian Dream’s argument, and there are holes.

Bowing to Russia might have made sense at the war’s outbreak, according to Tbilisi-think tanker Shota Utiashvili, but not once it got bogged down in Ukraine. Russia has since withdrawn 2,000 troops from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as it struggles to find the manpower and firepower to take Bakhmut, and it’s hardly able to open a new front.

Other frontline countries have taken advantage of this distraction to assert their independence. Moldova, which Russia also occupies, blackmails and subverts, stood up for Ukraine and has been rewarded with EU candidate status. Finland traded neutrality for NATO membership. Even Armenia — member of a post-Soviet defense bloc — has cancelled military drills with Russia, inviting a European monitoring mission instead.

Perhaps the biggest question is then why the Georgian government would pursue such an unpopular policy. Is Georgian Dream — a party that has prosecuted political opponents, rigged elections and chipped away at judicial independence — engaged in a grand act of political courage, sticking to a disliked foreign policy a year before elections, all to appease an improbable long-term threat?

Many Georgians doubt it.

Instead, they argue that the ruling party serves not the country but its billionaire overlord Bidzina Ivanishvili — who acquired Georgia’s biggest wallet by wheeling and dealing in Russian banking, pharmaceuticals and agriculture, before going on to found Georgian Dream and serve as prime minister in 2012.

Since 2021, however, Ivanishvili has vanished, claiming to have quit politics, pouring his time and money into a multimillion-dollar dendrological park on the Black Sea, where he nourishes his love of trees and animals. But Georgian Dream insiders admit that he still pulls the strings. As easily said as done, perhaps, when some of his former employees sit in parliament.

Still, many in Georgia — including a Western diplomat I spoke with on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly — wonder if Ivanishvili answers to the Kremlin.

Not only is his foreign policy unpopularly pro-Russian, but Russian media leave him and his pals alone. “I know that Ivanishvili has no problems in Russia,” the late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky said in 2012. “For me, that is always an accurate criterion that the businessman plays according to the rules set by the Russian government.”

For his part, Ivanishvili claims to have sold all his Russian assets but, according to Transparency International, he’s actually held onto at least 10 companies in the country. “If you come out of Russia with billions of dollars,” one Georgian businessman told me, “they own you.”

Conspiracy theories about politicians reporting to foreign powers are old hat, of course. But in Russia’s “near abroad,” where the Kremlin’s footprint is widespread and lasting, such allegations mean something more.

Last month, however, Georgian Dream finally went too far in its pro-Russia policies, introducing a bill that would have required media organizations and NGOs receiving over 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence,” threatening jail time for those that disobey. A similar law in Russia had silenced civil society.

Tens of thousands of Georgians flooded the streets of Tbilisi in protest, waving EU and Georgian flags and dancing to the cacophony of crowd-control sirens, as major NGOs promised to disobey the law. And over the following three days, the Georgian government did what governments under heavy pressure do — insist on standing firm, then cave.

Perhaps Putin’s hand was at work here — after all, pro-Russian governments in Abkhazia, Republika Srpska and Kyrgyzstan all introduced similar laws in recent months. Or maybe, Georgian Dream reckoned that the bill would still taint NGOs with the epithet of “foreign agent” even if it didn’t pass. Either way, it was sure to jeopardize — if not destroy — the country’s membership application to the EU and Georgia’s real dreams along with it.

And for a party that doesn’t dare to openly stray from the westward path, maybe that was exactly the point.