Putin or the EU? Georgia's big fight

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Speaker 7 You ever wonder what home life is like for a strongman dictator?

Speaker 10 Well, I've never met one personally, but we do occasionally get a little bit of insight when one of them hops on a plane to Moscow, never never to return.

Speaker 12 Welcome to Kiev's latest tourist attraction. They all want to see how Viktor Yanukovych lived.
So come and have a look.

Speaker 14 Ten years ago, it was the Ukrainian strongman president.

Speaker 16 Viktor Yanukovych blamed fascists, youngsters and nationalists for the uprising which saw him flee Kiev.

Speaker 18 He fled to Moscow after protesters broke through police barricades and chased him out of office.

Speaker 21 When the protesters broke into his empty house, they were astonished by what they found.

Speaker 12 There is quite another world of luxury there. Lavish items.
You see his face in quite a number of places.

Speaker 23 Golden chandeliers, statues, suits of armour and bathroom fixtures.

Speaker 25 A private golf course. Ostriches.

Speaker 26 An unironic pirate ship with a restaurant below decks.

Speaker 17 floating on a private lake, which is an amazing thing for a plunderous leader to have on their property.

Speaker 14 Locals called it a museum of corruption.

Speaker 31 I can't find words to express how angry I am now.

Speaker 16 It's crazy and how much money is spent.

Speaker 23 Then earlier this month, another one.

Speaker 6 This time, the palace being raided was in the Syrian capital.

Speaker 32 In Damascus, signs of a deposed dictator. Bashar al-Assad's palace has been looted.

Speaker 26 The opulence of Assad's compound was even more extreme than Yanukovych's.

Speaker 32 A warehouse filled with luxury cars when two-thirds of the population live in poverty.

Speaker 35 Rooms filled with decadent gifts, white walls, marble everywhere.

Speaker 4 It actually looks awful.

Speaker 11 But the people exploring it were thrilled at the trophies they snagged.

Speaker 37 A small moment of triumph after decades of oppression.

Speaker 38 No pirate ship, unfortunately.

Speaker 39 Apparently, that was too distasteful even for Assad.

Speaker 21 Either that or he somehow took it with him to Moscow.

Speaker 18 Being mates with Vladimir Putin is absolutely no guarantee that you are going to be safe from a violent revolution.

Speaker 33 Sometimes it can happen quite suddenly, like it did for Assad and Yanukovych.

Speaker 10 And yet there are still a lot of puppet governments around the place who depend on Vladimir Putin for their security.

Speaker 27 There are also a bunch of leaders who ally themselves with Putin out of fear.

Speaker 18 They fear what might happen if they challenge him and align themselves with the West.

Speaker 2 That is certainly what's happening now in Georgia on Russia's southern border.

Speaker 18 People are in the streets fighting over whether they should appease Putin or oppose him.

Speaker 25 At the center of the fight is a billionaire oligarch living in an insanely opulent mansion with pet sharks and zebras, hoping it doesn't get stormed.

Speaker 18 Today, the story of a democracy at the crossroads of the West and the East, fighting over whether or not to be afraid of Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 38 I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

Speaker 39 Let's start where a lot of these stories start.

Speaker 13 Georgians poured onto the streets of their capital, Tbilisi, to celebrate the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker 29 The collapse of the USSR.

Speaker 13 In a referendum two weeks ago, 98% of them voted to leave the Soviet Union.

Speaker 35 They thought that would be easy.

Speaker 26 There is a clear geographical border between Russia and Georgia, the nearly impassable Greater Caucasus mountain range. North of the mountains, that's Russia.
South, that's Georgia.

Speaker 2 Easy.

Speaker 42 But unfortunately, there is history to deal with.

Speaker 24 For 800 years, a small tribe of people called Ossetians had been living on both sides of the mountains.

Speaker 1 And while the Ossetians on the southern side of the mountains didn't want to be Soviets, they also didn't want to be Georgians.

Speaker 9 But the newly formed government of Georgia said that they didn't have a choice.

Speaker 37 Scores of lives have been lost in armed clashes between Ossetians and Georgians.

Speaker 19 As the Soviet Union collapsed around them, Georgia put them under siege.

Speaker 37 What is effectively a blockade of the city by surrounding Georgia has left them without petrol and limited water, electricity and food. There is no heating in sub-freezing temperatures.

Speaker 21 But the Essetians had an advantage.

Speaker 4 A newly constructed road tunnel running under the mountains connecting them to Russia.

Speaker 18 These days, Georgians call it the tunnel of misfortune.

Speaker 17 Using the tunnel as a lifeline, they managed to withstand the blockade and keep Georgia out.

Speaker 20 So South Essetia was a separatist state, but on the ground they weren't all that independent.

Speaker 22 Police and soldiers wear Russian uniforms. Cars have Russian number plates.
90% of the population have Russian passports. The region even runs on Moscow time, an hour later than Tbilisi.

Speaker 19 A very strange situation emerged.

Speaker 24 Separatist South Ossetia's tunnel of misfortune became a key route for spies, criminals, terrorists, smugglers and drug traffickers.

Speaker 42 95% of heroin consumed in Europe

Speaker 2 comes from Afghanistan and most of it goes through Georgia.

Speaker 4 Throughout the 2000s, Georgia grew angrier and angrier about the international crime hub on its doorstep until it spilled out into open warfare.

Speaker 46 It was this overnight bombardment by Georgia that did it. Heavy artillery and mortar shelling that pounded the South Ossetian capital.

Speaker 34 But Georgia made the fatal error of not taking control of the tunnel of misfortune first.

Speaker 2 Oops.

Speaker 39 Look, I'm no military strategist, but I believe that is putting down a separatist uprising 101.

Speaker 4 First, blow up the tunnel that connects them to the neighbouring nuclear superpower.

Speaker 46 A relentless convoy of heavy armor pouring across Russia's southern border into South Ossetia.

Speaker 18 Georgia was defeated within days.

Speaker 44 The panic spread as soldiers fell back toward the capital yelling, the Russians are coming.

Speaker 33 Soldiers rushing past yelling the Russians are coming is genuinely my worst nightmare.

Speaker 43 Russia didn't march all the way to the capital though.

Speaker 18 They set up permanent military bases in South Ossetia and recognized it as its own nation.

Speaker 18 So by the end of 2008, Instead of being on the other side of the mountains, the Russians were stationed in farmland, like 90 kilometres from Tbilisi.

Speaker 2 This was very, very bad for Georgia.

Speaker 44 It's become increasingly clear the Georgian government can't control any part of the country if the Russians have different ideas.

Speaker 18 Ever since their The Russians Are Coming experience in 2008, the Georgian government had been desperately applying for entry to the big Western alliances, NATO and the European Union.

Speaker 26 But like I said at the start of this episode, you don't have to be governed by a Putin puppet to be controlled by fear of Russia.

Speaker 13 And in 2022, the invasion of Ukraine changed everything.

Speaker 17 The change in Georgia has played out in their political system and on the streets all throughout this year as the country geared up for their elections.

Speaker 35 In July, the honorary chairman of the ruling party of Georgia, the Georgian Dream Party, gave an extraordinary speech.

Speaker 2 The chairman's name is Bidzina Ivanishvili, and he's no great charismatic orator.

Speaker 10 He's softly spoken, quite matter of fact.

Speaker 17 But the stuff he's talking about in his speech is not matter of fact at all.

Speaker 2 He's saying that there's a secret global war party.

Speaker 17 This is a line pushed by others in his party too.

Speaker 40 They claim that there's an international conspiracy made up of US weapons companies, Hungarian liberal billionaire George Soros and top politicians in Europe and America.

Speaker 11 In this speech, Ivanishvili is saying that this group, the Global War Party, is hell-bent on forcing Georgia into a war war against Russia.

Speaker 7 He says that this Global War Party is in league with the opposition parties in Georgia and is trying to overthrow the government.

Speaker 19 It sounds like the kind of crackpot conspiracy theories that you would hear from Vladimir Putin or from Russian bots online, and yet theoretically, Ivanishvili is still supportive of getting Georgia to join the European Union.

Speaker 1 So, who is this guy, Ivanishvili?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 27 buckle up.

Speaker 2 High above Tbilisi, on a mountainside visible from all over town, is a mansion that locals refer to as a glassel.

Speaker 30 A castle, but glass.

Speaker 11 Tunnel of misfortune, museum of corruption, glassel.

Speaker 15 They do love drama in the former Soviet Union.

Speaker 27 The glassel looks more like a spaceport than a house.

Speaker 34 It has aluminium turrets, a helipad, and a giant rotating sphere hovering above a pool.

Speaker 11 Inside the house is a giant aquarium home to a single lonely shark.

Speaker 47 It looks like Dr.

Speaker 38 Evil's lair, sands the ill-tempered mutated sea bass.

Speaker 11 But it belongs to Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Speaker 41 Georgia's richest oligarch.

Speaker 18 He got rich during the collapse of the Soviet Union and these days he's sitting on a $7 billion fortune.

Speaker 43 He is Georgia's one and only oligarch.

Speaker 19 No other person on earth is richer in comparison to the country that they live in.

Speaker 35 His wealth is a quarter of Georgia's GDP.

Speaker 10 Ivanishvili was an enigma, a recluse, rarely venturing outside his glashl, a Georgian Bruce Wayne with a shark tank.

Speaker 11 Then in 2012, he came out of of the shadows and ran for prime minister.

Speaker 32 But Bidzina Ivanishvili and his opposition coalition say democracy in Georgia is a sham. They argue the country has grown more authoritarian and repressive.

Speaker 10 He won in a landslide, and his party Georgian dream has been in power ever since.

Speaker 48 He retired as prime minister after only a year, but did he really hand over the reins?

Speaker 36 reins?

Speaker 21 Critics say that Ivanishvili is the de facto ruler of Georgia.

Speaker 2 He sits in his glassel and calls all the shots while considering whether or not he can attach a laser beam to the head of his shark.

Speaker 9 For most of Georgian Dream's time in power, it's adopted populist policies, getting closer to Europe and the West.

Speaker 23 Polls indicate that between 70 and 90% of Georgians support joining the EU.

Speaker 49 As citizens in the first place have proven that they are,

Speaker 49 this is what they want. They want the European integration, they want to move forward.

Speaker 45 That was popular politically and opened up economic opportunities through trade with rich European countries.

Speaker 6 The door is wide open.

Speaker 50 It is up to Georgia now to take the necessary steps to move forward.

Speaker 2 Great.

Speaker 17 So what are these necessary steps?

Speaker 45 Let's just check them out here.

Speaker 36 Ah,

Speaker 29 it's regulation and de-oligarchisation.

Speaker 4 Basically, don't let your country be run by a single unelected billionaire in a glass hole.

Speaker 11 Even Ishvili doesn't like this.

Speaker 23 He says that the EU's main condition of entry should just be a high standard of living achieved through economic growth.

Speaker 15 The Georgian Dream Party started trolling the EU, saying that it would be more than happy to crack down on Georgia's oligarch once Europe and America cracked down on theirs.

Speaker 17 The The process broke down and by the time of the election Georgian Dream was implying that joining the EU would lead to war with Russia.

Speaker 48 In this ad published in the lead-up to the Georgian vote, a woman and her husband are getting into bed.

Speaker 10 She tells him that they're going to go and vote in the morning.

Speaker 2 He says he doesn't have time and then he has a terrible nightmare of a horrific war with Russia with images from the war in South Ossetia.

Speaker 10 He jolts awake and he says that they're going to go and vote for the Georgian Dream Party.

Speaker 1 Across Tbilisi, ads were posted on billboards with pictures of war-torn Ukraine covered in logos for opposition parties, contrasted with unwar-torn Georgia with the logo for Georgian dream.

Speaker 40 Ivanishvili told France24 in an interview that accommodating Putin was the only option.

Speaker 31 We will not be able to change Russia.

Speaker 26 It would be better for us to change ourselves. We have to try to establish relations with Russia the way it is.

Speaker 38 This is a very tricky line for a populace to walk.

Speaker 11 Nobody wants war, but also people do want to join the EU.

Speaker 9 So Ivanishvili embraced this conspiracy theory about the Global War Party.

Speaker 2 Of course, we want to join the EU, but not while it's overrun with people from the Global War Party who want to overthrow the Georgian Dream Party and force us to fight Putin.

Speaker 6 The EU tried to fight back against this disinformation.

Speaker 52 Yes,

Speaker 52 such a global war party exists.

Speaker 52 And this global war party is not just a threat for you, the proud Georgians, this global war party is also a threat for our Baltic friends, for Germany, for France, for the Nordics, for Spain, for Italy, for Greece, for Romania, for Bulgaria.

Speaker 52 This global war party is Russia Monitoring the campaign, EU election observers were extremely not jazzed by what they saw.

Speaker 51 The ruling party used anti Western and hostile rhetoric targeting Georgia's democratic partners, in particular the European Union, its politicians and diplomats, promoted Russian disinformation, manipulation, and conspiracy theories.

Speaker 11 As the election drew close, polls indicated that Georgian Dream was headed for a loss, but they won.

Speaker 53 During our observation, we noted cases of vote buying and double voting

Speaker 53 before and during elections, especially in in rural areas.

Speaker 27 Observers said that not only were votes being bought, voters were being intimidated.

Speaker 11 Cameras were being used to watch who was going in and out of polling stations.

Speaker 53 Led widespread climate of pressure and party organized intimidation and the feeling of big brother is watching you.

Speaker 11 The former president had turned on Ivinishvili, so he chose a new one.

Speaker 15 A former Premier League striker, very handsome, grey hair and a beard, loved that combo.

Speaker 27 Georgian Dream also announced that they would be suspending talks with the EU about membership until 2028.

Speaker 26 Georgians were not pleased.

Speaker 32 Local media is reporting demonstrations in at least eight cities and towns. Momentum against the government's ruling Georgian Dream Party.

Speaker 9 As the government cracks down, the protests have only grown.

Speaker 50 My country deserves to be free from the Russian regime that has haunted us for many centuries and I believe that we need to get into Europe.

Speaker 33 And European politicians have thrown their support behind the protesters.

Speaker 52 Don't give up.

Speaker 52 We are with you in solidarity.

Speaker 34 Now the former president who was replaced by the parliament with the handsome footballer is refusing to go.

Speaker 18 The thing is, this entire situation, the entire political landscape in Georgia, is based on Vladimir Putin being powerful and scary, the thing that you have nightmares about.

Speaker 44 As soldiers fell back toward the capital, yelling, the Russians are coming.

Speaker 10 Ivanishvili isn't like Yanukovych or Assad.

Speaker 2 He's not going to create some sort of a security agreement with Putin or become overtly pro-Russia. But that doesn't really matter to Vladimir Putin.
In Putin's eyes, there's two clubs that matter.

Speaker 2 The Western Club, meaning countries allied with Europe and America, and the Everybody Else Club.

Speaker 35 He particularly doesn't want countries which share a border with Russia to join the Western Club.

Speaker 18 He's invaded Georgia and Ukraine to try and stop that from happening, but it's backfired.

Speaker 40 Finland joined NATO last year.

Speaker 18 He's hoping that the Russian troops in South Ossetia will be scary enough to stop Georgia from joining too.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 19 and this is a question we've been asking for months.

Speaker 38 Is Putin really as scary as he wants people to think?

Speaker 2 Putin's resources are spread thin.

Speaker 28 He was unable to prop up Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Speaker 9 He's calling in recruits from North Korea to help with the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 40 If Georgia joined the EU, would he really invade?

Speaker 18 Does he have the resources for another front?

Speaker 40 Would he be sending very confused North Koreans through the tunnel of misfortune?

Speaker 45 Ivanishvili is facing enormous pressure, both domestically and internationally and he's laid a bet that appeasing Putin is the way to hold on to power.

Speaker 34 But has he made the right bet?

Speaker 10 Or are the people of Georgia going to get a close-up look at that shark tank?

Speaker 19 So in our listener survey this year, the number one suggestion for how we can make the show better is by putting out more episodes.

Speaker 17 I do just want want to point out that this year Jess, Yaz, Kara, Anna and I made 50 episodes and I didn't think that was possible.

Speaker 8 Apparently we can also make them in Detroit and sitting at a card table outside the White House.

Speaker 23 We can also somehow get 7.3 million podcast downloads in a year and 13 million YouTube views.

Speaker 38 Another significant thing from the survey is that 55% of you have been listening since before 2023.

Speaker 7 That is incredible.

Speaker 38 All of the things we've achieved this year are really thanks to you and your loyalty to the show.

Speaker 41 We really, really appreciate it.

Speaker 23 And for those of you who joined us in 2023 and 24, you are the reason that we are going to be expanding if you're listening next year with more episodes, more live shows, hopefully a bit of merch.

Speaker 19 It's going to be quite a year. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 2 Merry Christmas.