Putin or the EU? Georgia's big fight

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This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug and Iora people.

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

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.

Welcome to Kiev's latest tourist attraction.

They all want to see how Viktor Yanukovych lived.

So come and have a look.

Ten years ago, it was the Ukrainian strongman president.

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

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

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

There is quite another world of luxury there.

Lavish items.

You see his face in quite a number of places.

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

A private golf course.

Ostriches.

An unironic pirate ship with a restaurant below decks.

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

Locals called it a museum of corruption.

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

It's crazy and how much money is spent.

Then earlier this month, another one.

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

In Damascus, signs of a deposed dictator.

Bashar al-Assad's palace has been looted.

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

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

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

It actually looks awful.

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

A small moment of triumph after decades of oppression.

No pirate ship, unfortunately.

Apparently, that was too distasteful even for Assad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The collapse of the USSR.

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

They thought that would be easy.

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.

Easy.

But unfortunately, there is history to deal with.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

But the Essetians had an advantage.

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

These days, Georgians call it the tunnel of misfortune.

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

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

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.

A very strange situation emerged.

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

95% of heroin consumed in Europe

comes from Afghanistan and most of it goes through Georgia.

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

It was this overnight bombardment by Georgia that did it.

Heavy artillery and mortar shelling that pounded the South Ossetian capital.

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

Oops.

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

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

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

Georgia was defeated within days.

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

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

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

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

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.

This was very, very bad for Georgia.

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

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.

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.

And in 2022, the invasion of Ukraine changed everything.

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.

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

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

He's softly spoken, quite matter of fact.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

So, who is this guy, Ivanishvili?

Well,

buckle up.

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

A castle, but glass.

Tunnel of misfortune, museum of corruption, glassel.

They do love drama in the former Soviet Union.

The glassel looks more like a spaceport than a house.

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

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

It looks like Dr.

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

But it belongs to Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Georgia's richest oligarch.

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

He is Georgia's one and only oligarch.

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

His wealth is a quarter of Georgia's GDP.

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

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

But Bidzina Ivanishvili and his opposition coalition say democracy in Georgia is a sham.

They argue the country has grown more authoritarian and repressive.

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

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

reins?

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

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.

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

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

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

this is what they want.

They want the European integration, they want to move forward.

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

The door is wide open.

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

Great.

So what are these necessary steps?

Let's just check them out here.

Ah,

it's regulation and de-oligarchisation.

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

Even Ishvili doesn't like this.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

We will not be able to change Russia.

It would be better for us to change ourselves.

We have to try to establish relations with Russia the way it is.

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

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

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

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.

The EU tried to fight back against this disinformation.

Yes,

such a global war party exists.

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.

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

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.

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

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

before and during elections, especially in in rural areas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgians were not pleased.

Local media is reporting demonstrations in at least eight cities and towns.

Momentum against the government's ruling Georgian Dream Party.

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

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.

And European politicians have thrown their support behind the protesters.

Don't give up.

We are with you in solidarity.

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

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.

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

Ivanishvili isn't like Yanukovych or Assad.

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.

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

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

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

Finland joined NATO last year.

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

But

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

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

Putin's resources are spread thin.

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

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

If Georgia joined the EU, would he really invade?

Does he have the resources for another front?

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

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.

But has he made the right bet?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

That is incredible.

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

We really, really appreciate it.

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.

It's going to be quite a year.

Thank you so much for listening.

Merry Christmas.