In the summer of 2008, as Russian tanks rolled toward Tbilisi, the woman who is today the symbol of Georgia’s pro-Western opposition was writing the book that Russia would later carry into a courtroom in The Hague and read aloud against my country.
That sounds like a polemic. It is a matter of record, and it explains something Washington keeps getting wrong about Georgia.
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Salome Zourabichvili was born in France, the granddaughter of Georgian emigres, and had a real diplomatic career in Paris. After the Rose Revolution, many of us were intoxicated by the idea of bringing our emigres home and handing them the state to rebuild. In 2004, President Mikheil Saakashvili detached her from the French foreign service and made her Georgia’s foreign minister. Her appointment was read as a signal of Western intent.
AMERICA LEFT THE BUILDING. UKRAINE TOOK THE WHEEL
I was not reading that signal from abroad. I read it from a desk in Tbilisi, as a serving counterintelligence officer, when she was appointed in 2004 and again when she was dismissed in 2005 — and a foreign ministry is watched closely, from the inside as much as the outside.
The book
In 2008, the year of the war, she published “La tragédie géorgienne, 2003-2008” in Paris, a memoir of disillusion with the government she had served. As literature, that was her right. Here is what happened to it next.
On Aug. 12, 2008, Georgia filed suit against the Russian Federation at the International Court of Justice, accusing Moscow of ethnic persecution in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On Dec. 1, 2009, Russia filed its preliminary objections. And in that filing — pages 31 to 32 and 34, a matter confirmed by Georgia’s own fact-checking organization with a verdict of “true” — Russia quoted Zourabichvili’s book to build its case against Georgia.
Moscow used her account of 2004 to argue that Tbilisi “spoke with the language of arms.” It used her description of the defense budget to argue that Georgia, “behind the appearance of a defense policy,” was pursuing “military revenge and the forcible reintegration of the lost lands.” The aggressor reached into the memoir of a former Georgian foreign minister and read it back to the world as a confession — a citation, in a legal brief, by the country that occupies 20% of Georgia’s soil.
That is the whole method. I am not claiming she was a Russian agent, and I have no reason to think she was, which is the point. Moscow did not need to recruit her, and it did not need to invent her. It only needed her to write the sentences down. The Kremlin does not require ideological consistency from the people it quotes. It requires only useful quotations.
The line the Kremlin loved
There is one more claim in her record worth naming, because Moscow has repeated it for over a decade: that Georgia started the 2008 war. It is the oldest item in Russia’s propaganda catalog about that August. When Zourabichvili, campaigning in 2018, echoed the framing that Georgia “followed the provocation,” Russian media amplified her within hours. That is not a small thing legally: A president’s public statements can create obligations for a state, as the ICJ established in Australia v. France in 1974. Weeks later, after the government and opposition rose against her together, she corrected herself. Two statements, one campaign, two audiences.
How she became president
She did not win that office on her own. In 2018, Bidzina Ivanishvili — the billionaire who made his fortune in Russia, who was prime minister himself for a year and has run Georgia from behind a succession of them ever since, and whom the Treasury Department sanctioned in December 2024 under the executive order built for the Russian Federation — needed a candidate. He chose Zourabichvili and ran her as an “independent.” The independence was the point: a neutral face for a partisan project.
His family financed the campaign. She led the first round only narrowly, and before the runoff, his family foundation wrote off the bank debts of more than 600,000 people, which Georgia’s main election monitors called vote-buying. The “independent” needed an oligarch to drag her across the line.
Once installed, she governed to match. In 2019, she pardoned two convicted murderers, one of them the killer of a 22-year-old police officer who had served four years of a 12-year sentence, and drew such condemnation from government and opposition alike that she suspended her own power to pardon. This is the figure now presented to Western capitals as the conscience of Georgian democracy.
Washington has graded the costume before
In 2012, the election that first brought Ivanishvili to power, two U.S. senators served as monitors and judged the vote free and fair, and it largely was. Ivanishvili wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in correspondence later made public, presenting his coalition as firmly pro-Western and pledging fealty to NATO and European Union integration. The West welcomed a real democratic milestone: Georgia’s first peaceful transfer of power at the ballot box. Washington graded the process, and graded it correctly. It never graded the outcome. A peaceful transfer of power is a good thing. It is also sometimes the mechanism through which a hostile neighbor gets the government it prefers, wearing the costume democracy handed it.
None of this is answered by the fact that Zourabichvili, in her last years in office, became one of Moscow’s loudest critics, calling the 2024 election a Russian “special operation.” Take the sincerity as given. It is beside the point. A record does not reset when its author changes her tone. The book is still in the filing at The Hague, and the war-blame line still runs on Russian state television every August.
Grade the record
Georgia sits among three empires — the Russian, Ottoman, and Persian. The names change. The pressure does not. For a state that small, the difference between a friend and an instrument is the difference between survival and absorption.
The Western habit is to read Georgian politics through one question: Who is pro-Western, and who is pro-Russian? It is the wrong question, because the figures who have served Moscow’s ends most effectively in my country do not present as pro-Russian. They present as neutral. As independent. As European, even. Ivanishvili calls himself pro-Western while suspending Georgia’s EU accession talks until 2028 and sending water cannons against the crowds who protested it. The people are pro-European. The government is the obstacle.
RUSSIA ISN’T NEGOTIATING OVER UKRAINE. IT’S RUNNING A CLOCK
I am not asking Washington to adjudicate Georgian personalities. I am asking for something narrower. Stop grading the costume. Grade the record. Ask what a figure has actually done, and whose case it has actually served — not what banner they carry into the television studio.
We named a street in Tbilisi after an American president. We sent our children to America’s wars. We do not need to be persuaded to value the West. We need the West to look closely enough to tell its friends from the figures who merely serve its rivals because Moscow has already learned to dress the second in the costume of the first.
Emzari Gelashvili is a Georgian-born American geopolitical analyst and columnist. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s state security, defense, and interior ministries, specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012.
