Washington is grading the costume. Moscow is running the playbook

Published August 3, 2026 7:00am ET



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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