When Patarkatsishvili died in his British home for no apparent reason in February 2008, on the eve of a crucial election for Saakashvili, the British authorities did not raise hell and expel diplomats, as they had years before with Alexander Litvinenko and a decade later with Sergei Skripal, that man of miraculous resilience to the deadliest of chemical weapons. Instead, the British authorities just quietly accepted the idea that a sudden heart attack had struck down the Georgian billionaire at a very opportune moment for then-president Mikheil Saakashvili. 

It was a bad week for both bin Salman and Mikheil Saakashvili. In fact, it should have been a bad week for the political leaders and journalists of the West, who have been calling Saakashvili “the beacon of liberty” in the former Soviet Union for both that region as well as the world and bin Salman — “the leader of Saudi Arabia’s own Arab spring” who is “on a mission” to make his country more democratic. The scandal is that this first tidbit of sickening flattery was authored by none other than the longtime president of the United States, George W. Bush. And the second — by the New York Times’ most prominent columnist, Thomas Friedman, in his article titled “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, At Last.”

As the Saudi authorities have now admitted that Jamal Khashoggi was actually murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the question is no longer who killed Mr. Khashoggi or why. The answer to that question is becoming increasingly clear. In the same way, there is progressively less and less reason to wonder why Mikheil Saakashvili’s biggest political competitor, Zurab Zhvania, the second-most powerful man in Georgia at the time, “suffocated himself” by mishandling an Iranian-made gas oven in 2005. The real question is a different one. How could George Bush and Thomas Friedman, along with dozens of other Western leaders and tens of thousands of journalists, have so completely misunderstood bin Salman and Saakashvili? How could they have bought bin Salman’s story about Syrian president Assad as an embodiment of evil and “Iran’s puppet,” who was threatening poor Saudi Arabia, with its lavishly equipped military — the beneficiary of a national defense budget that is second only to America’s? And how could they buy Saakashvili’s never-ending narrative about Russia as an “aggressive crocodile” who wants to swallow his native Georgia? In short, how could the West believe these killers for so long?

Was this just an example of naiveté, due to the fact that bin Salman and Saakashvili had not always being been what they are today, but had suddenly changed for the worse over the course of their careers? Nope. Even before welcoming George W. Bush to Tbilisi in his sickeningly flattering way in 2005, Saakashvili had already detained the people who had been connected to the previous regime and extorted money from them. He had launched military attacks against Georgia’s “disobedient” provinces, much in the same way that Prince bin Salman detained his own relatives and in 2015 attacked the “rebellious” country of Yemen, treating that nation as some sort of rebellious province of Saudi Arabia. And George W. Bush, along with his successor Obama, continued to lionize Saakashvili, not only during Bush’s visit to Tbilisi, during which a street was renamed in honor of the American president in the Georgian capital, but even after Saakashvili’s disastrous attack against South Ossetia in 2008 and his short and dismal tenure as the governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region in 2015-2016.

The parallels between bin Salman and Saakashvili, as well as the West’s blind support for them, are so obvious, you don’t need to investigate or search through archives — all that information has been willingly broadcast and even somewhat propagandized by the mainstream media in the US and the EU. Both men prided themselves on acting outside the law, and the Western media swallowed their stories hook, line, and sinker, as long as it all fit the Western media’s beloved narrative of “young reformers vs. corrupt conservatives in a country undergoing the process of transition.”

When Saakashvili arrested his predecessor’s son-in-law Gia Jokhtaberidze and said that Jokhtaberidze would not be set free until he coughed up money to the tune of millions of dollars for the Georgian treasury, the Western media accepted this as a legitimate “bending of the rules,” given the corruption that Georgia was facing at the time. Saakashvili’s somewhat peculiar attitude to justice was excused, as long as this former New York City lawyer promised to move Jokhtaberidze’s money into Georgia’s state coffers, and not into his own pocket. At the time, the BBC affectionately quoted Saakashvili’s warning: “Don’t take bribes and don’t give jobs to your relatives.” He claimed that this was his “first advice” to his team (later many of this team’s members were found guilty on corruption charges for having made off with the biggest sums in Georgia’s history, but the BBC ignored that story). When Prince bin Salman did the same thing as Saakashvili, keeping the rich magnates of the previous regime in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh until they coughed up money to the tune of billions of dollars, the NYT’s Thomas Friedman was only too happy to oblige bin Salman by not only justifying this action, but seeing in it the long-awaited reform that would change “the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe.”

Now that this new tone and tenor has revealed itself in the audio recordings of Mr. Khashoggi’s interrogation, which the media is still awaiting from the Saudi and Turkish authorities, the question about the roots of Thomas Friedman’s blind trust is taking on not just an urgent, but almost a sinister tinge. Mr. Friedman should explain to himself and to the world why bin Salman found it so easy to “wear him out with a fire hose of ideas about transforming his country.”

Could something more than just ideas have been inside that fire hose? And when will the Western media stop pushing the “reform agenda” on other sovereign countries, instead of looking at their own countries’ aggressions, oppressions, and (as in the case of bin Salman and Saakashvili) disastrous delusions? These are the questions that the public “needs to know,” as the NYT’s authors love to put it when writing about Russiagate — the paper that employs the same writers who have just recently been selling us Mr. Mohammed bin Salman and Mr. Saakashvili as squeaky-clean, “young reformers.”

However, Western news media sought to portray Medvedev’s cautionary words as conveying a sinister intent. Britain’s Independent headlined: “Russia threatens [sic] ‘horrible’ conflict if Georgia joins NATO”.

Other news outlets, such as Reuters and Associated Press, did not go as far as using the word “threatens”. But their implied tone relaying Medvedev’s remarks was one of Russia flexing its muscles with intimidation towards the South Caucasus state.

That mischievous insinuation fits in with the wider Western narrative of Russia’s alleged “malign activity” and “threatening posture” towards Eastern European countries in the Baltic, Balkans and Ukraine.

Both the United States and European Union this week reiterated accusations that Russia was illegally occupying Georgian territory owing to Moscow’s support for the two breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia which border with Georgia in the South Caucasus region.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the five-day war in August 2008, the foreign ministers from Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine’s Kiev regime were reportedly in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to demonstrate their solidarity over what they called “Russian aggression”.

Georgia is continually cited – along with Ukraine – by American and European politicians as two examples that purportedly prove Russian malfeasance, and thereby justify the relentless buildup of NATO forces along Russia’s Western flank. In other words, Georgia and Ukraine are cause célèbre for NATO’s existence, and for the American and European policy of sanctions against Russia.

Indeed, both Georgia and Ukraine have been cordially invited to join the NATO alliance. The fast-track invitation was reiterated at the NATO summit in Brussels last month where the two countries were hosted as guests of honor by the 29-member bloc.

Subsequently, following the NATO summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin repeated Russia’s well-known opposition to such a further expansion of the US-led military alliance. The proposed additions of Ukraine and Georgia could potentially lead to the installation of American missiles and warplanes smack on Russia’s borders. Putin said that Russia would respond vigorously to such a move, although he did not specify what the “consequences” would entail.

Similarly, Dmitry Medvedev issued a warning this week regarding Georgia and NATO.

Nevertheless, Russia’s reasonable position of perceiving NATO’s expansion as an offensive threat is bizarrely distorted and turned on its head by Western governments and media.

By merely pointing out its grievance stemming from US-led military forces moving ever-closer to its national territory, astoundingly, Russia is portrayed in Western media as the one that is making the threats. It’s quite a feat of mental engineering.

If we listen to Medvedev’s words, he is patently not conveying any sinister intent, as Western media tried to make out.

“There is an unresolved territorial conflict… and would they bring such a country [Georgia] into the [NATO] military alliance?” said Medvedev. “Do they understand the possible implications? It could provoke a horrible conflict.” 

The Russian premier is simply stating what should be an obvious fact: namely, that NATO membership by Georgia in the midst of a territorial dispute with its pro-Russian neighbors, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would lead to a dangerous conflict.

What Western governments and news media need to do is critically examine the whole premise of NATO’s eastwards expansion since the end of the Cold War in 1991.

That expansion violated commitments given by American leaders to Russian counterparts at the end of the Cold War, first by George Bush Senior and later Bill Clinton.

It is precisely the doubling membership of NATO based mainly on the absorption of former Soviet countries that has so alarmed Russia about military encirclement. Given the relentless anti-Russian rhetoric out of Washington and some of its European allies casting Russia as an enemy it is by no means alarmist that Moscow sees the entire trajectory over the past two decades as a strategic offensive.

Recall too that existential threats to Russia over the past two centuries have come from an eastward expansion of armies out of Europe, under Napoleon and then Nazi Germany. Given the loss of up to 30 million of its people from Nazi imperialist aggression, it is perfectly understandable that Russia today is deeply wary of any military advancement on its territory. And NATO fits that nefarious pattern.

On the specific cases of Ukraine and Georgia, NATO has been very much the instigator of conflicts there, yet it is NATO that poses now as a defender. That inversion of reality is made possible in part because of Western news media distorting historical events, just as they did again this week with regard to reporting Medvedev’s comments on NATO and Georgia.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Georgia have been solicited by Washington, the EU and NATO, as with other former Soviet states. That soliciting has created tensions and instability, not least because that was supposed to be what American leaders said they wouldn’t do.

The conflict in Ukraine came about from American and European Union support for a coup against an elected government in February 2014. The CIA and NATO were also instrumental. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine between the NATO-backed Kiev regime and pro-Russian separatists in the Eastern self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk is not due to Russian aggression; it is a result of the irresponsible and provocative intervention by Washington and its European allies.

The West accuses Russia of “annexing” Crimea, an historical part of Russia, whenever it was the West that allowed a faction of Neo-Nazi Ukrainians to annex Kiev and its government. The ongoing four-year conflict in Ukraine which has killed over 10,000 people is a direct result of NATO imperialist meddling.

On Georgia, after the Western-backed so-called Rose Revolution in 2004 which brought the mercurial Mikhail Saakashvili to power, the former Soviet Republic suddenly became a staunch proponent of NATO. Saakashvili was enthusiastically supported by Washington with weapons and finance. He also made the retaking of Abkhazia and South Ossetia into Georgian territory his big mission. The three neighboring states broke up after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia requested the Russian Federation to recognize their statehoods in March 2008, prompted by the American and European recognition of Kosovo in the Balkans as a self-declared state during the previous month in February 2008. Kosovo broke away from Serbia largely as a result of the military intervention of NATO. Again, NATO was setting the precedent, not Russia.

At Washington’s bidding, Georgian leader Saakashvili sent NATO-backed troops to attack Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia on August 8, 10 years ago this week. The rapid intervention by Russian troops along with Abkhaz forces repelled the Georgian offensive. Wisely, NATO declined to push its support for Saakashvili any further. The war was over in five days, resulting in the formal recognition by Russia of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Today, the US and Europe continue to accuse Russia of illegally occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia and of violating Georgia’s sovereignty.

Western media make an upside-down analogy with Ukraine. The real analogy is that both Georgia and Ukraine have been destabilized by NATO expansionism, not Russian.

But such are the lies, distortions and self-serving propaganda churned out over and over by Western media in the service of their governments and NATO, there is an appalling failure in the West to learn from history.

When Russia warns that NATO’s expansion is risking horrible conflict that is a straightforward, reasonable observation which is borne out by history. Tragically, thousands of lives have been destroyed by not heeding this warning.

And thousands more – perhaps millions – continue to be put in danger because the Western media willfully misinterpret and misrepresent Russia.

Photo: Twitter

Stripped of Ukraine’s citizenship and forced to remain outside his adopted country for several months, Saakashvili forced his way across the border on September 10 to get the passport back and occupy a prominent place in Ukraine’s politics while leading the protest movement against overwhelming corruption. He is the leader of the political party named the New Forces Movement (Rukh Novykh Syl). Kiev is “panicking,” Saakashvili said, adding that he did “not want to overthrow President Poroshenko” but just defend his rights.

Saakashvili is wanted in his homeland for alleged abuse of power during nine years as president that saw him start and lose a brief war with Russia in 2008. He left Georgia in 2013. In 2015, he was appointed by President Poroshenko as governor of the key Odessa region on the Black Sea. He quit the job in 2016 after a political split with President Poroshenko, who stripped him of the Ukrainian citizenship in July 2017. The pretext was “inaccurate information” in Saakashvili’s citizenship application. With Ukraine’s citizenship back, Saakashvili could be elected for parliament or run for president.

It remains to be seen whether the “breakthrough” bringing Saakashvili back into Ukraine’s political limelight will translate into leadership of growing political opposition movement. Saakashvili indicates he intends to “go all the way” to challenge the Ukraine’s government of “thieves and corrupt dealers.”

He is a menace for the Poroshenko-led Ukraine’s government and he has just made a dexterous move crossing the border and making a trip across western Ukraine gaining political backing. And this menace to Ukraine’s president is supported by Washington. Saakashvili has always been a pro-US politician. It was in New York where he got the news about his being stripped of Ukraine’s citizenship.

Special US representative on Ukraine, Kurt Volker, has stressed that Mikheil Saakashvili has the right to have his case on the loss of Ukrainian citizenship heard in a Ukrainian court. “I hope that people de-escalate the political drama, focus on the legal matter, and that Ukraine really strengthens its institutions of democracy, as well as fighting corruption and economic reform," Volker said. The US official knows well that open court hearings may become a death knell for the Poroshenko’s administration, with scandalous revelations to hit media headlines.

Poroshenko is a pro-western politician, too, but disappointment with his administration is growing in the West. Kiev is under pressure from the US and the EU to curb corruption and liberalize the economy. The reforms in pension, land and tax reforms, and privatization have failed. The country tops the world corruption rating. According to the 2016 Global Fraud Survey, 88% of Ukrainian employees thought that bribery and corrupt practices were widespread in the country. European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker believes that “Corruption is undermining all efforts to rebuild Ukraine in line with European Union norms.” "What we are asking … is to increase the fight against corruption, because corruption is undermining all the efforts this great nation is undertaking," Juncker said. "We remain very concerned."

US officials have been pushing Ukraine to press ahead with reforms that would curb corruption and improve governmental transparency for some time. Visiting Ukraine in July, State Secretary Rex Tillerson admitted that Ukraine had come a long way but "We want to acknowledge that, (but) we still have more to do," he said. "This is all about securing Ukraine's future: making the place attractive for investors, being attractive to their European neighbors."

Melinda Haring, the editor of the Ukraine Alert blog at the Atlantic Council and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, believes that “The sad reality is that Ukraine’s reforms have stalled, and the window of opportunity is starting to close”. She notes that the International Monetary Fund, which pledged $17.5 billion to right the economy, has told Ukraine that it won’t get any more assistance until it legalizes land sales, reforms its troubled pension system, creates an anti-corruption court and starts to privatize some of Ukraine’s 1,800 state-run companies. Of this formidable to-do list, only pension and health reform have a chance of passing before mid-July, 2017.

“Ukraine's Western partners are disappointed with the lack of progress of the country's reform process, and with Petro Poroshenko's record as the country's president in particular,” said Andreas Umland, German analyst at the Kiev-based Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. He fully supports Ukraine's attempts to reform along Western lines, but his assessment of the first two years of President Poroshenko's term in office is mostly negative, since Ukraine continues to face many of the same problems it did when he was first sworn in, along with a series of new ones. 

While pledging its loyalty to the West, Ukraine’s government and political elite continue to have things their way. The West’s patience with Ukraine is not unlimited. Saakashvili can be used as a tool to exert pressure and make the Poroshenko administration do more to meet the West’s demands. According to the Rating Group Ukraine survey conducted in June, a total of 76 percent of Ukrainian citizens disapprove of the work of Petro Poroshenko as president of Ukraine. Only 1 percent fully approved the activities of the head of state.

Sooner or later, Poroshenko will go to be remembered as a miserable failure. The much vaunted loyalty to the West lasts as long as it meets the interests of the Ukraine’s ruling elite, which is pursuing its own goals. Saakashvili knows how to ride the wave of popular discontent. With Poroshenko gone, he’ll be the right person to step in. As the opposition leader, Saakashvili will guarantee that Ukraine continues dancing to the tune played in Washington and Brussels, whatever happens. If it were not for the support of the West, Saakashvili would have been arrested after crossing the border. 

Here’s the relevant background of this internationally significant case: 

Saakashvili is a former President of Georgia, who had led America’s anti-Russia campaign there, was voted out of office, and then promptly emigrated to his foreign backer America. In February 2015, a year after the February 2014 U.S. coup that established an anti-Russian government in Ukraine (a government even more rabidly anti-Russian than Saakashvili’s in Georgia had been), the U.S. agent running Ukraine (Petro Poroshenko, who admitted that it had been a coup, no real ‘revolution’ such as is asserted by the people who enabled him to gain power, the U.S. regime in Washington) appointed Saakashvili to become the new Governor of the Odessa region.

Odessa is a region that has always been pro-Russian and where many of the same «Right Sector» U.S.-operated mercenaries who had done the coup in February 2014, then also perpetrated on 2 May 2014 a massacre of Odessa locals, who had been distributing literature against the coup-regime, a massacre of them by clubbing, shooting, and finally burning these people alive inside Odessa’s Trade Unions Building. Saakashvili was brought in from America to become the man who would shape-up Odessa to accept America's coup-imposed Ukrainian government. However, in Saakashvili's first electoral test, his candidate for Mayor of the city of Odessa has lost, by a two-to-one margin; and Saakashvili doesn’t accept the result of the election; he’s trying to annul it.

The Russian international news site vz.ru headlined on October 28th, «Saakashvili Calls for Odessans to Protest» against the election-result, and the article reports that Saakashvili and Borovik are calling for protests to overturn the election. Another news-report at the same site on the same day asserts that the Odessa-region’s chairman of the «Poroshenko Bloc» in Ukraine’s parliament has joined them in demanding a recount (of this vote, which wasn’t even close).

They don’t want merely a ‘recount’; they want the election-results thrown out. This is a demand for a ‘recount' in an election where the winning candidate, the pro-Russian candidate, had received 52% of the vote; and Borovik, the anti-Russian candidate, had won 26%. Furthermore, the entire Odessa region had always, in prior elections, voted against anti-Russian candidates, and favored instead candidates who preferred neutralist and even pro-Russian positions. This was especially true inside the City of Odessa itself (where the vote was held). 

Furthermore, Poroshenko, who is the current U.S.-backed President of Ukraine, and who has been trying his utmost to get an anti-Russian to become the Mayor of Odessa, has publicly insulted on national Ukrainian television, the people who were murdered inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building. He has rallied the rest of what remains of the Ukrainian population, to despise and reject those people — people who are heroes to probably the vast majority of residents of Odessa.

A U.S.-operated July 2015 poll of residents in the region of Odessa found Poroshenko’s job-approval rating to be 17%, and his job-disapproval rating to be 79%. Clearly, Odessans aren’t going to vote for Poroshenko’s man to replace the existing Mayor, who was voted by Odessans into that office right after the 2 May 2014 massacre largely because he passionately opposed Ukraine’s coup-installed government, which had perpetrated the massacre. (And the coup itself had been extremely violent. The protesters who were subsequently massacred at the Odessa Trade Unions Building were protesting against that bloody coup; they were for peace, and against war, a war which the new leaders who were installed by Obama, craved to have against Russia.

These people were protesting against takeover of Ukraine by anti-Russian racist fascists, some of whom even are overtly pro-Hitler). There is a photo of the existing Mayor taken only weeks before the massacre, and its caption reads: "Odessa, Ukraine. 10th April, 2014. lawmaker Gennady Truhanov on reconstruction parade April 10, 1944, dedicated to the liberation of Odessa from the German fascist invaders.» He was referring there to Obama’s people (including Poroshenko), and not merely  to Hitler’s. After all: Obama has installed racist fascists and some overt Nazis into power in Ukraine, and they’re even teaching the children now.

Obviously under circumstances such as these, there can be no authentically democratic motivation to seek a nullification of the pro-Russian candidate’s election. If Truhanov’s re-election is nullified, Odessans will be absolutely furious.

This election-result presents to the Obama Administration in Washington a perhaps insoluble problem. Will Washington go public in its support for dictatorship? How would the U.S. (and other Western) ’news’ media handle that? Would they simply ignore  it?

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

The Georgian Labor Party put together a curious vision of the events, actually linking Saakashvili and Ivanishvili. Kaha Dzagania, the laborist secretary for ideology, claimed at a September 20 briefing that the atrocities in the N8 Prison had been perpetrated by special forces under Sakashvili's chain of command, with Ivanishvili actually paying for the job. According to Dzagania, Kartu, a bank owned by Ivanishvili, had dished out bonuses to the special forces officers every time they helped disperse anti-Saakashvili protesters. Building on the theory, Dzagania demanded that Ivanishvili compile, based on the bank's transaction papers, a real list of those responsible for the tortures, as that would be the only way to guarantee Georgia against similar crimes in the future(3). 

The internal strife within the Georgian ruling group is also cited as an explanation behind the recent developments. Cracks running across Saakashvili's team are an open secret, the stakes in the undeclared competition being the privilege of close association with the president, administrative influence, or money. Now that the end of Saakashvili's term in office looms ahead, the latent conflicts may be switching to an open phase. The spotty human rights record of the Georgian penitentiary system has never been deeply hidden, and, considering that, by multiple accounts, the now displaced minister of the interior Bacho Akhalaya and premier Vano Merabishvili were chronically at odds, attempts to drag the hyper-ambitious Georgian policemaster off the trajectory were fairly predictable. The struggle with no rules, though, is not necessarily played out entirely within the cohort of the Rose Revolution veterans. I. Okruashvili used to be a promising figure no less than Akhalaya, but – regardless of whether he could have been tortured or drugged – it is a given that his career collapsed overnight. Reportedly, the mission which led to the fall of Okruashvili rested with Bacho Akhalaya (in a potentially related scandal, Okruashvili beat up D. Akhalaya, the brother of Bacho Akhalaya, twice in a single day in France).

Statements issued by several Georgian establishment officials were, in fact, indicative of its divisions over the displacement of Bacho Akhalaya. Majority parliamentarian Nuzgar Tsiklauri said hours before it was announced he was confident that Akhalaya was not responsible for the jail incident and went on to condemn calls for the police minister's resignation as a part of the game invented by the opposition. Tsiklauri expressed a view that Kalmakhelidze could be to blame rather than Akhalaya who has had nothing to do with the system since 2007. Overall, Tsiklauri praised Akhalaya's accomplishments during his tenure as a defense official and warned that the opposition hoped to weaken the administration by ejecting the man from his current post (4). 

Akhalaya did submit resignation late on September 20, when Kalmakhelidze was already unseated and charges were pressed in connection with the case. Akhalaya's accompanying statement said that he was, as a Georgian citizen, shocked to hear about the abuses in the N8 Prison and that – though he had not been in charge of the penitentiary system for years – he still felt responsible since he had appointed some of the officials running it (5). The same day, head of the Obiektivi media union Irma Inashvili,who is staying in Belgium, said that the abuse video – a total of around 90 minutes in the unabridged version – had been supplied to her from the name of Vano Merabishvili by a former high-ranking Georgian official (6). 

Whichever storyline eventually proves to contain a greater doze of realism, it is clear that the Georgian administration faces a serious crash test just days before the crucial poll. Under the pressure from the protesters, Saakashvili had to sacrifice a number of key political figures, and the damage inflicted upon the ruling United National Movement appears to be irreversible under the current time constraints. Ramaz Sakvarelidze remarks that the Movement's campaign is bound to be affected by the disgrace since voting for a political group which “co-authored” the appalling abuses will arguably be out of question for most of the constituency (7). It has to be taken into account none the less that – as the history of the post-Soviet Georgia serially showed – the administrative resources in the republic factor heavily into election outcomes, which, as a result, tend to deviate radically from the public expectations. 

The Gldani incident marked the culmination of the electoral battles in Georgia, and, moreover, rendered the situation after the poll completely unpredictable. One thing beyond dispute in the context is that, in any case, prospects for democracy in Georgia dim day by day…

__________________________________________

(1) http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2025957.

(2) http://pda.rbc.ru/newsline/20120919105139.shtml.

(3) http://www.apsny.ge/2012/conf/1348188709.php.

(4) http://www.rus.ghn.ge/news-23142.html.

(5) http://www.rus.ghn.ge/news-23151.html.

(6) http://vz.ru/news/2012/9/20/599048.html.

(7) http://www.rus.ghn.ge/news-23105.html.