Giorgi Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
Recently, in the village of Tskhramukh in the Khashuri Region of Georgia, a former soldier of the Georgian army, 37-year-old Tamaz Sukhiashvili, who died in Ukraine, was buried. Sukhiashvili fought the DPR in one of the volunteer squadrons of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He was the second Georgian volunteer to die in the Ukrainian war. Earlier, Alexander Grigolashvili was killed near Lugansk.
Both of them were commemorated on Independence Square in the center of Kiev. The coffins were placed in the very center of the Maidan. Not only representatives of Ukrainian society, but also former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili and his supporters, who had arrived in Ukraine to promote “all-round reforms, according to the Georgian model.” Many of them were appointed to top positions in Arseny Yatsenyuk’s government and the administration of President Petro Poroshenko. One of them is a former head of the government of the Adjaria Autonomous Republic, Levan Varshalomidze, who was appointed a presidential advisor.
The current Georgian authorities are worried about a growing number of “Georgian volunteers” in Ukraine. They are fighting for both sides. According to the commander of the Georgian legion, which is included in the Aidar Squadron, Mumuka Mamulashvili, two Georgians have died fighting for armed groups of the DPR and LPR. They were also former soldiers of the Georgian Armed Forces. Mamulashvili calls them “betrayers of the country.”
Georgian volunteers in Ukraine create several threats for Tbilisi. Firstly, confrontation of Georgians in Ukraine can continue in Georgian itself, especially considering the local mentality. Secondly, Saakashvili’s party, the United National Movement, can use the resource to form “a ram” from experienced fighters for destabilizing the situation in the country ahead of the parliamentary elections.
Speaking about the probable dissatisfaction of Moscow, Irakli Aladashvili, the editor-in-chief of the Arsenaly Military Analytical Magazine, told Vestnik Kavkaza that “Georgians are fighting for both sides, and the Georgian government has nothing in common with sending volunteers to Ukraine.”
However, the burials of Alexander Grigolashvili and Timur Sukhitashvili were broadly covered by the Georgian media. Representatives of the ruling Georgian Dream coalition were not present there; but along with Saakashvili’s supporters, many social activists participated in the burials. At the same time, the two Georgians who died on the opposite side of the front were buried quietly. The mass media didn’t cover them.
At the same time, the growing concern of the authorities was revealed in a strict statement which was recently made by the initiator of Georgian Dream, Bidzina Ivanishvili. Hinting at the former president, the informal leader of the country stated that “those who call for Georgians to go to Ukraine to fight should send their own children there.”
On the one hand, such a rebuke is groundless, as Saakashvili has never called on citizens to go to fight in Ukraine. But Ivanishvili meant the general involvement of the former president in Ukrainian affairs, his warnings that “Georgia’s fate is determined in Ukraine,” blaming the authorities for “suppression of Georgian heroes after their return home and threatening them with repressions.”
It seems that Saakashvili, who secretly sent dozens of Georgian officers to Ukraine when president, thinks that it would be right if the volunteer movement is broadly spread in Georgia. That’s what Bidzina Ivanishvili meant.
Ivanishvili said nothing about Georgian soldiers who were fighting for the DPR and LPR, as the topic was not popular in the country; and they were unlikely to be “a military resource” for the former authorities in the process of continuing confrontation in Georgia.
