Vazha Tavberidze is a staff writer with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Georgian service. RFE/RL is a media organisation covering news in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
‘They say the human body, given time, builds a resistance to pain. But after being tear-gassed six times in 21 nights, I can’t say I’ve started to tolerate it, let alone appreciate it,’ says a colleague who hasn’t missed a single night of the pro-European protests on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue since 28 November. She counts
Georgia is defined by its fight for survival. Lying in the shadow of Russia, Turkey and Iran, it has navigated – not always successfully – between the great powers for centuries, longing for freedom. The 26 October parliamentary elections were billed as the latest existential chapter in this centuries-old struggle – a choice between returning
‘He wasn’t my first billionaire, so I kind of knew my way around him’, a senior US diplomat who plied his trade in Georgia told me at the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. ‘And the weirdest thing? He was starry-eyed about Nato and the West in the beginning. I remember at one meeting with
If you had told me a month ago that Georgia would make it into the play-offs, defeating Portugal on the way, I’d have called you mad – which, much like in English, isn’t a word in Georgian that necessarily carries a negative connotation. Over these last two weeks, especially after the historic 2-0 win against
