Salome Zourabichvili has thanked Vladimir Zelensky for targeting Georgian officials amid mass protests
Georgia’s outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili has thanked Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelenksy after he announced that Kiev is imposing sanctions on senior members of the government in Tbilisi.
Zourabichvili, who has vowed to refuse to leave her post when her term expires later this month, is one of the leaders of the mass anti-government protests that demonstrators hope will force Tbilisi to conduct a re-run of the recent parliamentary election. The ruling Georgian Dream party won the October vote in a landslide, while opposition parties claimed that it was rigged.
Zelensky followed the lead of some EU nations this week to impose personal sanctions against Georgian government officials and members of its ruling party, touting it as a way to oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin.
”Those sanctions are against the part of the Georgian government that is surrendering Georgia to Putin,” Zelensky claimed in a video address on Thursday.
The Georgian protesters urgently need foreign support or otherwise the country would be “lost” for decades, he warned. “We must stand together against Moscow,” he urged.
”I could not say it better,” Zourabichvili said on X, sharing Zelensky’s video statement later in the day.
Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has called Kiev’s move a sign of the “desperate situation” in Ukraine. The country’s military has suffered a series of defeats this year and risks losing US assistance, after President-elect Donald Trump comes into office in January, he noted.
Zourabichvili has previously called the election a Russian “special operation” and urged citizens to protest against the outcome. She has snubbed an invitation by the Georgian prosecutor general’s office to share possible evidence of criminality during the poll.
Officials in Tbilisi have claimed that opposition parties are trying to instigate an armed coup, similar to the one that happened in Ukraine in 2014. Tbilisi has vowed to prevent such a scenario, citing the harm that the Ukrainian people and the nation have suffered due to the Maidan events.
The US had imposed some personal sanctions against Georgian politicians even before the parliamentary election. Washington is considering further punishment for what Secretary of State Antony Blinken described this week as undermining the “Euro-Atlantic aspirations” of the Georgian people.
