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After weeks of protests, the Georgian government on Tuesday passed its controversial Kremlin-style law on ‘foreign influence’. It rings a death knell for more than 90% of the public’s hopes for EU accession, incompatible as the measures are with the bloc’s stated criteria for membership, and promises to push the South Caucasian country back into Moscow’s orbit.
Images from a rally outside parliament showed furious demonstrators shouting, chanting and openly weeping as they were addressed by opposition politicians who’d walked out on the vote to caution the crowds against despair, calling for the public to mobilise ahead of polls in October — now set to be Georgia’s most decisive in decades. The outcome of the vote was quickly condemned by the US.
The recent level of state violence, which critics warn offers a grim foreshadowing of what may now be to come for the law’s intended targets, has prompted massive international outcry — with dozens of prominent activists, NGO workers, journalists and opposition politicians hospitalised in attacks by security forces at rallies, and by masked assailants waiting outside victims’ homes at night.
The ruling Georgian Dream party has responded to widespread condemnation by labelling historic Western allies their “enemies,” representatives of a “global war party” supposedly hellbent on dragging Georgia into the conflict in Ukraine.
Five days before the bill was passed, New Lines Magazine published the results of a months-long investigation into historic support from Western partners for a Georgian government communications division that has, for years, proven instrumental to this now rapidly accelerating authoritarian slide closer to the Kremlin, which has occupied a fifth of Georgian territory since the 90s.
Georgia’s Department of Strategic Communications, or StratComs, was set up in 2015 as part of a landmark, UK-led NATO initiative designed to bolster the Black Sea country’s resilience to Russian hybrid warfare.
Under that project, staff at the Georgian government division received training and technical assistance from alliance experts, as well as attending and even hosting conferences and analytical exchanges on disinformation and methods for countering Putinist propaganda.
Over time, however, as the government began to embark on its present anti-Western trajectory, StratComs fell prey to carrying out exactly the kind of activity they’d been set up to defend against.
Georgian Dream Pass ‘Foreign Influence’ law ‘Completing its Seizure of Power’ After Weeks of Violent Protests
For several weeks, Tbilisi has been rocked by violent crackdowns on protesters opposed to a Kremlin-style bill targeting journalists and civil society. Today it passed into law
Numerous reports by Georgian watchdogs show how the unit has long used troll accounts to launch vicious Russian-style attacks on political opponents, as well as spreading fake news and propaganda narratives about the very partners who were supporting the division.
The UK government recently said the NATO initiative was concluded in March 2024 – around two months after New Lines Magazine submitted the first in a series of FOI requests about it.
Authorities denied that staff at the UK Embassy in Tbilisi had any knowledge of the allegations against StratComs, but later said it “first became aware of reports in September 2023, by which time UK strategic communications support to the Georgian government had ended”.
That line was undercut in the recent investigation not only by the fact allegations against StratComs have been public since at least 2021 (beyond broader reports of the Georgian government being behind this kind of activity going back to 2019), but also anonymous testimony from a source with first-hand knowledge of the NATO initiative.
‘Our Injuries Will Heal, but the Georgian Government’s Reputation Will Not’
Georgia’s accelerating authoritarian slide into Russia’s orbit has now seen its government launch a full-scale Belarusian-style crackdown on opposition voices.
The insider said that “of course [the UK] knew there was abuse of resources going on,” adding that officials were therefore fully aware “they weren’t using taxpayer’s money wisely”.
Byline Times can now exclusively reveal that James Cleverly, in his former capacity as UK Foreign Secretary, was personally informed of the situation at a meeting with NGO representatives during a diplomatic trip to Tbilisi in March 2023.
Ahead of that visit, the Foreign Office had teased a significant increase in assistance to Georgia as part of efforts to “boost regional resilience against Russian malign influence,” though the Foreign Office has since declined to confirm whether that support was granted.
A source with knowledge of Cleverly’s subsequent meeting with NGOs says the former Foreign Secretary was directly told about allegations against the NATO-supported Georgian StratComs division. Cleverly is understood to have seemed “remorseful,” with one of his aides using the word “ashamed”.
Neither Cleverly nor the Foreign Office responded to requests for comment from Byline Times. The revelations contradict the Foreign Office’s narrative of first becoming aware of the scandal last September, not only raising the question of why it wasn’t until 12 months later the NATO-backed project was brought to a close, but also throwing into sharp relief the UK Embassy’s decision in January 2024 to hire a former member of the Georgian government’s StratComs division to its own team.