On Aug. 27, 2025, President Donald Trump wrote that George Soros and his son should be charged under the federal racketeering law. That same day, a court in Tbilisi froze the bank accounts of the Civil Society Foundation, the renamed Georgian branch of Soros’s Open Society network, in a “sabotage” case opened on a complaint from a pro-government group.
Americans might read the two events as one fight. They are not. In Georgia, the war over Soros is fought between people who came out of the same donor world.
Start with the government. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, whose party calls Western-funded groups agents of revolution, coordinated a USAID education project in 2000 and 2001 and managed United Nations Development Programme projects from 2006 to 2014. In 2011 and 2012, he sat on the expert committee of the Open Society Georgia Foundation’s human rights and rule-of-law program. In 2012, he was also helping Bidzina Ivanishvili found Georgian Dream. In 2023, he accused USAID of training activists for a coup.
GEORGIA’S OPPOSITION HATES TRUMP MORE THAN THEY FEAR PUTIN
The speaker of parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, spent 17 years at GIZ, Germany’s state development agency, according to his biography. The chairman of the foreign relations committee, Nikoloz Samkharadze, is a former Open Society fellow and UNDP program manager.
By the end of September, all four German political foundations, among them the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which once gave Samkharadze a scholarship, had been forced to suspend their work in Georgia. Papuashvili’s verdict: foreign party foundations should have no political mission there.
Their patron knew the donor personally. On Dec. 1, 2012, two months after taking power, then-Prime Minister Ivanishvili received George Soros at his hilltop business center in Tbilisi. The next day, Soros met Saakashvili. In January 2013, Ivanishvili met Soros again, at Davos.
Now the opposition. Its founding generation came out of the same world a decade earlier. The Liberty Institute, which the U.S. Helsinki Commission reported was funded by Soros’s Open Society Institute, was co-founded by future ministers, among them Giga Bokeria, later secretary of the National Security Council, and Vano Merabishvili, later interior minister and prime minister. Kakha Lomaia ran the Open Society Georgia Foundation on the day of the 2003 Rose Revolution and became education minister three months later. Giorgi Papuashvili directed the foundation’s rule-of-law program until February 2004, became justice minister that month, and chaired the Constitutional Court from 2006 to 2016.
The traffic ran both ways. Sozar Subari directed a Liberty Institute project, served as Georgia’s ombudsman, became a minister in Ivanishvili’s government, and, in 2022, co-founded People’s Power, the Georgian Dream offshoot that introduced the “foreign agents” bill in 2023.
I served in that parliament, for that party, from 2008 to 2012. I came to it from the security services, not from a grant.
The money moved, too. In January 2004, Soros’s institute and the UNDP launched a fund that paid salary supplements of $1,500 a month to the president, the speaker, and the prime minister, and $1,200 to ministers and the prosecutor general. Its director, Kote Kublashvili, became chief justice of the Supreme Court in 2005 and held the post for a decade.
Ivanishvili tells a different story. In a 2012 interview with Obiektivi TV, he said he had financed that fund “from beginning to end.” From the Soros foundation, he explained, “we used only its name”: he had business in Russia, “and Russia would not have liked this.” The Soros name, he said, “served us well.” He described a second fund for the security ministries, above all the Defense Ministry, whose minister, Irakli Okruashvili, sent him reports. I was a state security officer then. My own salary supplement came from Ivanishvili, not from Soros.
In my old trade, that has a name: cover. A billionaire with business in Russia paid Georgia’s officials under an American philanthropist’s name so that Moscow would not notice. Today, his party treats that same name as the mark of a foreign agent.
The pattern holds today. Tina Bokuchava, who chairs Saakashvili’s United National Movement, worked for the National Democratic Institute, the Democratic Party-affiliated democracy group, from 2009 to 2011. Salome Samadashvili, political secretary of the opposition party Lelo, ran NDI’s parliamentary program in Georgia before she became a lawmaker and an ambassador. Formula, one of the two main opposition channels, was founded and financed by Davit Kezerashvili, a former defense minister in Saakashvili’s government. At the bottom of the other’s website, TV Pirveli, the only partner banner links to the Open Society Georgia Foundation.
None of this is a crime, and none of it is a conspiracy. Western donors built Georgia’s political class on both sides; that is what donors do. The problem is what each side now does with that past.
The opposition hears President Donald Trump’s war on Soros as a war on the institutions that made its careers. Its channels curse the president nightly. In private conversations with me and in social media comments, its people say they are counting on a Democratic House in November and an impeachment after that. I described in these pages how that hostility climbs a ladder: from the man, to his administration, to his party, to America itself.
Georgian Dream does the opposite. It flatters Trump. Kobakhidze has his photograph with the president from the Sept. 22 reception in New York, and his party borrows the American Right’s vocabulary on Soros. Then it works against what Washington wants in Georgia. In May 2024, it picked a consortium led by China Communications Construction Company, which the United States sanctioned in 2020, as its partner for the deep-sea port at Anaklia, four years after scrapping an American-led consortium. Its story that USAID and NGOs were plotting a revolution matched the script of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, which announced in August 2024 that Washington was preparing a “Tbilisi Maidan.” Asked about the SVR’s claim, Georgian Dream’s secretary general, Kakha Kaladze, said Moscow hardly needed to say it. It was already obvious, he said.
In my old trade, we called this convergence. Moscow does not need to recruit either side. One side tells Georgians that America’s president is a Russian agent; the other tells them America is plotting a coup. Beijing collects the contracts. Each side, in its own way, teaches the most pro-American nation in the region to distrust America.
TO THE TRUMPS, IT’S A TOWER. TO GEORGIA’S OLIGARCHS, IT’S A STAMP OF APPROVAL
Washington keeps reading Georgia through the Soros lens: the opposition as his heirs, the government as his enemies. It should read Georgia through its own interests. The test is not who attacks Soros or who defends him. It is who helps America: who backs the Megobari Act, who keeps sanctioned Chinese state companies out of a Black Sea port, who refuses to repeat the SVR.
By that test, neither Georgia’s government nor its loudest opposition passes. The Georgians who do pass rarely ran a foundation or a ministry. They are the ones who bought American flags with their own money.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations; a former regional chief of Georgia’s military police; and a former member of Parliament representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the United States in 2013.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
