‘Colour revolutions’, Western meddling, coups — how Russian media is covering Georgia’s election

Russian-state run media and other affiliated outlets have been drumming up allegations that it is the West, not Russia or the ruling Georgian Dream party, that meddled in the elections. 

Accusations from Russia that the West is interfering in the domestic affairs of countries in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and beyond, are not new. Russian media, its affiliates, and other sympathetic outlets have long characterised revolutions and protests that have occurred throughout the former Soviet Union as being funded by the CIA as part of a larger plot to encroach on Russia’s so-called sphere of influence. 

In the aftermath of Georgia’s parliamentary elections on 26 October, which both the opposition and many in the West have said was tampered with in favour of the ruling Georgian Dream party, this loose conglomerate of anti-Western media outlets has adopted a similar playbook. 

The ‘Euro-Elites’ want to ‘plant their puppets in Tbilisi’

In an article published on 28 October by the Russian state-run media outlet RIA Novosti, the election was cast as a civilisational fight between the decadent West and the Orthodox East. 

‘The Georgian people voted against gay parades and other LGBT propaganda (banned in Russia), as well as against the persecution of the Orthodox Church’, the author Victoria Nikiforova argued. 

She further claimed that aligning with Russia is the natural course for Georgia, and instead, it is the ‘Euro-elites’ who wanted to ‘to pull the same trick with Georgia as with Ukraine, to plant their puppets in Tbilisi, who would drive the people to fight the Russians’.

Nikiforova, who has been sanctioned by the EU and other Western countries, reiterated oft-cited claims that the West was trying to pull Georgia into Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine and open a new front in the Caucasus. Such assertions featured regularly in the campaign ahead of the parliamentary elections, with Georgian Dream officials warning of an elusive ‘Global War Party’ that wants to drag the country into the war. 

Brushing aside any of the widely-documented allegations of electoral irregularities, Nikiforova wrote that in Europe, ‘they are complaining that the Georgians voted “incorrectly” because they were intimidated by Moscow’. 

‘But in fact, it was Brussels that was openly blackmailing them. Tbilisi was under severe pressure, demanding that it support anti-Russian sanctions, help Ukraine, and open a second front against Moscow’. 

The next step, Nikiforova claimed, is an EU-imposed ‘colour revolution’ akin to Ukraine’s 2014 EuroMaidan revolution, which resulted in the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. 

In the leadup to the Georgian elections, long before the official results had been announced, RIA Novosti was already claiming that the opposition was preparing for a coup, citing comments from the Speaker of the Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili. 

The historian Tarik Cyril Amar made a similar claim on 29 October in a column in the Russian state-run outlet RT, insinuating that German MP Michael Roth was spearheading the Western-backed effort to overthrow Georgian Dream. 

Georgian Dream is not pro-Russian, Amar said, but rather wants to maintain ‘useful relationships with everyone’. 

‘Its real sin, in the eyes of the West, is that it is not anti-Russian, like the opposition’.

In Amar’s view, Roth’s criticisms of the election irregularities and support for the opposition are an example of the EU solely viewing Georgians as a tool to fight against Russia. A similar argument has long been made about Western support for Ukraine. 

Correspondents on the ground

Ahead of the elections, at least two Western journalists were denied entry into Georgia for unspecified reasons. 

Nonetheless, Russian journalists appeared to have no issue entering the country and covering the vote. 

Among them was Alexander Malkevich, a sanctioned Russian propagandist formerly associated with the Wagner Group’s Yevgeniy Prigozhin. Malkevich is known for working in Russian-occupied Ukraine and has been accused of recruiting young Ukrainians to join his propaganda activities. He is wanted in the US, which has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his identification or location for interfering in US elections. 

A correspondent from RIA Novosti was also on the ground and was filmed being yelled at by Georgian protesters. 

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed on Wednesday the correspondent was ‘harassed’ by Georgian ‘provocateurs’. She said it was evidence of interference in the work of Russian journalists, who ‘show all events as they really are’, as opposed to the narrative ‘preferred’ by the West.

Chay Bowes, an Irish journalist who works for RT, spent several days in Tbilisi around the election and shared a number of short interviews with protesters, which he claimed showed evidence of Western interference. 

In one video published on Friday, Bowes alleges that his ‘local Georgian source’ told him ‘students were paid to create “organic looking” anti-Russian signs in English’.

Bowes appeared to be fixated on the fact that many of the protesters’ signs were in English in other videos. 

In a separate video published on the same day, Bowes questions an Italian man at a protest on why his sign, reading ‘Georgia is not Russia’, was in English. While the man says he belongs to a ‘human rights organisation’, Bowes later claimed the man comes from a ‘US and EU “funded” NGO’. 

Non-affiliated ‘citizen journalists’ have also contributed to spreading the narrative of Western meddling. 

Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko, who was in Georgia as part of an observation team from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), was filmed being confronted by an anonymous man in front of the parliament building. 

The man continued to question Goncharenko on what he was doing in Georgia in Russian, despite the MP’s insistence on speaking in Ukrainian or English.

The video, published on 27 October, was later shared by a popular Russian propaganda account on X with the caption, ‘Now even nationalists Ukranian [sic] politicians came to Georgia to help with the colour revolution, to ensure Georgia will be an anti-Russian proxy’.