Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has said it would be ‘difficult’ to congratulate Moldovan President Maia Sandu after her pro-EU party notched a victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. He claimed the difficulties arose due to Moldova’s membership in the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
On Sunday, Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) secured 50.2% of the vote, besting the main competitor, the communist, pro-Russian, Patriotic Electoral Bloc (BEP). The vote was held under widespread attempts by Russia to influence the results of the election, with authorities saying that Russia and pro-Russian figures had spent as much as $400 million in a failed attempt to help the BEP win.
While much of the EU swiftly congratulated Sandu on her party’s victory, noting that it was a huge setback for Russia, Georgian authorities largely refrained from making official congratulations until Kobakhidze’s remarks on Monday.
‘We will wait until Moldova leaves the CIS, and then we will see, we will reconsider the issue of congratulations’, Kobakhidze said.
The CIS is a regional organisation consisting of nine successor states of the former Soviet Union — Georgia was previously a member, but withdrew following the 2008 August War. While formally still a member, Moldova has said it would withdraw from the organisation in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Kobakhidze’s citing of Moldova’s CIS membership as a reason to refuse to congratulate Sandu were mocked and seen as a smokescreen, obfuscating the unwillingness of Georgian Dream to publicly support Moldova’s pro-EU government. Georgian Dream has repeatedly complained that the EU has a hypocritical approach towards Moldova, unfairly focusing on problems in Georgia while ignoring similar issues there.
Notably, membership in the CIS has previously not prevented Kobakhidze from congratulating other foreign leaders on electoral victories — in 2024, he congratulated Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev for being reelected to a fifth term in a vote that was widely seen as neither free nor fair.
Georgian media coverage and Sandu’s deepfake
On the day of the election, a deepfaked video of Sandu addressing the country — and mentioning Georgia — was widely circulated, primarily (but not solely) by pro-Russian propaganda accounts.
In the manipulated video, which was altered from a video Sandu released in August, she appears to say that ‘Georgia has once again turned into a colony of Russia’, among other criticisms of the state of Georgian democracy.
The pro-government Georgian media outlet Rustavi 2 also picked up on the manipulated video, but deleted their post shortly after. Other outlets have not deleted the news.
Elsewhere, pro-government Georgian media outlets largely did not overtly criticise the election or the victory of Sandu’s PAS. Rustavi 2 did, however, report on various complaints about the election from Moldovan opposition figures, including an allegation from former President Igor Dodon, of the pro-Russian BEP, that Sandu was trying to ‘cancel’ the election.
Days before the election, a crew of journalists from the prominent Georgian pro-government media outlet Imedi was denied entry into Moldova to cover the elections.
OC Media reached out to the Moldovan Foreign Ministry for more information about the denial, but did not receive an answer.
Xandie (Alexandra) Kuenning
