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Last week, Elina Valtonen, the OSCE Chair-in-office and Finnish Foreign Minister, attended a demonstration in central Tbilisi as a show of support for the long-running protest movement against the Georgian Dream government’s anti-Western trajectory. While not the first EU diplomat to have attended a protest in Tbilisi, her attendance drove the government to say that it had cancelled her meeting with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze — or so it seemed. Valtonen quickly hit back, saying that she
After almost a year of plummeting relations, Azerbaijan and Russia seem like they have ended their very public beef. At a meeting in Dushanbe earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised, on camera, to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev for the deadly Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) plane crash in December 2024 — the incident that had set off the chain of escalating tit-for-tat actions between Moscow and Baku. In a delicately-worded admission of guilt, Putin acknowledged that the
My previous OC Insider was titled ‘Georgia’s uncertain 4 October’. That date has now passed, yet the ambiguity has not faded — neither the ambiguity tied to the day itself, nor, even more so, the ambiguity that has haunted the future of the Georgian state since long before 4 October. For those who haven’t been closely following events, here’s a brief recap: on 4 October, Georgia held municipal elections that were boycotted by much of the opposition, including the two largest opposition groups.
On 4 October, two remarkable events are set to unfold in Georgia — the municipal elections and an anti-government demonstration, branded by its initiators as a ‘peaceful revolution’ and a ‘peaceful overthrow’ of Georgian Dream’s rule. I feel uncertain about what exactly to expect from that day, and based on past experiences, I’m not even trying to form any specific expectations. The elections issue has further fractured Georgia’s already fragmented opposition: two major opposition groups and s
