Senior US Senator Daines meets Georgia’s Kobakhidze, Zourabichvili, and others

US Senator Steve Daines visited Tbilisi on Friday, where he held high-level talks with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, as well as Georgia’s fifth president, Salome Zourabichvili and other opposition figures.

It was the highest-level visit from a US politician since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term. Under former President Joe Biden, relations between Georgia and the US grew increasingly rocky, culminating with the sanctioning of Georgian Dream’s founder Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Even before Trump took office in January 2025, Georgian Dream officials openly spoke about their hopes for a reset of ties under the new administration, which has so far yet to materialise.

Just days before Daines arrived in Tbilisi, the US Embassy said that Ivanishvili had refused to meet with Ambassador Robin Dunnigan, who was tapped to deliver a message on behalf of the Trump administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It is unclear if the refusal was connected to Daines’ visit — his stop in Tbilisi capped off a regional tour that also saw him visit Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Conflicting stories emerge about US diplomatic outreach to Georgia

The US Embassy said on Wednesday that ‘Ivanishvili has refused to meet with Ambassador Dunnigan to hear a message from the Trump administration’.

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Official statements from the US and Georgian sides of the meeting differed only slightly.

Georgian Foreign Minister Maka Botchorishvili, who was also in attendance at the meeting, described the talks as ‘very good’.

‘The meeting clearly reaffirmed Georgia’s readiness to reboot its relations with the United States and to focus on the substance of those relations’.

Daines, a member of the Republican Party who also serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also met with former President Salome Zourabichvili and opposition leaders Tina Bokuchava from the Unity — National Movement party and Nika Gvaramia, a member of the Coalition for Change alliance.

The wording of the US Embassy’s announcement about the meeting with the opposition was more critical, and explicitly addressed the widespread concerns of democratic backsliding under Georgian Dream.

Separately, Gvaramia said that others from the US State Department were present at the meeting, and that he had raised a number of issues related to Russian influence in Georgia, as well as the arrest on Thursday of opposition figure Nika Melia.

‘We talked about how, for the first time in the history of all three Caucasian countries, Georgia has become a country whose government was called anti-American by a State Department representative — Rubio’, Gvaramia said.

Kobakhidze speaks at CPAC Hungary alongside Orbán and other conservative politicians

Kobakhidze previously spoke at the conference in 2024, while former Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili spoke in 2023.

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