Terje Helland Profile picture
Dec 20, 2024 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
🇬🇪Sanctions are already working.
Bidzina Ivanishvili is petrified, and his panic proves it.
How do we know? By watching how he and Georgian Dream have reacted to the wave of sanctions over the past weeks.
🧵Let’s go through it ...
1/11Image
🇪🇪🇱🇻🇱🇹When the Baltic states imposed sanctions, Ivanishvili scoffed.
He ridiculed them, dismissing their actions as "only hurting the Baltic people". There was no retaliation, no panic.
Indifference was the message.
2/11Image
Then came the UK and US Magnitsky sanctions.
The tone shifted instantly. Ivanishvili slammed the panic button .
What is he so afraid of?
Two things:
1️⃣ Appearing weak.
2️⃣ Cracks and defections within his power structure.
3/11Image
Just hours after the sanctions hit, Ivanishvili scrambled to signal strength:
🔹Vakhtang Gomelauri (sanctioned) promoted to Vice PM.
🔹Medals of honor announced for him and other sanctioned loyalists.
🔹Compensation was promised: “The state will cover their financial losses.”
4/11Image
😱This isn’t confidence. This is fear.
When you have to reward loyalty with promotions, medals, and money—just to keep your circle intact—it’s not strength.
It’s desperation.
5/11Image
But here’s the problem for Ivanishvili and Georgian Dream:
They don’t understand how Magnitsky sanctions work.
Magnitsky sanctions aren’t just symbolic. They are isolating, consequential, and contagious.
6/11Image
Under Magnitsky sanctions, anyone who interacts with sanctioned individuals can be targeted next:
🔹Banks handling their accounts.
🔹Colleagues working with them.
🔹Businesses serving them (even pizza delivery companies, in theory).
No one is safe.
7/11 Image
By doubling down to protect his loyalists, Ivanishvili is dragging everyone with him:
🔹The self-proclaimed government
🔹The election fraudsters of Georgian Dream
🔹The enablers, the corrupt financiers, the propagandists—all of them are now in the crosshairs
8/11Image
Ivanishvili knows defections are coming and he is freaking out.
No one wants to risk their future over a leader in panic mode.
Sanctions are a wedge. They create pressure. And under pressure, systems like Georgian Dream begin to crack.
9/11Image
The walls are closing in on Ivanishvili.
His fear is justified.
Sanctions are working, and his actions betray the desperation of a regime in freefall.
The only question is: Who will defect first?
10/11
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11/11buymeacoffee.com/terjehelland

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More from @terjehelland

May 27
🇬🇪 ATTENTION. Self-proclaimed PM Irakli Kobakhidze called former MP Giorgi Kandelaki "a formula of treason" and signaled state prosecution.
His offense? Co-authoring a Hudson Institute report on Iran's grip on Georgia.
In Georgian Dream's Georgia, this is not rhetoric.
1/10Image
Kobakhidze's exact words to pro-government media. "[Foreign] agents are directly involved in this, including this particular individual, who is a formula of treason."
He added that "a legal response would not be inappropriate" and named "the relevant state institutions".
2/10Image
The March Hudson report, co-authored by Kandelaki and Luke Coffey, documents what Tbilisi will not deny.
Kobakhidze traveled to Tehran twice in 2024. He was photographed beside Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at President Pezeshkian's inauguration.
3/10
hudson.org/foreign-policy…
Read 10 tweets
May 23
🇬🇪Georgian Dream is not EU-skeptic. GD runs a calculated campaign to ensure Georgia never qualifies, never progresses, and never joins the EU.
The anti-EU rhetoric is now the strategy itself.
The last three weeks make that very visible. 👇
1/13 📷 Civil.geImage
Two facts the regime cannot move. Over 80% of Georgians want EU membership. EU integration is written into the constitution. The pro-Western direction is not a Western imposition. It is the codified preference of Georgian voters, repeated in every credible poll for a decade.
2/13Image
Shaddow ruler Ivanishvili cannot allow that. The US sanctioned him in Dec 2024 for "undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation."
His, and Putins, political project requires the EU path to fail.
3/13 Image
Read 13 tweets
May 19
🇬🇪Open letter, meet open record.
PM Kobakhidze writes to von der Leyen, Costa and Metsola to lecture the EU on police violence in Copenhagen. Peaceful protesters beaten with batons, set on by dogs he claims.
Then read what his own police do, and never answer for.
1/13 👇🧵Image
The letter casts Georgia as the guardian of European values and Brussels as the backslider, with Denmark as the exhibit.
He picked the one subject on which his own government has the longest and best documented record.
2/13
interpressnews.ge/en/article/147…
The premise is whataboutism, and it collapses on contact.
The question is never whether police use force. Every state's police use force. It is whether anyone is held to account when they do.
3/13
Read 13 tweets
May 16
🇬🇪🇺🇸The Trump family recently signed Georgia's tallest building. Their local partner is a former Georgian Dream MP whom US lawmakers flagged as a regime financier. The deal lands while Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD's founder, sits under active US sanctions.
1/6thedailybeast.com/trumps-sign-me…
The partner is Archi Group, founded by Ilia Tsulaia. Former MP for Ivanishvili's party. Named on the sanctions-target list US lawmakers reportedly handed Marco Rubio in January 2025. He has not been sanctioned. That gap is the story. @willneal93
2/6Image
His firm took an estimated $7.2M from Ivanishvili's state Partnership Fund for a Tbilisi factory (Transparency International, 2019). In the same 2016-2018 window, he and his partners donated hundreds of thousands back to the ruling party.
State money in, party money out.
3/6
Read 6 tweets
May 15
🇬🇪🇺🇦Georgian Dream wants one gift from the West: recognition.
GD does not want the gift Kyiv just offered: friendship.
The Yerevan handshake between Zelensky and Georgian PM Kobakhidze was not normalization. It was a strategic trap.
Here's why GD secretly hates this opening.
1/15 Image
This is the third pressure in six weeks.
April 3: Marc Rubio's call to Kobakhidze. The gift GD wanted. Triggered Iranian and Russian counter-signals in 48 hours.
April 12: Hungary's Orbán lost his election. EU firewall gone.
May 4: Zelensky offers the gift GD did not want.
2/15
Sidelines of the 8th European Political Community summit in Yerevan. Ukraine initiated. Kobakhidze "immediately confirmed."
🇺🇦FM Sybiha and 🇬🇪FM Bochorishvili met separately. Return of ambassadors discussed.
Sybiha called it "historical."

3/15jam-news.net/irakli-kobakhi…
Read 16 tweets
Apr 14
🇬🇪🇭🇺Hungary under Orbán shows that a heavily rigged electoral system can still be contested. Georgian opposition is right to study it.
But the comparison only holds if you understand precisely how different the Georgian reality is.
1/11 Image
What Hungary demonstrates: even with gerrymandered districts, captured media, and rewritten electoral law, a resourced and organized opposition can compete for real stakes. The system was bent. It was not broken.
2/11
Transferable lessons exist: long-term civic coalition building, unified candidate lists, refusing to let the regime define the terms of the contest. These are real tools. Georgia's opposition should absorb them.
3/11
Read 11 tweets

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