David Kezerashvili knows better than most what standing up to Russia entails. He helped to overthrow the Kremlin-aligned Georgian government during the 2003 Rose Revolution. Then he served as Georgia’s defence minister for two years including when Russia invaded in 2008. He eventually fled to London in 2012 when the Kremlin-backed Georgian Dream government accused him of embezzling $5.2 million in state funds. Seven criminal charges were levelled against him, including extortion and money laundering. None was upheld in court, until two years ago when the country’s Supreme Court overturned the embezzlement acquittal, sentencing him in absentia to ten years in prison.
‘Without calling my defence, in a few hours the Supreme Court decided I was guilty’
When we meet in The Spectator’s offices, Kezerashvili, who owns Georgia’s pro-democracy television channel, Formula TV, insists the charges are trumped up, the result of a politically motivated campaign against him. Courts in both Britain and France have refused requests from Georgia to extradite him. ‘The ridiculous thing is that the [Supreme Court] judge who tried my case was the general prosecutor when the prosecutor’s office appealed my acquittal in 2018: it was the same person sitting on both trials,’ Kezerashvili says. ‘Without calling my defence, in a few hours they decided I was guilty.’
Kezerashvili, 44, says that his decision to meet me is ‘not without risk’. A week before our interview, Georgia’s former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who is serving six years for abuse of power (which he denies), passed a note to journalists from his prison hospital bed claiming he had been poisoned. ‘Vladimir Putin said at the time [of the Georgian war] that he will go after him. And that’s what we are seeing now.’
Saakashvili was referred to in a recent US State Department report as a ‘political prisoner’; two-thirds of the cabinet that served under him are in exile or living under the threat of jail time. This week, Norway gave Saakashvili the Sjur Lindebrekke Award for his work promoting human rights and democracy, which was dismissed by Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili as an ‘insult’.
Kezerashvili claims that even in London, he is not free from Russian intimidation. ‘I’ve spotted strangers taking photos of me meeting people,’ he says. ‘And then somehow they appear on the TV channel Imedi, which is the pro-government, pro-Russian TV channel in Georgia. They show my meetings with my ex-colleagues or with business partners. It happens every few weeks.’ He shrugs: ‘It’s become part of life.’
Part of the reason for this intimidation, Kezerashvili says, is his work on Formula TV. The station has been targeted since it was launched in 2020, but in the past few months the government has upped the ante: Kezerashvili expects the channel to be shut down imminently. The US State Department report notes that media watchdogs believe the state’s lawsuit against Kezerashvili is ‘aimed at seizing the government-critical television station’.
When I ask if he is concerned about meeting a similar fate to that of his old boss, or of Alexander Litvinenko or Yulia and Sergei Skripal, he replies: ‘It’s uncomfortable for sure.’ Friends and family have even been pushing him to get bodyguards. ‘I’m against it. I don’t like the idea.’
Questions have been raised over Saakashvili’s claim that he was poisoned. But Kezerashvili – who affectionately refers to Saakashvili as ‘Misha’ – says what happened is not, as the Georgian government claims, the result of natural illness. ‘On multiple occasions, Putin promised that he would punish Misha… now he’s doing it with the hands of the Georgian government. It’s all according to this Kremlin playbook, if you like. But that’s how they treat their enemies and those they don’t like.’
Kezerashvili says tests recently performed in the United States on samples of Saakashvili’s hair and nails indicate poisoning: abnormal levels of heavy metals were found in his system. Politico, too, said that medical reports revealed traces of ‘mercury and arsenic’ in Saakashvili’s hair and nails, and lacerations ‘throughout his body’.
Last month, there were violent protests across Georgia over the government’s attempts to pass two ‘foreign influence’ laws. These laws would have required any organisation which received more than 20 per cent of its funding from abroad to register as a ‘foreign agent’. The laws would have affected the freedom of the press and NGOs. After being criticised for ‘Russian-style’ threats to free expression, Georgian Dream dropped the legislation.
But Kezerashvili doesn’t believe the government will stop there: he suspects crackdowns on civil society are coming. ‘[Georgia] is becoming more and more pro-Russian almost every week… nowadays I would call it a proxy of the Russian state. It would have been difficult calling it that maybe a couple of years ago. But not from what I see now… [the government] are getting their instructions from officials in Moscow.’
The German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock last week accused Russia of trying to destabilise Georgia and Moldova because of the countries’ decision to ‘follow the European path’, and said this was ‘intensifying’ because of the Ukraine war. Britain has also pledged £500,000 to help shore up Georgia’s security against Russian interference ahead of the country’s election next year. ‘It’s getting to the point where everyone should start speaking up and attract as much attention as possible… Georgia needs help from the West,’ says Kezerashvili.
‘Georgians see themselves as European people; Georgia is a European country’
Russia continues to occupy the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia which were established as effective Russian territory during the 2008 war. There are reports that these territories might hold ‘referendums’ on joining Russia officially. Soldiers from the regions are also being sent to fight for Russia in Ukraine.
Kezerashvili has visited Kyiv at least six times since the war broke out, each trip lasting several weeks. He returned from his latest visit the day before we met; he stresses that his trips are for humanitarian purposes and gets defensive when pressed for details. ‘What details are you interested in?’ he says coyly when I ask. ‘There was lengthy travel involved because you have to drive all the way from the Polish border, which is about seven, eight hours.’ This is as much as he will give. It doesn’t seem far-fetched, perhaps, to imagine that a former defence minister – with first-hand experience of Russian military aggression and a strategic knowledge of how to defend a country against Putin – could have found a receptive audience among Ukraine’s wartime politicians.
Shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Georgia applied for EU membership along with Moldova. That application now hangs in the balance, in part due to the government’s attempts to repress free speech. Kezerashvili is ‘very doubtful’ the current government will fulfil the conditions set by the EU.
Nevertheless, he hopes that Georgians will have a future in the EU: ‘Georgians see themselves as – and they are – European people. Georgia is a European country.’
Kezerashvili will only be able to return to Georgia if there is a change of regime and an end to the ‘madness’ that he and many of his former colleagues have been subjected to. He hasn’t given up yet. ‘I hope one day I’ll be able to go back and see my family, friends, and the city where I was born and grew up,’ he says.
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