Tbilisi is a tinderbox

Never judge a country by its airport road. Georgia’s, from international arrivals to the heart of Tbilisi, is impeccable. The George W. Bush highway (yes, really) is smooth asphalt, with chic electric cars humming down avenues, punctuated by spanking new Lukoil petrol stations with fuel at dirt-cheap prices. It is impeccably clean. And when you reach the parliament building downtown, they have almost finished clearing up the detritus from three consecutive nights of protests, rubber bullets, tear gas and riot police.

Tbilisi’s highway was built during the country’s most recent economic sugar rush, when a good-looking young president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was in his brief but glamorous heyday. As a Kennedy-esque reformer, he sacked the police force, scourged corruption and cleaned up the country. But he later fell back into heavy-handed authoritarianism. Last weekend, the sunlit way-stations of progress – EU and even Nato membership – receded with the crowds. Saakashvili is in a jail hospital, his once-generous 120kg almost halved by illness amid rumours of dementia and even, improbably, poisoning.

As ever, it is feast and, more often, famine in Georgia, a country of 3.7 million that has had more invaders than Sicily. Romans, Persians, Syrians, Genghis Khan, and, of course, the Russians have all had their turn raping and pillaging in the temperate vineyards, orchards and vegetable fields that spill out below the great Caucasian massif that should be a defensive wall, but isn’t. Today, as the once good-time-boy president wastes away, thousands of Russian conscript-dodgers and digital nomads mingle with Ukrainian war refugees and pour over the borders to push up the prices of everything. And meanwhile the country totters on a tightrope between appeasing the widely disliked Bear or, some fear, facing its own existential apocalypse.

It’s not that Georgia hasn’t seen it all before – in fact, you could argue that it was Moscow’s trial run.