Tbilisi Arrests a War Veteran for the Wrong Answer About a War

Giorgi Baramidze was taken from his Tbilisi apartment this week and charged with treason for something he said about a war Georgia lost in 1992-93. Not for a document handed over, not for money moved, not for a meeting in a hotel lobby — for words about Abkhazia. The Georgian state, in the year 2026, is now in the business of deciding which sentences about its own military defeats constitute a betrayal of the country.

The decision belongs to the ruling Georgian Dream apparatus around Bidzina Ivanishvili, and it should be read as one. Prosecutors do not wake up in Tbilisi and independently reach for the treason article of the criminal code against a former interior and defence minister of the opposition United National Movement. Someone signs the order. That signature is the story.

What makes this move worth a column, rather than the hundredth entry in a long ledger of pressure on the UNM, is the choice of charge. Treason is not administrative harassment. It is not a tax audit or a licence revoked or a protester bundled into a van for the night. It is the charge a state reserves for the accusation that a citizen has served a foreign power against his own. To deploy it over remarks about the 1992-93 war is to announce that the government's version of that war is now the only lawful one — and that revising it, even by a man who was in government himself when the ceasefire lines hardened, is an act against the state.

This is the pattern to watch: a ruling party that has spent two years narrowing the space between disagreement and disloyalty is now closing the last gap. The foreign agents law drew the first line. The suspension of EU accession talks last winter drew the second. The arrests around the parliamentary protests drew the third. Prosecuting a veteran politician for the wrong reading of a lost war is the fourth, and it is qualitatively different, because it reaches backward. Previous escalations governed what Georgians could do this week. This one governs what they are allowed to remember.

The context around the arrest sharpens it. The same days brought the routine Sokhumi-Tskhinvali-Moscow digest: planned large-scale exercises on the Abkhaz side of the line, another Ergneti incident meeting, Russian diplomatic staff in Tbilisi quietly promoting outreach programmes for ethnic Georgians living beyond the administrative boundary. The occupation is not frozen; it is being administered, patiently, by the power that benefits from Tbilisi's paralysis. And in Tbilisi, the state's prosecutorial energy is directed not at that administration but at a domestic opponent's phrasing.

Georgian Dream will argue this is a legal matter, that prosecutors act independently, that Baramidze's specific words crossed a specific statutory line. Reserve judgment on the specifics — the indictment has not been published in full — but recognise the shape. A government that genuinely believed its treason case would survive scrutiny would welcome the trial. A government using the charge as a signal will let the pre-trial detention do the work regardless of what a court eventually finds.