Tbilisi's New Loyalty Test: A 'Russophobia Council' Arrives Just as Washington Knocks

A government does not need to write a new law when it can outsource the policing of speech to a 'public initiative' and pretend not to know whose idea it was.

The announcement out of Tbilisi this week — a 'Council for Monitoring Russophobia,' surfaced through a Russian state outlet rather than through any Georgian institution that would have to answer questions about it — is the kind of object you study not for what it claims to do but for when it appears. It appears in the same week that U.S. State Department representatives are in Tbilisi from May 24 to 29, meeting Georgian Dream officials, opposition figures, and civil society. The choreography is not subtle. One delegation arrives to ask about democratic backsliding; the host government simultaneously blesses a body whose entire premise is that criticism of Russia is a form of bigotry to be catalogued.

The decision-maker here is Bidzina Ivanishvili, whatever title he is or is not holding this month. Georgian Dream does not generate this sort of initiative spontaneously from its parliamentary benches. The ruling party has spent two years building the legal scaffolding — the foreign agents law, the restrictions on assembly, the prosecutorial pressure on opposition figures — and a 'Russophobia council' is the cultural superstructure that sits on top of that scaffolding. It tells judges, prosecutors, university administrators and television editors where the new line is. You do not need to enforce it directly. You need only to make people uncertain about where it falls, and they will enforce it on themselves.

This is the part worth lingering on. The council has no statutory power. That is the design, not a weakness. A body with formal authority would be challengeable in court and embarrassing in front of European partners. A 'public initiative' produces lists, reports, denunciations — and the state can shrug and say it is merely civic activism. The muscle memory in this technique is older than any current minister in Tbilisi; the post-Soviet space has been refining it since the late 1990s. Belarus perfected one variant. Russia perfected another. Georgian Dream is now field-testing its own.

What does the budget say, as opposed to the rostrum? Look at the National Bank of Georgia, which purchased USD 333.3 million in foreign currency through its Bmatch platform in April alone. That is not the reserve-building of a country confident in its trajectory. That is a central bank hedging against the capital flight and currency stress that tend to follow when a government decides its political survival matters more than its EU candidacy. The Foreign Ministry talks about European integration; the National Bank buys dollars like a country expecting weather. The second set of actions is the actual policy.

The American delegation's week in Tbilisi is the other half of the picture. What Washington wants from Georgia in 2026 is narrower than what it wanted in 2012 — not democratic transformation but denial of the corridor: keep Georgian territory, ports, and banking system from becoming a sanctions-evasion highway between Russia, Iran, and the Gulf. Georgian Dream knows this. It is calibrating exactly how much domestic authoritarianism the corridor question will tolerate before it becomes a sanctions question. The 'Russophobia council' is part of that calibration — a probe to see whether Washington will treat speech-policing as a red line or as background noise.