Simonyan threatened to strike Tbilisi

The editor-in-chief of the RT channel, Margarita Simonyan, commenting on the video of mass protests in Tbilisi, threatened to strike the capital of Georgia in the event of a “repeat of August 2008”.

According to Simonyan, as well as many other pro-Kremlin commentators in Russia, the protests against the so-called law on “foreign agents” that have engulfed Georgia are actually inspired from abroad and aim to involve Georgia in a war with Russia. Simonyan refers to the fact that on the video she is commenting on, the crowd is chanting “Sukhumi!” – this is the capital of self-proclaimed Abkhazia, which in Georgia is considered a territory occupied by Russian troops.

In August 2008, during the short-term war, Russian troops defeated the Georgian army, after which Moscow announced the recognition of the independence of the self-proclaimed Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As follows from Simonyan’s words, she believes that if Georgia tries to regain control over the territories, “no one will play with Georgia, and they will not send troops there, but they will simply rush around Tbilisi, without picking a person.”

According to Simonyan, Tbilisi will be hit, among other things, because “there is no Kiev-Pechersk Lavra” there, and in Russia “no one has ever considered and does not consider themselves one nation with Georgians, and the Russian Federation has never been “Tbilisi Russia “”. Apparently, the head of RT hints at the fact that the Russian authorities do not want to destroy Kyiv, caring about the fate of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, and Tbilisi has a different fate.

Since the beginning of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly subjected Kyiv to missile strikes, which killed civilians, and also tried to take the capital of Ukraine, advancing from the north and northeast. Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a well-known Orthodox monastery, was not actually bombed – unlike many other religious sites in Ukraine.

The protests in Georgia include activists of political forces who are advocating the return of Abkhazia and South Ossetia by force, but this topic is not on the agenda of the protests, and it is not listed among the protestors’ official demands.

Some Ukrainian politicians called on Georgia against the background of Russian aggression against Ukraine to open a “second front” against Russian troops and solve its territorial problems. The Georgian authorities say that they plan to settle territorial conflicts only peacefully. A number of Georgian politicians also claim that the West is inviting Georgia to war. The President of Georgia, Salome Zurabishvili, Western politicians and diplomats categorically deny this, – notes “Echo of the Caucasus”.