Last year, Washington demonstrated that political prisoners are a convertible currency. After visits and calls from President Donald Trump’s envoys, Alexander Lukashenko released dozens of them in two batches — and sanctions on Belavia, the Belarusian state airline, came off in return. Whatever the merits of that trade, its lesson traveled. In Tbilisi, the man who owns Georgia was watching.
Bidzina Ivanishvili — the billionaire founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, designated by the U.S. Treasury in December 2024 for undermining Georgia’s democratic and Euro-Atlantic future for the benefit of Russia — has spent two years assembling the same asset class.
Nearly every leader of Georgia’s pro-Western opposition went to prison in 2025, most for the novel crime of refusing to appear before a parliamentary commission — among them Nika Melia, former chairman of the largest opposition party; Nika Gvaramia, a media chief turned party leader; Giorgi Vashadze; and Zurab Japaridze. The cells also hold student protesters, a famous actor, an opera singer who sang at demonstrations, and the country’s most celebrated poet. Freedom House stated the American position plainly in June: for Georgia, there should be “no reset without releases.”
Read that sentence the way Ivanishvili reads it: The Trump administration has just published the exchange rate.
The repression, note, is not hidden. It is conducted in daylight — the foreign agents law, the speech restrictions, the beatings at protests, the mass detentions — because visibility is part of its function. The crackdown, in effect, doubles as a message to Washington: there is one address in Georgia, and it is mine. The opposition is in prison, the courts are in hand, the streets are being priced out of politics. Remove me, and there is no one to call.
Now watch what he has been doing to his own people. In October, prosecutors charged former Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili — for years Ivanishvili’s most loyal lieutenant — with laundering roughly $6.5 million. In January, he took a plea deal: five years. A former defense minister, a former intelligence chief, and a wave of ex-deputy ministers followed. Georgian Dream calls it an uncompromising fight against corruption, sparing not even its own.
Look closer. Student demonstrators in Tbilisi get pre-trial detention; the former prime minister got bail, a side entrance out of the courthouse, and a negotiated sentence. The anti-corruption campaign runs exactly one layer deep and entirely inside the family — and it never approaches the man at the top of the pyramid, or his money. According to sources close to Ivanishvili’s circle, the campaign has an intended audience, and that audience is not Georgian. This is not an anti-corruption drive. It is a Potemkin purge, built to be viewed from Washington: a reformer at work, a man cleaning his own house, a man one can do business with.
The ask behind the theater is specific. In my assessment, Ivanishvili wants the Aliyev arrangement — transactional relations, no democracy conditions, no lectures. The flaw is arithmetic. Aliyev brought Washington pipelines, a strategic partnership charter signed during Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Baku, and cooperation on the Trump Route through the Caucasus. Ivanishvili brings a port he spent nine years blocking and a warehouse of hostages he manufactured himself. That is not Baku’s offer. It is Minsk’s.
And if Washington declines to buy? People familiar with the thinking inside Ivanishvili’s circle describe a second plan, and it is simpler: wait. Outlast this administration, keep the system intact, and renegotiate with whoever comes next — a bet resting on his long-standing conviction that Russia, and especially China, cannot ultimately lose.
The plan is not even fully concealed. When Georgian Dream suspended Georgia’s EU accession process in 2024, it named a date: the end of 2028. Ask what else ends in 2028. The Kremlin, of course, nurses the same hope about the calendar. And here is the strangest fact of Georgian politics in 2026: in my assessment, so do parts of the country’s own opposition, whose prominent voices spent years publicly disparaging the current occupant of the White House rather than building a bridge to him. In Tbilisi, everyone is waiting for 2028. Only one of the people waiting is holding hostages.
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Washington should draw three conclusions. First, do not rerun the Belarus trade at Georgian prices. Belarus is a strategic dead end; Georgia is the corridor between the Caspian and the Black Sea, and paying ransom at a chokepoint finances the next hostage-taking. Second, treat any releases as the beginning of scrutiny, not the end of it: prisoners freed can be re-arrested, and a government that jails an opera singer for singing will restock the shelf the day the cameras leave. Third, judge the anti-corruption spectacle by the only test that matters — whether it ever reaches the top of the pyramid. It will not, because the pyramid is the point.
Lukashenko sold his hostages and kept his regime. That deal is done, and its wisdom is history’s problem. The urgent question is Tbilisi, where the same playbook lies open on the desk of a man far richer, far subtler, and sitting on far more valuable ground — a man who has already read Washington’s exchange rate. The difference between a precedent and a policy is whether the Trump administration lets it happen twice.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations; a former chief of Georgia’s military police; and a former member of Parliament representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the U.S. in 2012.