By Felix Light
TBILISI (Reuters) – Georgia’s president and opposition leaders have expressed anger and disgust at advertisements unveiled a month before an election by the ruling party, which used pictures of devastation in Ukraine to argue that it alone could keep peace with Russia.
The ads, which first appeared on Thursday on billboards in Tbilisi and on television, show devastated Ukrainian cities and villages, contrasted against peaceful Georgian ones, above a caption reading: “No to war! Choose peace.”
The governing Georgian Dream party is trying to hold on to power in the Oct. 26 election against a divided, mainly pro-Western opposition. Polls show it remains the most popular single bloc, though lagging behind its support in 2020 when it won a narrow majority.
One version of the ad shows the ruined Mariupol Drama Theatre, where hundreds of Ukrainian civilians were killed in a Russian airstrike while sheltering during Moscow’s siege of the Black Sea port. It was depicted next to a picture of a pristine Georgian theatre, with the ballot paper numbers symbolising Georgia’s four main opposition parties crossed out.
“I have never seen anything so shameful, so insulting to our culture, traditions, history, and faith,” President Salome Zourabichvili, a critic of the ruling party, said of the advertisements in a post on Facebook.
Former Georgian Dream prime minister turned opposition leader Giorgi Gakharia called the ads “disgusting” on X.
In a statement, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said the ads were “unacceptable”.
Relations with Russia have played a central role in politics in Georgia since it gained independence from Moscow in 1991.
Moscow supports the independence of two breakaway regions run by separatists since wars in the 1990s, and defeated Georgia decisively in a brief war in 2008. Georgia and Russia have no diplomatic relations.
Georgian Dream, whose billionaire founder made his fortune in Russia, says it favours measured ties with Moscow and has repeatedly accused the opposition and Western countries of seeking to drag Georgia into the war in Ukraine. It has long contrasted the peace since it came to power in 2012 with the period that led to the 2008 war.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgia has said it supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but Tbilisi has engaged in repeated diplomatic spats with Kyiv and the West and deepened economic ties with Russia.
(Reporting by Felix Light; Editing by Peter Graff)
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