Georgia's leader asks US to push back Russia

Salome Zourabichvili, Georgia’s fifth president, is on a mission in Washington to make her country matter to President Trump and his incoming team’s “America First” foreign policy, The Hill reports.

And she’s using personal relationships to gain access that was largely blocked in a Biden administration that rigidly stuck to protocol. 

“I couldn’t get to have even a phone call with the vice president when she was elected,” said Zourabichvili, who is Georgia’s first female president.

For a valuable few minutes of face time with Trump in December, Zourabichvili relied on French President Emanuel Macron to organize an introduction on the sidelines of the rededication ceremony of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Her message is that the U.S. should push back on Russia using Georgia “as a playground.” Russian forces have occupied 20 percent of the country since an invasion in 2008. And Moscow is accused of helping fuel a political crisis in the country.

“I had the chance to tell him that this was a strategic region that cannot be forgotten by the United States,” Zourabichvili said last week, meeting with reporters in Washington, D.C.

“Well, yes, in the sense that he knows Georgia, he has been to Georgia. He enjoyed having been to Georgia. So it was not an abstract moment.”

Trump once pursued construction of a residential tower in the Black Sea resort town of Batumi, but abandoned the project when he was elected president in 2016.

Zourabichvili used another close connection, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), to secure a rare invitation to Trump’s inauguration. One of a few European leaders to attend the ceremony, she sat in the overflow room of the Capitol and had a prime seat for the president’s second, unscripted speech to attendees – a rambling 30 minutes where he repeated false claims that he lost the 2020 election. 

“Nobody was expecting it, it was really a surprise,” she said. “And for me, as a political science specialist, it was fascinating.”

At pre-inauguration receptions, she shook hands with the incoming president’s Cabinet nominees — Secretary of State pick Marco Rubio and Defense nominee Pete Hegseth. She has carried out a weeklong media blitz, including Trump’s favorite news channel, Fox News, to get her message across.

“They cannot let this region go to Russia. That’s what we have to understand,” Zourabichvili said of her main message. 

Her strategy is that those first few introductions lead to more substantial meetings — particularly at the Munich Security Conference next month – and convince Trump’s team that it’s important to have a policy on Georgia.

“What I expect is America to feel engaged in this region because otherwise it’s leading this region to Russia, to the Chinese,” she said.