The Georgian siblings who are fighting Russian influence on two different fronts

Nona and Mamuka Mamulashvili were children when war first separated them, but they have always been united in a fight for Georgian independence that has shaped their family’s fate for generations.

Mamuka was only 14 and his sister Nona a year older when he and their father, Zurab, were captured fighting for Georgian forces against Russian-backed separatists in a 1992-3 war in Abkhazia, a subtropical region on Georgia’s Black Sea coast.

He was released after three months and returned home to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, where Nona still lives. This year she quit frontline politics to co-found Gamziri, a civic group that charts their nation’s long struggle for freedom and democracy, and campaigns for its future as a European Union and Nato member and against Moscow’s influence.

Mamuka is still on another frontline leading the Georgian Legion, a volunteer unit of Ukraine’s military that he founded in 2014 when Russia fomented fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine and annexed Crimea after the Maidan revolution turned Kyiv to the West. What began with a handful of volunteers now has some 2,500 fighters, about 70 per cent of them Georgian.

Emerging Ireland tour of South Africa may yield stars of the future

---

How Ireland drinks now: Teetotallers, wine-o’clockers and ex-drinkers

---

‘It is about power and control’ - scale of Baby Reindeer-type stalking in Ireland stuns researchers

---

“I remember being 15 and trying to take care of my mum. She was completely devastated because we learned about the imprisonment of my father and Mamuka from a broadcast on Russian television of their interrogation,” Nona says.

“I remember we didn’t have any information about them, and talking to the Red Cross and other groups that went to Abkhazia to see prisoners. I was allowed to write letters – in Russian – to my father and Mamuka and we queued up see members of parliament to find out what could be done to help them,” she adds.

“It has never stopped,” Nona says of Georgia’s struggle to escape the grip of Moscow, which now de facto controls 20 per cent of the country after recognising Abkhazia and another breakaway region, South Ossetia, as independent following a brief war with Georgia in 2008.

“For our family it has been a four-generation fight. My father’s grandparents were shot when the Bolsheviks came and almost the whole family was exterminated except for my great-grandfather, who changed his name so the Russians couldn’t find him,” she says.

Georgia had just three years of independence between the collapse of Russian tsarist rule and the invasion of the Bolshevik Red Army in 1921. Tens of thousands of Georgians were later executed, jailed or exiled during decades of Soviet repression, and the return of sovereignty in 1991 was soon followed by a coup and violent unrest in Tbilisi and wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where Russia aided the separatists.

Then came Georgia’s defeat in a five-day war with Russia in 2008, which is now widely seen – along with the West’s weak response to Moscow’s actions – as a prelude to the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea six years later and the all-out war launched against Ukraine in February 2022.

“When you have an enemy like this it never ends,” says Nona. Her civil society group Gamziri, or “Avenue”, is named after the tree-lined Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi where many key moments in Georgian history have played out, from pro-independence protests that were brutally crushed in 1989, to fighting in the 1991-2 coup and then the huge Rose Revolution rallies of 2003, which swept a new generation of Georgians into power.

That put the country of 3.7 million people, strategically set between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, on a path of rapid reform and deepening ties with the West under the United National Movement (UNM) of Mikheil Saakashvili, leader of the Rose Revolution and Georgia’s president from 2004 to 2013.

[ Russian activist’s disappearance alarms anti-Putin exiles in Georgia ]

Now many Georgians feel progress down that path is threatened by the party that ousted the UNM in 2012 and took the presidency a year later: Georgian Dream, the creation of the country’s richest tycoon, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

A decade ago, Georgian Dream capitalised on the UNM’s decline into scandal, corruption and growing authoritarianism, pledged to maintain the nation’s westward trajectory and denied that Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia, would allow Moscow to regain influence in the country.

The European Commission recommended last week that Georgia receive EU candidate member status if it does more to strengthen democracy and the rule of law and align itself more closely with the bloc’s foreign policy.

Georgia refuses to impose sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine and relaunched direct flights to Russia this year. The government dropped plans in March for a “Russian-style” law to brand some civil society groups as “foreign agents” only after big protests – again on Rustaveli Avenue – and then the country’s central bank changed its rules to shield an Ivanishvili ally from US sanctions over his alleged links to Russia’s security services.

The government denies backsliding on democracy or moving closer to the Kremlin and insists that the jailing in 2021 of Saakashvili – who is now being treated in a Tbilisi clinic for problems that he links to alleged poisoning – is not politically motivated.

Georgian Dream claims its careful positioning shields the country from more Russian aggression, spillover from the war in Ukraine and plots being hatched by Saakashvili allies and Georgians abroad – including Mamuka Mamulashvili, whom officials have accused several times of involvement in conspiracies to violently overthrow the government.

[ ‘I choose freedom in my homeland’: Georgia’s democracy under scrutiny before EU status decision ]

“Unfortunately, the Georgian government is doing whatever the Russians are telling them to do ... I’m sure it was an order from Moscow,” Mamuka Mamulashvili says of allegations that have not been backed by any show of evidence.

“They are in my opinion afraid to touch me because I am not only a military figure. They had better not touch me,” he says of Georgia’s government, alluding to Georgian society’s strong support for Ukraine and for Georgians fighting Russia there – dozens of whom have been killed since last year.

“I am not coming [to Georgia] because there is nothing to do there for me yet. And we have a lot of jobs here to do,” Mamulashvili (45) says from Ukraine, where his father – a former general in the Georgian military – fought alongside him before succumbing to diabetes about two years ago.

His father’s funeral was the last time he visited Georgia, where he says Georgian Legion fighters “are permanently under pressure” from the authorities when they return home from Ukraine to rest and recuperate.

After fighting in Abkhazia, Mamulashvili helped Chechen rebels take on the Russian army in two wars and then served as a Georgian defence ministry adviser under Saakashvili, before going to Ukraine in 2014.

A tattoo on his right arm reads: “Georgian Legion. Never forgive! Never forget!”

“I want Russians to be sure they will lose a lot of soldiers here because of what they did in Georgia,” he says. “Russia has never given back anything it occupied. So probably Georgia will have to fight again. But it should be the choice of society to fight for its freedom and territorial integrity. We are part of Georgian society and will do whatever Georgian society tells us to do.”

Mamuka says his sister supported the legion when it was established in Ukraine. “We are helping each other – it’s our common fight.”

Nona Mamulashvili left the UNM this year after a failed leadership bid and then quit politics to launch Gamziri and campaign for Georgia’s western integration through civic projects at home and abroad.

“Unfortunately, the Georgian government is trying to keep as low a profile as possible and disappear from all [international] platforms, and the opposition is too scattered and polarised to have a unified message for international partners to see there are people who still care about Georgia’s future,” she says.

“Georgia is totally off the [western] radar and we need to make sure we come back. But not as polarising [figures], but as a civil movement or platform that talks on behalf of Georgians who are not necessarily followers of one or other party, but who have fought for the freedom of Georgia and still fight for it now.”