Toomas Hendrik Ilves is a former two-term president of Estonia whose parents fled Soviet occupation. He spent decades in academia in the West and worked as a journalist for RFE/RL from 1984 until 1993, two years after Estonia regained independence.
He is an ardent backer of the Western path for his and other former Soviet republics and a staunch critic of Russian policies under President Vladimir Putin. He has also consistently warned of the dangers of Moscow’s aggression and influence, including ahead of last weekend’s crucial elections in the Caucasus state of Georgia.
After the ruling Georgian Dream declared victory, Ilves told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service that Georgians opted for a democratically elected coalition and liberal democracy but are being stymied thanks in part to Russian influence. He says “there has to be a price,” and the West’s response should be to punish billionaire Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili and the party’s elites. The aim should be to demonstrate that Europe and the United States “won’t accept” election manipulations no matter what Hungary’s Viktor Orban says.
RFE/RL: What was your initial reaction after the election results were announced?
Toomas Hendrik Ilves: Well, it seems that the winner of the Georgian parliamentary elections is Vladimir Putin, right? I mean, that's really the one conclusion. The voters were presented with an artificial choice between democracy and war or nondemocracy and peace. They chose the first but ended up with the second.
And rigging of those elections is just an awkward way, the biggest possible compliment to the Georgian people. After all, the Georgian people didn't want this result. This so-called official result shows that the Georgian people actually won, it's just that the government couldn't stand the idea. Putin knew that for the first time in history, there would have been a real chance for genuine democracy to emerge in Georgia, a democratically elected coalition government, and...it's nothing that he could allow himself in his backyard. There is nothing also, I would say, particularly surprising if you follow Putin's behavior for the past several years, but especially, I mean, just last weekend, right, we had the same thing attempted in Moldova and barely made it through, barely.
So, in this case, the videos you see, the accounts of people being beaten up -- the last thing I saw just a few minutes ago on Twitter was was an Azerbaijani observer claiming that it was free and fair, and right in the background is a woman taking a picture of her of her ballot, which of course it's illegal; but it’s one way you they can show that you get money [under vote-buying schemes]. I saw the ballot with a little dot next to number 41 so [they] would know what to vote for. I mean, all of this stuff, it's horrific and just shows that Putin cannot allow himself democracy.
RFE/RL: Not for himself or not for the neighborhood as well?
Ilves: For anyone. Well, he's working hard in the United States also, and he's basically worked hard to prevent that in a number of EU countries.
RFE/RL: One shouldn't look at these elections and the results as a manifestation of the sovereign will of the Georgian people?
Ilves: The incredible effort put in to screw the results of this shows what the will of the Georgian people really is: that Georgians want to be part of the liberal democratic West, and they want it in an overwhelming majority, and the only way to prevent that is through massive, massive involvement on the part of a foreign country, Russia.
RFE/RL: Let me ask you also about the potential Western response. What should be a Western reaction? And let's discuss the ideal Western reaction from your perspective and then, more realistically, what it's actually going to look like?
Ilves: There will be sanctions. They may be strong or weak. They may be good or bad. Weak sanctions are the kind that we have seen, unfortunately, after, say, [Russia’s occupation in] 2014 in Crimea, which basically Western interests, especially on the part of Germany, were like, “Well, we have to show we're upset, but not too much because we have too much money at stake.” Bad sanctions are sanctions that target Georgian people. We want strong, effective sanctions. Strong sanctions would be sanctions that hit, strong and good sanctions would be ones that hit the clique that has just performed this obscenity.
We know that [billionaire Georgian Dream founder Bidzina] Ivanishvili has massive investments in the U.S. -- there's hundreds of millions of dollars. Those should all be frozen, right? I mean, there has to be a price for this.
We should place basically visa restrictions on all of all members of the GD elite -- I don't know what you'd call them, they're not even now particularly democratically elected -- but I would say the clique running the country should [be constrained to] enjoy themselves in Georgia.
Of course, they have enough money to go to Dubai and other places, not to mention Russia. But in any case, what we definitely need to do is to say that Europe and the United States are no longer open to the people like that.
RFE/RL: Now let me ask the obvious follow-up: Will Europe do that? Will the West say that?
Ilves: Well, we will see in the coming days. Look, there are there are enough countries -- I would say basically the northern arc of Europe: Poland, the Baltic countries, the Nordic states -- who are willing to take tough measures. I know that shortly there will be a a strong statement coming out from the foreign affairs commission heads in Europe.
The weak spot will be Hungary and Slovakia -- those two who are emerging really as proxies for Putin in the European Union.
I thought it funny but not surprising that Orban congratulated GD even before the results had been announced.
RFE/RL: A full hour before.
Ilves: I mean, the Soviets do that, they used to do that. They did that in my country in 1940, right? The congratulations were coming in and the vote hadn't even been announced. But, okay, I mean, we know who [Orban] is. The real task is, will the other members of the European Union get around it? I think we will.
As we've seen, whenever [Orban] blocked sanctions in the past, or when he has blocked aid to Ukraine, the EU has found a way to get around it. It just means an unnecessary and tedious process of lots of negotiations and meetings, all this stuff. You can't have a clear, decisive “Okay, you did this, we do this back.”
RFE/RL: Let's have a look at an even more unsavory scenario where the West kind of shrugs its geopolitical shoulders and says, ‘Okay what's done it's done. You want to be with Russia, go ahead and be with Russia, we are not going to put any effort into it anymore. How likely is that?
Ilves: I think that's not likely, given how clear it is, how huge were the efforts to manipulate the elections. Had these been free and fair elections, in fact, that would have been the response: “Okay, you made your choice.” But since it is so obvious that the elections were so manipulated, it would be very difficult to take that point of view. That will be the Orban-Fico point of view, but the rest of us will not accept that.
The Tavberidze Interviews
Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vazha Tavberidze of RFE/RL's Georgian Service has been interviewing diplomats, military experts, and academics who hold a wide spectrum of opinions about the war's course, causes, and effects. To read all of his interviews, click here.
RFE/RL: Should we give up any hopes of European aspiration, integration under this government, or can Mr. Ivanishvili, with his trademark cunning, somehow sort it out with the West, do you think, and maintain some sort of, if not friendly, then at least lukewarm, neutral relationship?
Ilves: I don't see that as a possibility. I think that the government and Ivanishvili have really burned their bridges to the West, to serious people in the West. I mean, in the U.S., when the U.S. sees that even Eto Buziashvili, this little, small woman who is one of the most harmless people I know, and gets raided because she's [a staff member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in Tbilisi], is raided by these thugs -- I think it will look at these people and go, “We can't deal with these people.”
And similarly in Europe, there are enough ties between pro-democracy Georgians and across Europe especially in countries like mine [Estonia] that you can count on a strong defense from our countries.
RFE/RL: In your very first response to the results announcement, you said it was a victory for Putin. If so, how significant and far-reaching are the consequences of that victory, outside of Georgia as well?
Ilves: You know, we're dealing with a psychopath, so it's hard to predict what the consequences will be in this case. I mean, this is an ego thing for him [Putin]. Russia would be far better off with good relations with a country that it doesn't manipulate, right? All he's managed to do is get everyone to hate him in the country. It's not a smart way of running anything. I don't understand what it is that he wants, but it didn't make any sense anywhere else either where he's gotten involved.
RFE/RL: Isn’t it a statement to the West, saying, “See, you intruded in my sphere of influence, and I reinstated my sphere of influence”?
Ilves: Yeah, well that's maybe how he thinks. That's not how we think. We don't say, “Oh, we shouldn't have supported liberal democracy in a country because Putin might be offended.” I mean, in his mind, yes, he probably thinks that he now sent the signal “Don't even come into what I claim to be my sphere of influence.”
Normal people here in liberal democracies don't think that way. We don’t think in terms of spheres of influence, backyards, and all of those things. That's not the way people since the middle of the 20th century have thought.
In fact, I would say the big tragedy of this century has been that that very firm principle of allowing countries to do what they choose to do has been violated by Russia ever since 2008, when he started off there [with the five-day war in Georgia’s breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions].
That was when I [traveled] there; that's why it's personally disappointing to me -- given all of the efforts that from the beginning of 2000 I put into trying to get Georgia tied to the liberal democratic West in Europe -- to see [it] now, you know, all going down the drain; I hope temporarily.
