We can predict pretty well what’s next for the Georgian-Russian relations. But it is not enough to predict because what is happening now is more like absurdity.
Russia has stopped the import of Georgian wine products to its territory. Before that, the number of Georgian wine product exports to Russia used to be 80% of all their wine production. Let’s admit that this is a big impact to the economy of Georgia, which is not in such a good situation now. We can kind of understand the reason for this embargo: Georgian wine contains substances, which are dangerous for health. So what should they do in such cases? Should they go meet Russian specialists, ask them to test their products one more time and in case of finding anything ask them to continue importing their products and promise that it will not happen any more? So what if the tests don’t show anything wrong? In this case there are different solutions: starting from negotiating in a polite way and ending up with applying to different international bodies. But instead of this Georgian politicians didn’t hesitate to announce to the whole world that this was political pressure. Even one of the Georgian high ranked officials (almost the highest one) said that they would inform the US and Euro Union about this in a duly manner. As for the mentioned countries, they criticize Russia for this but don’t buy Georgian wines to save their economy from collapse. All of us committed errors during our childhood and we can remember other people punishing us. What did we do in such cases? We told them that we would ask our elder brothers to beat them, but alas our elder brothers didn’t consider us serious, didn’t have time for that, and told us to go and solve our problems ourselves. The story is almost the same, but that’s not all.
Later the Georgian president started to speak proudly about the Chinese market (doesn’t he have any person close to him who knows the Chinese culture well and knows that they don’t drink wine much?). Then once he entered a market in Shanghai and saw a bottle of Georgian wine there. His reaction reminded us about a famous scene from the “Soldier’s father” film, where the soldier’s father spit to a tank, which had driven over a plant and later tried to recover that plant. Later this scene was shown on the first national TV channel of Georgia. Why did they do this? Did they do this to demonstrate it to Russia or China? But these hardly would watch Georgian channels. Did he do that to demonstrate something to Georgian wine producers? If yes, they don’t care about it. Later we heard some surprising news: the Georgian president appointed their minister of defense as a responsible person for wine production development and solving the crisis. Why? According to the president, he did this because the minister always does everything very well. So what did the minister do when he found out about this order of the president while being at an important meeting with NATO officials in Brussels? He said that he would negotiate with European countries that didn’t produce wine, but would not negotiate with Russia because he thought there was no sense for that. He also said that as soon as he returned to Georgia he would take certain actions to close some wine factories in some regions of Georgia that illegally produced wine. In fact with this sentence he agreed that there had been illegal wine exported to Russia. So why did they make announcements saying that Russia had added political pressure on them?
In the same period a Georgian delegation of wine makers, headed by the agricultural minister, left for Russia to negotiate there and find solutions for the problem. As for Russia, after these criticizing announcements they may hardly want to negotiate. According to different sources of information, the Georgian delegation rejected the announcements, which had been done in Brussels and China. As for Moscow, they didn’t hesitate to give a payback and reminded them of the announcement of the defense minister about closing some illegal wine-producing factories. Later Russians told them that they had taken about one billion liters of Georgian wine out of their market. We can compare this number with the entire number that has ever been imported to Russia from Georgia during the history of Russian-Georgian ties.
Later new players came up in the political arena. Although Tajikistan has never been famous with its wine production, they announced that they were ready to take the place of Georgian wine in the Russian market. Later Tbilisi made hysterical announcements concerning the CIS saying that they should generally leave this institution because they have such neighbors. Dushanbe later apologized and said that they had hurried to say such things… I think they shouldn’t do so, because in spite of the openly made announcements of Tajikistan, the other CIS countries producing wine are negotiating with Russia too.