iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/09/2026

I believe we will build it. I believe that one day we will return to Sukhumi, as free people in a free country. Glory to the heroes. Sukhumi is Georgia. We remember. We will not forget. [6/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/09/2026

We owe them a free, dignified, European Georgia that protects its own citizens. It should be a Georgia that even its enemies must respect, where such sacrifice is never needed again. [5/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/09/2026

I think they would ask us to live so that their sacrifice was not in vain: to refuse occupation, propaganda, lies and fear, and to refuse the Russian boot, abroad or at home. [4/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/09/2026

33 years on, for thousands of displaced families return to Sukhumi remains a dream. Russian troops still occupy our land. I often wonder what those who stayed would tell us today. [3/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/09/2026

He could have left. He stayed. He was a journalist: a co-founder & director of Georgian television in Abkhazia, and head of the press service and military press centre of the Abkhazian government. [2/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/09/2026

33 years ago today, on 27 September 1993, Sukhumi fell. For my family, it will never be just a date in the calendar. That day, in the besieged Council of Ministers building, my grandfather Alexander Berulava was killed alongside Zhiuli Shartava and others who refused to leave. [1/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 21/09/2026

Georgia has lived with the unfinished version of that question for thirty years. Ukraine is facing it on a scale Europe has not seen since 1945. Grateful to the organisers for putting this on the programme — with architects in the room, not only policymakers. [6/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 21/09/2026

Rebuilding after war gets discussed as logistics — how many units, at what cost, how fast. What is actually decided is who returns, whose past is rebuilt, and whether a place stays recognisable to the people who lost it. [5/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 21/09/2026

The most recent test was not fire but arrival: the tens of thousands who came from Abkhazia and Tskhinvali, to be housed in a city in no condition to receive them. [4/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 21/09/2026

As a democrat, I find cities hard not to love. The citizen is, quite literally, a creature of the city. Tbilisi has been destroyed and rebuilt at least six times - a city that keeps proving the resilience of the people who live in it. [3/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 21/09/2026

Thanks to Roman Grygoryshyn (Unicorn Capital, Ukraine), Nutsa Nadareishvili (teamtwo), Giorgi Sulakauri and Marcelina Zielinska (Chapman Taylor, London) for a genuinely thoughtful conversation. [2/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 21/09/2026

A bit of an unexpected turn, and a real pleasure: I moderated a panel at the Tbilisi Architecture Forum - "Beyond Shelter: Rebuilding Homes, Identity and Belonging After War." [1/6]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 03/09/2026

Delighted to be speaking at the London Security Conference: Frontlines of Europe on 7 September at the National Liberal Club - organised by @eurliberalforum.bsky.social , Liberal International & a host of brilliant partners.If you're in London, drop me a message. Always glad to meet and chat.

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 01/09/2026

demands an answer on the "real cause" of Lazare Jorbenadze's death, saying the public still has no answers about deaths that occurred "during the Kobakhidze-Mdinaradze rule". The infighting is moving to darker ground. [2/2]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 01/09/2026

Ex-Georgian Dream PM Gharibashvili is now publicly raising doubts about a series of suicides "during the Kobakhidze-Mdinaradze rule". He says a respondent in Dito Chubinidze's article later took his own life, and [1/2]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 28/08/2026

One truth stands: a young man put the Georgian state and the truth above tribe. He was an example to everyone living under occupation that propaganda can be defeated, and a standing rebuttal to Russian myths about Georgians. Georgia is mourning. Rest in peace. [3/3]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 28/08/2026

He chose otherwise. He was an example of choice and of liberation from propaganda: a man who chose truth over Russian servitude, and who served Georgia's territorial integrity as he believed and as he could, to the end of his life. [2/3]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 28/08/2026

Daur Buava has been found dead. My condolences to his family, his friends, and everyone who knew him. He was born and raised in Russian-occupied Abkhazia, under an apartheid regime built on propaganda and lies, where an ethnic Georgian was, and still is, a dehumanised enemy. [1/3]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/08/2026

Georgian Dream tried to eliminate civil society. It yet stands. But surviving isn't winning. My new @gmfus.bsky.social paper: the shift now has to be from a protest mentality to a construction mentality. Georgian civil society can do it. 📄 Read more 👉 www.gmfus.org/news/defendi...

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/08/2026

What students lose isn't one university. It's choice — the option of an institution that doesn't answer to one party. That's the actual product of this "reform", and it will take so much tome to reverse. More: ganatleba.substack.com [5/5]

ganatleba.substack.com

Ganatleba - განათლება | Hans Gutbrod | Substack

On Georgia's Education and its Future. Click to read Ganatleba - განათლება, by Hans Gutbrod, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/08/2026

Ilia State went from 3 468 admissions to 304. A 91% collapse in a single cycle. This isn't demography. It isn't demand. It isn't quality. Ilia is one of the strongest universities in the Caucasus, and it has been emptied out in one year. That's what the whole "reform" was about all along. [4/5]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/08/2026

On Russian - nobody had to legislate this. Out of nearly 30,000 only 795 students chose it, and the number keeps sliding down. A generation has quietly already settled an argument our politicians are still performing on television. [3/5]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/08/2026

One of the best universities in the Caucasus hollowed out in a single cycle, with students stripped of any real choice. That is what this "reform" delivers. ganatleba.substack.com [2/5]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 26/08/2026

University admissions data landed yesterday, and it tells two stories the government would rather you didn't read side by side: Russian: 2.7%; English: 96.7%.Ilia State University: 3468 students last year; only 304 this year. [1/5]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 22/08/2026

Georgian Studies program at Harvard University, launched in 2022 within the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies with the Georgian government's backing, has closed after the Georgian Education Ministry refused to extend funding. civil.ge/archives/748...

civil.ge

Harvard Georgian Studies Program Closes After Tbilisi Does Not Extend Funding - Civil Georgia

The program on Georgian Studies at Harvard University in the U.S., launched in 2022 within the Davis

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

The war that took my grandfather's life wasn't a local uprising that Moscow simply exploited. It was built in Moscow, from the start. We always knew it. Now, so does everyone else. [16/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

34 years on, Kozyrev's testimony matters because it comes from inside the room - from the man who ran Russian foreign policy while this was being engineered, not from a Georgian historian or a Western analyst. [15/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

He was posthumously awarded Georgia's Order of Vakhtang Gorgasali for his courage. This is who we remember today. [14/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

He was captured and murdered by Abkhaz separatists and North Caucasian militants, alongside other members of the Abkhazian government who made the same choice: to stay at their posts rather than abandon the city. [13/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

I carry this history personally, not just politically. My grandfather, Alexander Berulava, was a members of the Cabinet of Abkhazia the war. When Sukhumi fell on 27 September 1993, he had every chance to leave. He refused. [12/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

Kozyrev sums up the Kremlin's mindset at the time in a single line: the separatists were treated as "one of our own." That is the whole story of what happened to us, told plainly, by someone who was there. [11/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

Who sent him? Kozyrev names Russia's then-Defence Minister, Pavel Grachev - who, by his account, armed the separatists in secret, bypassing the very Foreign Ministry Kozyrev was running. And Yeltsin, Kozyrev says, knew about it the entire time. Not a rogue operation. A state one. [10/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

Not a grassroots uprising born of local grievance, whatever we were told at the time. A product of the Soviet capital, sent south and dressed up as something indigenous. [9/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

The detail that struck me most is Kozyrev's own description: he and Ardzinba spoke the same language, with the same Moscow accent. [8/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

And Vladislav Ardzinba, the man we're told to remember as the face of Abkhazian "freedom"? Before the war, Kozyrev says, he was a junior researcher at KGB chief - Primakov's - Institute of World Economy. Not in Sukhumi. In Moscow. This is worth sitting with. [7/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

"wake up" the autonomous republics nested inside them, so that any republic that dared seek independence would pay for it with a piece of its own territory. Georgia and Moldova were both hit with the same playbook. We were never an isolated case - we were a template. [6/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

His account matches what we always understood: as the Soviet republics moved towards independence in 1990–91, the Central Committee and the KGB drew up a deliberate plan. The plan: [5/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

he tells us, in his own words, how the Kremlin manufactured Abkhazia's separatist crisis from the centre. We have said this for thirty years. Now we have it from the man on the inside. [4/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

Kozyrev was Russia's Foreign Minister from 1990–96, and one of the very few officials of that era whose word actually carries weight. In an interview with journalist Mikhail Zygar, [3/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

Andrei Kozyrev, has said out loud what we in Georgia have always known, and in doing so has created a unique piece of testimony. Thread. [2/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 14/08/2026

34 years ago today, war broke out in Abkhazia. Every year on this day we pay our respects to the victims of Russian imperialism - and this year there's something rare to add. A man of genuine dignity within Russia, 🧵 [1/16]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

Empires do not only take territory. They take the account of how they took it. Solomon II was erased because a king who refuses is evidence - and colonisation is not complete until the evidence is gone. [14/14]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

November 1990: his remains were brought home from Trabzon to Gelati. 27 July 2005: he was canonised. The Holy King Solomon II's odyssey home took 175 years. [13/14]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

So here is the question: why was this one name so dangerous that two empires, a century apart, both worked to erase it? dangerous enough that the Soviets finished what the tsars started? Because both needed the same story: "voluntary unification". A king who refused breaks that story. [12/14]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

Not a former king, not a pretender, not a subject - the last of the Georgian Kings to wear a crown, and the only one the empire could never take it from. [11/14]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

7 February 1815. Solomon II dies in Trabzon. They bury him in the grounds of a Greek church dedicated to St. George - foreign soil, a liturgy in a foreign tongue. He died a king. [10/14]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

It takes the empire a full campaign to put him down. The kingdom is abolished. Solomon goes into exile rather than kneel. Russia then offers him a pardon - a return home, in exchange for recognising the annexation. His answer: NO. [9/14]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

1810 - The king is arrested. And here is the part that never made it into the textbooks: Solomon II escapes, and that same year puts himself at the head of the Imeretian uprising. A captive king who returns to the battlefield. [8/14]

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George Melashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦 @mel.ge · 13/08/2026

Solomon signs - and immediately begins to manoeuvre. He tries to unite western Georgia. He looks for a way out through the Ottomans, through Persia, and through Napoleon, who wanted a road through the Caucasus to Persia and India.He is playing for time. Time was not on his side. [7/14]

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