GEORGIA: Mysterious Blackouts & more – 30th July 2026

Gamarjobat from 30th Street Station. This is the Rorshok Georgia Update from the 30th of July twenty twenty-six. A quick summary of what's going down in Georgia.

On Friday, the 24th, the EU added Georgia's Kulevi refinery to its 21st sanctions package against Russia for processing Russian crude oil. The sanctions impose a transaction ban on the refinery, and they take effect in six months, giving the facility and its parent company, Black Sea Petroleum, time to wind down Russian oil dealings first. The package also introduces a new legal mechanism letting the EU sanction any refinery worldwide that processes Russian crude oil. Corruption researcher Besik Donadze called it a reputational blow to Georgia and suggested the Kulevi refinery would not have processed Russian oil without the direct approval of Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of Georgian Dream or the Kotsebi Party.

Speaking of Sanctions. The EU's latest sanctions also hit Inter RAO, a major Russian state-controlled energy company that indirectly owns 75% of Telasi, Tbilisi's main electricity distributor, through a Netherlands-based subsidiary. Inter RAO also owns two hydropower plants in Georgia through a second subsidiary. The EU sanctioned the company for funneling revenue to the Russian government. Georgia's National Bank says Telasi itself isn't sanctioned since it's only indirectly owned, and banks will keep serving it normally.

Next Up. On Friday, the 24th, a rare nationwide blackout swept across Georgia, including Tbilisi. The outage also hit Abkhazia, which receives free electricity from the Enguri Hydropower Plant, Georgia's largest, under a long-standing agreement. Authorities gave no official cause for Friday's blackout.

A smaller outage struck Tbilisi again on Saturday, the 25th, which utility company Telasi blamed on planned preventive work. Georgia's State Security Service is now investigating the possibility of deliberate sabotage aimed at threatening national interests.

In other news. On Monday, the 27th, MMA fighter Giorgi Kartvelishvili announced a new movement to defend Georgian values and traditions, which he claims face coordinated attacks from pseudo-liberal groups, foreign-funded activists, and certain media figures. He pointed to the July 22nd assault on comedian Onise Okriashvili, who was attacked after joking about writer Nodar Dumbadze and faced a state-media smear campaign beforehand. The suspect in that attack walked free on bail on the 25th, a move pro-government circles celebrated.

Kartvelishvili says his movement will stay constructive but won't shy away from forceful actions, and members are ready to go to prison if necessary.

On Sunday, the 26th, Police detained ten anti-government protesters in central Tbilisi, all for holding posters phrased as a yes-or-no poll: "Is Bidzina a dick? Yes. No."

It started with activist Tornike Toshkhua, who stood alone outside Tbilisi City Council with the poster and was detained almost immediately. Other protesters then arrived and held up identical signs in solidarity, and police arrested them too. The Interior Ministry charged all ten with petty hooliganism and disobeying police. A near-identical incident happened outside the same building in two thousand and fifteen, over posters criticizing Ivanishvili's Panorama Tbilisi project, and the European Court of Human Rights later ruled those arrests violated protesters' rights.

On Tuesday, the 28th, the US Embassy in Georgia openly criticized the government's new hate speech monitoring department, calling it troubling. The embassy's statement came after Radio Free Europe asked about media freedom and the recent fourteen-day jail sentence given to opposition journalist Vakho Sanaia over a Facebook post deemed insulting to ruling party members.

An embassy spokesperson said the Trump administration sees free speech as foundational and opposes censorship laws used to silence critics.

On Monday, the 27th, Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili made another anti-EU statement, saying that staying outside the EU might actually benefit a small country. He was reacting to a German initiative that would scrap the EU's consensus-based decision-making rule, a change member states haven't agreed on yet. Papuashvili warned that dropping consensus would turn the EU from a union of equals into one run by big states, leaving small countries unable to protect their vital interests or block harmful decisions. He argued this would strip states of real sovereignty, reducing them to regions or provinces of a larger political system.

Last week we covered the shooting in Tbilisi's Vera district, where a gunman opened fire on the evening of July 22nd, shooting four people, two of them minors. One of the wounded, a seventeen-year-old boy, later died in the hospital. Police arrested suspect Nika Kapanadze on the spot.

Now his mother says that despite mental health problems the shooter legally owned three registered firearms. She told TV Pirveli that years ago, when her son's mental health declined and he started acting aggressively at home, she reported it to police herself, and they issued a one-month restraining order against him and confiscated his weapons. However, just a month later the weapons were returned, with no further follow up from authorities.

On Wednesday, the 29th, Georgian media confirmed that Thai travel blogger Hlun Solo, who has been missing for two weeks, had been found dead in his Tbilisi hotel room. His family lost contact with him on 13th of July while he filmed content for his channel, which has 2.5 million Facebook followers and nearly a million YouTube subscribers.

Georgian authorities actually found his body the very next day, July 14th, but never announced it. With no news, his brother posted a public appeal on the 28th, still believing him missing. The Interior Ministry confirmed the death only after the news gained public traction, adding that an investigation is still ongoing. Hours before that confirmation, Thailand's embassy was still posting about efforts to locate him, and it's still unclear if Georgia ever informed Thai authorities.

On Tuesday, the 21st, Nauru, a tiny Pacific island country of around 12,000 people and one of the smallest nations on Earth, withdrew its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

th territories since December: 2009

On July 18th, in the southern Georgian town of Akhaltsikhe, more than ten people physically attacked the local mosque's imam, Shevket Dvalidze, and his family. The attack started after the imam's son and a visiting underage relative from Turkey were overheard speaking Turkish. Strangers verbally confronted them over the language, then chased the family into their yard and beat them, with Dvalidze suffering the worst injuries and needing hospital treatment. Dvalidze belongs to the Muslim Meskhetian community, a Turkish-speaking group deported from Georgia by Soviet authorities in nineteen forty-four. Police arrested only two suspects despite witnesses identifying up to twelve attackers, and a court released both on bail.

An in-depth OC Media feature by Mikheil Gvadzabia looks at Iranian dissidents who fled to Georgia for safety and now risk being sent back home. It centers on Iman Asghari, detained by migration authorities in May after eight years in Georgia. His asylum claim was rejected, and the Iranian Embassy is now refusing to help him since he joined anti-government protests in Tbilisi. With no valid passport and no country willing to take him, his family fears deportation would mean persecution or worse back in Iran. The piece also points to a broader pattern. Georgia's migration laws have tightened sharply, deportations are up, and diaspora activists say the government's growing ties with Tehran are shaping how it treats Iranian asylum seekers.

Link to the full article in the Show Notes.

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