Streets of central Tbilisi were full of anti-government protesters as the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party consolidated its position by claiming to elect former football player Mikheil Kavelashvili as the country’s new president. Kavelashvili, a former player for Manchester City and other football clubs in Europe, was the only candidate. He is meant to replace pro-EU Salome Zourabichvili who heavily criticized the Georgian Dream party, the pro-Russian governing party. The election took place through an electoral college dominated by Georgian Dream. The opposition did not put forward any candidates because they boycotted the polling, saying the process was rigged from the…
Author: Koen Verhelst
Striking targets far inside Russia with U.S. and other Western weapons would not make a big difference for Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s aggression, American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Friday. “There’s no one capability that will, in and of itself, be decisive in this campaign,” Austin told reporters at Germany’s Ramstein Air Base, where he met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and fellow allies in the so-called Ukraine Defense Contact Group. “We had this discussion about tanks; we had this discussion about other capabilities,” Austin said. “There are a lot of targets in Russia — a…