Rikard Jozwiak, the Europe editor for RFE/RL in Prague, focusing on coverage of the European Union and NATO, published an article in which he reviews Georgia-EU relations.

“With Georgia, the EU Is In A Diplomatic No-Man’s-Land,” he says.

Rikard Jozwiak wrote that three months after controversial Georgian parliamentary elections took place on October 26, the EU — and to a lesser degree NATO — are “still unsure of how to proceed in their relations with Tbilisi.”

According to the article, the issue became even more complicated as the ruling Georgian Dream party in December 2024 elected and inaugurated Mikheil Kavelashvili as the president of the country.

“Kavelashvili’s presidency is disputed by the country’s opposition; by Salome Zurabishvili, who still claims the presidency as her own until, she says, a legitimate replacement has been elected; and by some parts of the international community. The European Parliament, in late November 2024, overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for fresh Georgian elections and rejected the parliament that subsequently elected Kavelashvili,” he wrote.

Rikard Jozwiak remarks that for the Council of the EU, the most powerful part of the bloc where the 27 EU member states sit, the situation is less clear cut. Operating by consensus on foreign policy matters, the room is divided by countries such as Hungary and Slovakia, which rushed to congratulate Georgian Dream directly in late October 2024, and hawks such as Estonia and Lithuania.

Jozwiak notes that speaking to several EU officials on background, it appears as if they would prefer to just kick the can down the road on Kavelashvili and not have to deal with Georgia at all at the moment. As one senior official put it:  “There is no ‘EU deal’ on this — in fact, we have classic EU limbo. Nobody wants to say anything, nobody wants to touch it, and nobody definitely wants to put anything on paper. A second diplomat I spoke to was even blunter, saying ‘we are not taking steps on this right now but, at some point, we will have to face questions on this,” he said.

The article further reads that a third source from a country critical of the current regime in Tbilisi was rather gloomy about predicting the future: “It’s impossible to have unanimity on nonrecognition policy [of the] Georgian authorities. We will try to keep the line [on] limiting contact with the president and new government as much as possible. But I am afraid with time it will not be possible.”

Jozwiak said that many EU officials note that the bloc currently only engages with Georgia on a technical level in order to “depoliticize” the situation, but “no one knows how long this will go on.”

Rikard Jozwiak believes that there are two other reasons why the EU is unable to move forward.

“One is the reading of what happened during the controversial parliamentary elections last year. The full OSCE/ODHIR report on the vote, which was released in December 2024, hasn’t settled the issue. ‘We cannot state that the election results were illegal or illegitimate. We still talk about irregularities. We haven’t moved beyond that point,’ one EU official told me on background.

The second issue is that the EU has a lot going on. When EU foreign ministers met in Brussels for their first council of the year on January 27, they discussed Ukraine, the situation in the Middle East, and then how to deal with the new U.S. administration. Georgia was relegated to the end of the meeting under ‘Current Affairs.’ Little was decided when Georgia was discussed by ministers in December 2024,” he said.

At NATO things are a bit simpler, Jozwiak wrote.

“One official, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to speak on the record, told me that “the short answer is yes, we see [Kavelashvili] as the Georgian president. The long answer is that it is a difficult situation. Officially. we are not saying much, but if we must invite him to an event like a summit, we would. It is, however, worth pointing out that we don’t foresee that Georgian ministers will be invited to NATO ministerials this year, nor any Georgian leaders to the NATO summit in The Hague in June,” reads the article.