“We chose to protect the lives of our own people, because we understood that patriotism does not reside in thunderous slogans but in the weight of statecraft. You cannot alter geography. You cannot erase history. Whoever looks these truths squarely in the eye is not serving war; they are defending their country. That is precisely the choice Georgia made,”
Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, said in a social media post, in which he shared a statement by French President Emmanuel Macron.

“For context: the distance from France’s easternmost border to Russia’s westernmost border is 3,500 kilometres. From Georgia’s occupation line to its main transport artery, it is 500 metres.

This stark, tangible, geographical difference places Georgia and France in entirely different situations. It is the difference between theoretical rhetoric and the full burden of real responsibility, between geopolitical posturing and geopolitical decision-making.

Anyone who knows history and does not avert their eyes from its lessons always knew that fairy tales built on hollow values would end this way. It was plain in 2022.

Confrontations of this kind have occurred repeatedly throughout human history. They have ended. Nations have reconciled. Life has gone on; so it was in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth, and long before. The shifting, realigning balance of power is the very nature of great states. The destruction and the suffering that occur at their points of friction, however, are the lot of small ones.

In 2022, there was only one question: when the inevitable day came, the day that President Macron’s own words are now confirming, would Georgia meet it in ruins and devastation, or would it learn from its own experience and choose its own path over someone else’s counterfeit pathos?

This is precisely where the line was drawn between those with no homeland and those who are true patriots. The former adopted a foreign flag and a foreign anthem as their own; first convincing themselves, then trying to convince others, that a rain of bombs is preferable to the shame of peace; that this was our fight, our debt, that sacrifice was owed for the sake of a glorious future; that war is peace and the sun rises in the West. Beneath that banner, they hurled abuse at their fellow citizens, at their friends, at those who dared to think differently; they spat in the dish they ate from and cursed.

We, meanwhile, chose to protect the lives of our own people, because we understood that patriotism does not reside in thunderous slogans but in the weight of statecraft.

You cannot alter geography. You cannot erase history. Whoever looks these truths squarely in the eye is not serving war; they are defending their country. That is precisely the choice Georgia made,” Shalva Papuashvili wrote.

French President Emmanuel Macron has stated that “when Moscow and Kyiv reach a peace agreement, we will need to build a new security architecture together with Russia, whether we like it or not, Russia is at our door.”