Despite most voters in the former Soviet nation of Georgia casting their ballots against the Georgian Dream party in October, and despite thousands of them protesting against this party’s stolen victory night after night in the weeks since, Georgian Dream is now in control of the nation.

“The elections were rigged, and we have an illegitimate parliament right now,” former Prime Minister Nika Gilauri told Fox News Digital on Dec. 23, 2024.

And since Georgian Dream has become staunchly pro-Russia in recent years and has now installed a pro-Russia president, it means Russian President Vladimir Putin now has de facto control over the former Soviet nation.

“This is a bad day for Georgia, it’s a bad day for Georgia’s friends, and it’s a good day for Vladimir Putin and for all his friends,” journalist Edward Lucas said after Georgian Dream’s stolen win became clear.

Putin accomplished this conquest not with tanks and troops, as he is attempting in the former Soviet nation of Ukraine, but with political manipulation and scare tactics, as he has successfully done in the former Soviet nation of Belarus. “As things stand at the moment, Georgia is heading in the direction of Belarus,” Lucas said, “and that is a source of great sorrow to me.”

The Belarus Model: Conquering Without Firing a Shot

Belarus was in Putin’s cross hairs since his earliest days in power. He began at once to pressure Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko to better integrate Belarus with Russia in all areas, particularly militarily. Russia and Belarus began regularly conducting joint war games, undertaking joint weapons programs, and Russia even opened permanent military facilities in Belarus. Putin also pulled Belarus into the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a major weapon of Russia’s power.

With each of these moves, Putin was making the Russian-Belarussian “Slavic brotherhood” stronger. Yet for years, Lukashenko managed to keep Belarus from being fully dominated. While he accepted Russian favors, he also maintained close ties with nato, the European Union and the United States. This delicate balancing act prevented Belarus from falling entirely under Russian control, and it seemed as though he would be able to maintain it for as long as he was in power.

But then came the 2020 Belarussian presidential election.

Exit polls showed that Belarussian voters, fed up with Lukashenko’s Russia-leaning rule, had ousted him in a landslide. They had overwhelmingly voted instead for a pro-Europe candidate. But Lukashenko did what dictators often do in such situations: He doctored the results and declared himself the winner, with a comfortable 80 percent of the vote.

This “democracy with Russian characteristics” enraged Belarussians. Some 200,000 of them took to the streets of the capital in the biggest anti-government demonstration in Belarus’s history. After 26 years of Lukashenko’s corruption, mismanagement and electoral fraud, the people finally had the numbers and the rage to stand up to him. The protesters were backed by European and American leaders who rejected Lukashenko’s clearly bogus election results and sanctioned him. It looked like the end for Lukashenko’s regime.

But then Putin intervened.

He endorsed the fabricated results, spoke out in support of Lukashenko, and gave him hundreds of millions of dollars in discounted energy and loans. Putin also went a major step further: He announced publicly that he stood ready to send Russian troops into Belarus to help Lukashenko subdue the demonstrators.

So there was neither a coup nor a coffin for Lukashenko. Putin had saved him politically—and possibly physically. With only the threat of force (and tacit support for Lukashenko’s active forces), Putin put the opposition down and consolidated Lukashenko’s power further. And ever since, Lukashenko has been utterly beholden to Putin.

This was clear in early 2022 when Putin wanted to station 30,000 Russian troops in Belarus, the largest number since the Cold War, as part of his planned invasion of Ukraine. Lukashenko was against it: He knew that approving this would represent a surrender of his nation’s sovereignty. But he had no choice, so he allowed it.

Lukashenko also submitted to Putin by revoking Belarus’s nuclear-free and defense neutrality commitments. This let Russia deploy nuclear weapons in the nation. He also agreed to back Russia in the United Nations and to accelerate the Union of Belarus and Russia plan. Now Russian troops have used his nation to invade Ukraine, and they are conducting a de facto soft occupation of Belarus.

Lukashenko’s days of balancing Belarus between Russia and the West are over. Putin has effectively annexed the country, turning back the clock to its Soviet Union days to make Belarus Russia’s vassal once again.

Putin views this bloodless conquest as a notable success, especially compared to his extremely costly attempt to take Ukraine by brute force. And he is now replicating it, in some significant ways, in Georgia.

Is Georgia Becoming Belarus 2.0?

When Bidzina Ivanishvili entered Georgia’s political arena in 2011, there were misgivings among the people about where his loyalties lay. After all, he had made a fortune in Russia and had become Georgia’s richest man. He had established a major bank in Russia, as well as a drugstore chain and a massive agricultural company. He had even allied with Russia’s security services to better run his businesses, which is known to require a lifelong commitment from its partners. “Once you cooperate with the government or the security services,” said ​​Russian security services expert Irina Borogan, “they will never let you out of their sight.”

But Ivanishvili promised Georgian voters that his Russian ties were unimportant. To demonstrate it, he renounced his Russian citizenship and claimed to sell off his Russian assets. He founded a new political party called Georgian Dream. He vowed that if elected, he would follow the will of 80 percent of Georgians by tilting the nation away from Russia and authoritarianism and toward Europe and democracy. He pledged, “I will create such a democracy in Georgia, I may truly astonish Europe.”

This promise, along with his vows to invest hundreds of millions of his own money into Georgia, helped Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream become a reality. It won a solid victory in 2012, and Ivanishvili became prime minister.

The billionaire started off true to his word, deepening ties with the European Union and pursuing reforms intended to clear the way for EU membership. But Georgian Dream also began replacing what Ivanishvili called “a confrontational manner of interaction” with Russia with more Kremlin-friendly policies. He made major economic overtures to Russia and floated the idea of Georgia joining Russia’s Eurasian Union. He even made statements suggesting Georgia was to blame for Russia’s 2008 invasion of the nation that killed and wounded thousands of Georgians and put a fifth of the nation’s territory under de facto Russian control.

Ivanishvili resigned as prime minister in 2013. But Georgian Dream remained the dominant party, and he remained its de facto leader from his palace overlooking the capital, which resembles a Bond villain’s mansion. And the nation’s supposedly representative institutions were gradually centralized into his hands. Giorgi Gakharia, a former Georgian Dream member who served as prime minister from 2019 to 2021, told Politico in October: “Ministers, including the prime minister, struggle to make decisions during negotiations with partners because decisions need to be approved by Ivanishvili.”

To further Putin’s goals, Ivanishvili also began going after Georgia’s anti-Russia politicians. He imprisoned several high-profile individuals, including former President Mikheil Saakashvili.

In the time since Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine erupted in 2022, Ivanishvili and other Georgian Dream leaders have swung the nation farther into the Russian orbit. They have been doing all they can to please Putin.

They refused to join in international sanctions against Russia to punish it for the war. They began parroting many of Russia’s anti-Western conspiracy theories, blaming the “Global War Party” for the conflict. They blocked planes that were intended to fly Georgian volunteers to fight alongside Ukrainian forces. And they ramrodded a “foreign influence” law through the legislature, which lets Ivanishvili target any organization that is not pro-Russia. This law torpedoed the country’s attempts to align with Europe.

It was also discovered around this time that Ivanishvili’s family still had millions of dollars’ worth of unreported real estate in Russia, despite his claims of having sold it.

At this point, Ivanishvili and his cohorts have swung the nation so far toward Moscow that many now say the party’s name should be changed to “Russian Dream.”

In the lead-up to October’s elections, the pro-Europe opposition painted the vote as a choice between Europe and Russia. But Georgian Dream cast it instead as the choice between war and peace. Yes, they conceded, peace would mean a near complete surrender of Georgia’s sovereignty to Vladimir Putin and they would have to do his bidding in every way, but at least it would keep Russian tanks and troops from invading, as in 2008, to slaughter more of their people.

This message resonated with many terrified voters in October. There is abundant evidence of intimidation from pro-Russia agents, as well as vote buying, double voting, bribery and physical violence by hired thugs. But even without the rigging, exit polls show that Georgian Dream earned more of the vote than expected.

“I think the scare campaign [worked],” Lucas said. “In the end they would rather be safe than free, to put it brutally.”

So it is clear that under Ivanishvili and his pro-Russia Georgian Dream comrades, including newly inaugurated president Mikheil Kavelashvili, Georgia is essentially back under Russia’s control as it was during the Soviet era. “In some ways, we feel like we are back in 1921,” Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili told the European Parliament on Dec. 18, 2024, referencing the year Georgia was absorbed into the Soviet Union. “Scenes are repeating themselves.”

The ‘Prince of Russia’ Rebuilds the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union was infamous for its communism and attendant repression, purges and perverse prison camps. Its diabolical policies killed more than 10 million of its own people, including thousands of Georgians. When it collapsed in the early 1990s, many celebrated it as a victory for human freedom.

But not Vladimir Putin. In a famous 2005 speech, he called the collapse of that dark, dehumanizing regime “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Putin has made plain that what he mostly misses is not the ideals of communism but the power and prestige Russia had when Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and 11 other countries were pounded into total submission to Moscow.

In the years since Putin’s speech, he has devoted much of Russia’s might into bringing those countries back under Moscow’s control. He has worked to reverse that “catastrophe” and to build something even more dominant over those people and more powerful against the West than the Soviet Union ever was.

His wicked ambitions are most evident in Ukraine, but also clear in Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and beyond. It is plain that by hook or by crook, by war or by political manipulation, Putin is hellbent on bringing these countries into submission.

The Trumpet closely watches the development of Putin’s rising Russian empire because of our understanding of Bible prophecy. Revelation 9:16 describes an Asian alliance amassing an army of 200 million troops, which is 15 times the size of the largest army ever assembled in human history. This army is described as fighting in a third world war that will dwarf all previous wars and other military conflicts of the 20th century by several times. Ezekiel 38 and 39 show that at the head of this massive force will be a man called the “prince” of Russia.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has identified Vladimir Putin as this prince. In his 2017 booklet The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia,’ Mr. Flurry writes: “This world has a lot of authoritarian rulers. But Vladimir Putin is one we need to keep a particularly close eye on. His track record, his nationality and his ideology show that he is fulfilling a linchpin Bible prophecy. The time frame of his rule also shows that nobody else could be fulfilling the Ezekiel 38 and 39 prophecy.”

Mr. Flurry’s booklet explains that Putin’s leadership of Russia, including his conquest of former Soviet nations such as Georgia, shows that the world is barreling toward a time of violence and calamity far worse than anything in humanity’s calamitous history!

But Mr. Flurry emphasizes that there is also deep hope tied into these prophecies. He writes that the fact Putin is now leading the nation in its imperialist drive proves that the most hope-filled event in mankind’s history is close. “What we are seeing in Russia ultimately leads to the transition from man ruling man to God ruling man!” he writes. “And it is almost here! It is just a few short years away.”

To understand the prophecies this forecast was built on, order a free copy of The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia.’