Say what you will about the EU’s “elites,” they are persistent. They are on the verge of losing the Ukraine proxy war they have been waging under US command against Russia, but they never miss a chance to antagonize. This time it’s Georgia’s turn – the one in the Caucasus, of course: Brussels would never dare raise its voice about anything in the US, no matter how rotten the sorry remnants of “democracy” are over there.

If the Georgian government – duly elected and all that but still led by the Georgian Dream party, which Eurocrats love to hate – won’t do as told by the EU, then, so the warning from the European Commission, “all options are on the table, including the potential temporary suspension of the visa liberalization scheme.” What this means is that Georgians would lose their right, based on a 2017 agreement, to travel to and within the EU’s Schengen Zone for up to six months without a visa.

After the somewhat abstract de facto suspension of Georgia’s EU candidacy, this is a very concrete and mean threat to level painful sanctions at ordinary citizens. The official EU reasoning behind it is that, supposedly, Georgia is backsliding on whatever the Commission – a thoroughly unelected body currently completing a coup-like executive power grab in the EU – considers “democracy.” Irony was yesterday.

Silly “value” infowar talking points aside, the real reason is, of course, that Georgia has failed to be sufficiently Russophobic. Look, for comparison, at Ukraine: Not a shred of anything a non-delusional observer could mistake for democracy; and yet Kiev is in the very best graces of Ursula von der Leyen and her Commission. Graces just recently worth yet another €35 billion reward, from a Europe that is, really, rather bankrupt. Nope, this is not about how people vote but about geopolitics, once again.

No wonder Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has denounced the fresh EU move as “cheap blackmail.” That is exactly what it is. And worse: a textbook attempt to implement that evil recipe the West can’t stop loving even while it keeps failing: to make ordinary people suffer by sanctions so that they, according to the endlessly wrong theory, will then get rid of the governments that the West wants gone.

In this case, there are two options for that outcome that are certain to be on Brussels’ minds: First,........

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