IT’S a decade now since tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets of Kyiv. The Maidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity as its sometimes known, came about after Russian leaning president Viktor Yanukovych pulled out of signing an integration accord with the European Union.

Fast forward from 2014 to 2024, from Kyiv to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and you can’t help but notice the unsettling similarity of the circumstances and protests there these past days.

In Tbilisi this time it’s a law proposed by a government under the sway of a Kremlin-linked oligarch, that seeks to clamp down on any opposition and derailing Georgia’s hopes of joining the EU that have brought Georgians on to the streets just as Ukrainians did back in 2014.

And just as Yanukovych was Moscow’s man back in 2014, so Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, is Vladimir Putin’s puppet master of Georgian politics today.

Ivanishvili might stay out of the public eye, but the richest and most powerful man in Georgia calls the political shots, from choosing prime ministers to trying to stymie Georgia’s hopes of joining the EU and steering it instead back into Russia’s orbit.

This week as the ruling Georgian Dream party – of which Ivanishvili is chairman – voted to adopt what one senior Georgian academic called a “repress-anyone-you like law”, Georgia took yet another step into Russia’s orbit.

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If ever we here in the West needed a sharp wakeup call to the intensifying threat Russia poses in Europe, this move in Georgia and Russia’s offensive in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region, are exactly that.

While I have no like of Grant Shapps, who is to the UK Defence Secretary role what a paper clip is to a knife fight, he has a point when he says that the world was “caught napping” by Russia’s renewed offensive.

Suddenly, Moscow’s latest military advance has the potential to threaten Ukraine’s second largest city and is the biggest seizure of territory since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

But if the West was caught napping here, it was also shamefully caught napping over Georgia. For months Georgians have been courageously trying to highlight the fate that awaits them should those malign powers inside their country only too willing to do Moscow’s bidding get their way. For a long time now too, Georgians have also shown a supreme desire to be brought into the EU fold.

As Scots if we cannot recognise that ambition it’s a sad day indeed. As SNP MP Alyn Smith wrote in this newspaper yesterday, the reason that Georgia matters to us is that even though it may be on the other side of Europe, it citizens believe in the same values as we Scots when it comes to the EU.

But sticking with Georgia for the moment, the problem is that too many of us here in the West still somehow fail to see Putin and his authoritarian regime for what it truly is.

It’s all too easy and indeed what arrogance it displays to sit in the comparatively safe and comfortable West and tell the likes of Ukrainians or Georgians that they are wrong to stand up for their independence or democratic right and values.

How patronising it is, too, when some dismiss such desires and ambitions with the glib or facile insistence that they are simply being manipulated for reasons of “Nato expansionism” or by some CIA plot fostering colour revolutions in their respective countries.

No one doubts that such negative Western policies and nefarious intent have existed in the past and there is no shortage of examples to prove it. But who are we to tell that to Georgians or Ukrainians right now.

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In the West there are those who never miss the opportunity to pontificate on “Western imperialist” ambitions. But just how many of such folk I wonder have ever taken the time to talk to those on the ground in Georgia, Ukraine or elsewhere across Central and Eastern Europe who have experienced the worst horrors of Russian aggression and brutality first hand to find out how those on the sharp end feel?

Watching the courage of those Georgians in Tbilisi these past weeks I was reminded of being there in 2008 when Russian tanks sat only a few hours’ drive from the Georgian capital. The Georgians I spoke with then, like the Georgians on the streets of Tbilisi today, were in no doubt what a Russian takeover would mean for their lives.

They knew what was at stake in terms of their liberty and a return to the dark past of Soviet times.

That 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia brought the West’s relations with Moscow to their lowest point since the 1980s. It should have been a wake-up call back then that Western efforts since the fall of the Berlin Wall to integrate Russia in a collective security framework was a non-starter under Putin.

But it was a wakeup call ignored and since then the Kremlin has only doubled down on using so-called “frozen conflicts” to extend its reach beyond Russian borders.

Over the past 30 years, it has backed a pro-Russian regime in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria. Then six years after its 2008 invasion of Georgia it seized Crimea from Ukraine and began supporting an insurgency of pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas.

Yet, despite all this, the West still tried to “reset” relations and failed to see Russia for the threat that it was and more than ever now is. Even when push finally came to shove following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many in the West hoped that sanctions and Putin’s initial blunders in Ukraine would simply doom his regime. They were wrong again.

Yes, there is the argument that Russia will only stop being a rogue and authoritarian nation when its people want it to, and it’s important to acknowledge that.

But that does not in the meantime exempt us from also acknowledging that the people of Ukraine, Georgia and other parts of the region, have their own very different set of values and a refusal to succumb to Putin’s predatory will.

As I write, Russian forces continue their advance on Kharkiv and the Kremlin’s proxies and henchmen are doing all they can to deprive Georgians of their independence and freedom.

It’s time the West rid itself once and for all of any illusions it might have about Putin’s playbook and stopped ignoring those wake-up calls to the threat Russia poses.

It’s time also to double down on our support for those Ukrainians, Georgians and others, who like so many of us Scots, put great store by our European identity and desire for independence.