Editor of Dispatches from the Rebellion — a weekly newsletter covering freedom movements around the world. After 25 years in IT, I’ve dedicated my life to telling the stories of those risking everything for freedom. Each issue delivers sharp global updates, threats to American democracy, and profiles of the heroes fighting back. If you believe freedom is worth fighting for — you're in the right place.
Putin's Neighbors Smell His Weakness
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Flashpoints
- Putin's Puppet Pivots West
- Erdogan's "Caliphate" Devoured Itself. Africa Is Next.
- Belgrade's Buried Movement Rises Again
Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.
As we reported a month ago, Putin is in deep sh*t.
Now, his neighbors smell the weakness.
In 2008, Putin was riding high. His tanks met little resistance as they poured through the Roki Tunnel into Georgia, seizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and planting the Russian flag on 20% of Georgian soil.
Georgia had just been promised a path to NATO, and Putin's message was clear: move toward the West — and bleed. The West watched, issued statements, and did nothing.
That was the lesson Bidzina Ivanishvili absorbed. Georgia's billionaire oligarch, who'd made his fortune navigating post-Soviet Moscow, came away with a worldview that only power matters — and Western commitments are worthless.
He founded the Georgian Dream in 2012, took control of the country, and never looked back. As honorary chairman of the party, he remains Georgia's de facto ruler.
Since the Rose Revolution swept the corrupt Shevardnadze regime from power in 2003, Georgia has been split between two destinies. One pulled west — toward the EU and NATO membership that pro-Western reformer Mikheil Saakashvili made the nation's defining ambition, writing it into their constitution.
The other pulled back toward Moscow. Since taking power, Ivanishvili has rigged elections, suspended EU accession talks, and turned his security forces loose on dissenters. Today, Saakashvili rots in prison — another victim of a mysterious poisoning.
When Georgians flooded Tbilisi's Rustaveli Avenue in 2024, riot police deployed camite — a WWI-era chemical weapon— laced into water cannons. Prolonged shortness of breath, cardiac abnormalities, and vomiting dogged protesters for weeks.
Last week, thousands lined the streets of Tbilisi anyway, chanting "Freedom" under EU flags.
Ivanishvili's Russia bet is collapsing — Ukraine didn't fall, Russian capacity is degraded, and Putin's economy is crashing. So, he's adopted a new worldview: survival. He is pivoting back to the West —meeting Zelenskyy, calling Rubio, and dangling Georgia's Black Sea ports and transit corridors.
One analyst called it the “Rodriquez model,” after Venezuela’s Delcy — bribe Trump, offer selective deliverables, pocket sanctions relief, and make zero democratic concessions.
The Trump administration faces a genuine tension here. Georgia's pivot is proof that pragmatic engagement can work. Realpolitik says take the win and leverage Georgia's geography.
But Ivanishvili is simultaneously hosting three campuses of Al-Mustafa University — designated by our Treasury Department as an Iranian Revolutionary Guard recruitment pipeline — and allowed Russian military aircraft to transit Georgian airspace, carrying supplies to Tehran during the U.S.-Iran war.
Yet in April, the Trump Organization announced Trump Tower Tbilisi — a 70-story luxury skyscraper, tallest in the Caucasus.
Realpolitik is one thing. Gilding a regime that helps Tehran hunt Americans is another.
Another golden tower. Another corrupt bargain. Another betrayal of America’s values.
Sources: CEPA, BBC, Washington Free Beacon, Washington Post, RFE/RL, U.S. Department of Justice
"You cannot be both secular and a Muslim! You will either be a Muslim, or secular!" thundered Recep Tayyip Erdogan as Istanbul's mayor in 1997. "When both are together, they create reverse magnetism… And why is that? Because Allah, the creator of the Muslim, has absolute power and rule!"
Note the implication: Allah has absolute power; Erdogan, his earthly representative; Erdogan therefore must wield absolute power too. On the incompatibility, these pages agree — political Islam and Enlightenment values cannot share a country.
One must devour the other.
Erdogan has spent 23 years devouring Ataturk's republic. The pro-Western, secular model the founder enshrined is gone. The Hagia Sophia is now a mosque. Judiciary, military, press, and academia have been purged.
And on May 21, a Turkish court dismissed the elected leadership of the opposition CHP — Erdogan's most serious challenger in two decades — clearing his path to a fourth term.
Yet, the more dangerous story is abroad. Erdogan has made Turkey the principal global sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood — whose late spiritual leader called him "the current caliph." He pledged Hamas $300 million in 2011, hosted Haniyeh after October 7, and shelters Egyptian Brotherhood leadership, including jihadists tied to bin Laden. In Syria, Erdogan once armed al-Qaeda's local branch and now seeks full control over Damascus.
Now Africa. SADAT — the Wagner-style private military founded by an Erdogan confidant — has trained ISIS and al-Nusra recruits, guards Mali's brutal junta leader and openly seeks "defensive collaboration among Islamic countries" against "Western crusader imperialist countries."
The strategic case for engagement with the Turkish tyrant is real — he controls the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, wields NATO's second-largest army, and hosts American tactical nuclear weapons.
But the Trump administration gives Erdogan free rein while receiving little in return. On May 21 — the same day Erdogan dismantled the CHP — Trump posted a fabricated Erdogan quote praising Trump as "the leader the world has been waiting for for centuries." Ankara asked him to delete it. He complied.
Even Realpolitik demands American power buy more than one man's vanity.
Sources: Foundation for Defense of Democracies, The National Interest, War on the Rocks, Türkiye Today
In February, The Economist ran the obituary. Serbia's 17-month student uprising against autocratic, Putin-loyal President Aleksandar Vučić was over. Vučić had won.
They forgot to tell the students.
On March 31, anti-corruption police raided the University of Belgrade's Rectorate, seizing servers and surveillance recordings. A 25-year-old student had fallen from a Faculty of Philosophy window five days earlier, after firecrackers and chemicals combusted inside.
The regime aimed to pin it on the professors backing the protests. By nightfall, thousands packed Students' Square. At 10 p.m., the rector of Serbia's oldest university stepped onto the balcony with a megaphone.
Vladan Đokić is no Marxist firebrand or campus revolutionary. He's a USC-trained architect in a suit and tie — a rule-of-law conservative who once worked inside Vučić's orbit before breaking with his patron. His 2021 election as rector drew accusations of regime ties, which he denied.
"The University is the last institution standing," he told the crowd. "That's why they came."
Đokić walked onto the balcony as a university rector. He walked off as a presidential contender.
And his momentum is building. On May 23, the second-largest protest in Serbia's modern history filled Slavija Square — independents counted 190,000; the regime, a suspiciously precise 34,300.
Despite what the Vučić regime claims, this not purely a Western-backed color revolution. EU flags are scarce. This is a Serbian-nationalist anti-corruption revolt. And that's what makes it dangerous.
Within days, Vučić — fresh off his visit to Xi Jinping — caved. He announced early elections this fall.
The Economist wrote the obituary. Vučić is writing the resurrection. And he just scored his first victory.
Sources: The Economist, Reuters, AP, France 24, Balkan Insight, Vreme
Freedom Fighter of the Week: Dong Guangping
When I read the headline, I couldn’t believe it. He did it again.
Just before sunset Monday, a rubber dinghy bobbed through international waters between China and the Korean Peninsula. Inside, a 68-year-old man rode the swells — alone, exhausted, salt-cracked. Thirty hours after pushing off from China's coast, South Korean fishermen had spotted him.
Dong Guangping was free for the fourth time.
Dong has been trying to reach his wife and daughter in Canada for over a decade. A former police officer turned democracy activist, Dong became disillusioned with the Chinese Communist Party after it forced him to crack down on his fellow citizens.
He was first jailed in 2001 for "inciting subversion of state power." In 2014, Beijing arrested him again for penning a letter honoring victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He fled to Thailand with his wife Gu Shuhua and their daughter, won UNHCR refugee status, and prepared to fly to Canada.
Five days before his flight, Thai immigration police seized him in Bangkok, where Chinese authorities seized him and returned him to China as his wife and daughter fled to Toronto.
This was Operation Fox Hunt — Xi Jinping's global dissident-hunting program, sold as an anti-corruption campaign, but used to abduct roughly 10,000 Chinese political dissidents from 120 countries. Smaller nations dependent on Beijing routinely comply.
Back in China, Dong vanished for over 30 months into a secret prison system that exists outside the courts. Lights blazing 24 hours. Solitary cells. Stress positions. Sleep deprivation. Beatings. No lawyer, no family contact, no record.
Released in 2019 under Canadia pressure, Dong boldly tried again — swimming six miles toward Taiwan's Kinmen islands before Chinese fishermen turned him in. Then in 2020, he slipped into Vietnam, hiding in safehouses for 31 months while Ottawa quietly issued him travel documents.
But in 2022, a dozen Vietnamese police officers raided his residence. They handcuffed him, pulled a black hood over his head, and shoved him into a car. He vanished into China again — thirteen more months in prison.
Then Prime Minister Trudeau raised his case publicly, and China released him again in 2023.
But Dong was not done. "His dream of being reunited with family was so strong," his daughter Katherine said.
The Party demands the state come first. Dong keeps choosing his family.
South Korean authorities have detained Dong again. Will they too bow to the bully?
Sources: Wall Street Journal, CNN, Radio Free Asia, Amnesty International, Front Line Defenders, Safeguard Defenders, Toronto Association for Democracy in China
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Eric Erdman
Editor of Dispatches from the Rebellion — a weekly newsletter covering freedom movements around the world. After 25 years in IT, I’ve dedicated my life to telling the stories of those risking everything for freedom. Each issue delivers sharp global updates, threats to American democracy, and profiles of the heroes fighting back. If you believe freedom is worth fighting for — you're in the right place.
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