Georgia is drifting into the Kremlin’s orbit

The road fromTbilisi airport to the old town—a web of steep cobbled streets with ornate balconies and the mouthwatering smell of dumplings and cheese bread—bears the name of George W. Bush, the first American president to visit the small Caucasian country, in 2005. Saluting its democratic reforms, Mr Bush called Georgia “a beacon of liberty” and told its young and restless reformist president, Mikheil Saakashvili, that Georgia had “a solid friend in America”.These days it is the Kremlin that is praising Georgia, a country it , for toeing its line and refusing to join Western sanctions against Russia. The 55-year-old Mr Saakashvili is under guard in hospital on the outskirts of Tbilisi, fighting dementia and muscle atrophy. “My health is in deep shit,” Mr Saakashvili wrote to your correspondent in a letter. “Besides all kinds of bad symptoms, what makes me desperate is a terrible memory loss.” Mr Saakashvili believes that he has been poisoned, and says he lapsed into a brief coma after an earlier move to a different prison hospital. In December his legal team distributed a toxicology report said to identify the presence of heavy metals in his body, in which the toxicologist expressed the opinion he had been poisoned.