This news can spark different reactions according to who receives it. For the majority of global leaders is irrelevant. As for them Abkhazia is not an independent State, the fact that its self-proclaimed president left its fictitious charge matters little. For the Russian Federation, one of the few countries that recognize Abkhazian independence, Bzhania’s resignation is a problem. For Georgia, of which Abkhazia theoretically is a region, the event is a further twist in an already sufficiently tangled situation – the party holding parliamentary majority in Tbilisi has been accused of crookedly winning the last elections by the opposition and the President of the Republic.   

For Abkhazia, this resignation signals a surprising political dynamic, despite the situation in which this small Caucasian territory with very limited international recognition finds itself. Its capital, Sukhumi, is at the crossroad of different lines of tension: juridically part of Georgia, Abkhazia went independent after a conflict with Tbilisi in 1992-93, which resulted in a large exodus of Georgians and in the inability of the capital to control the separatist region. After another violent outbreak in 1998, the Russian invasion of Georgia ten years later further contributed in distancing Tbilisi from Sukhumi. The latter moved from independence from Georgia to dependence on Moscow, which recognized it as a State, build military and naval basis on its territory, kept its economy alive and delivered passports with the Russian double-headed eagle on the cover to its citizens.

The last thirty years of Abkhazian history feature more than a similarity with other territories of the former Soviet Union. After the fall of the USSR, separatist movements have been exploited by other actors, first and foremost by Moscow, as foreign policy tools (the list in not a short one: Transnistria, the other breakaway region in Georgia, South Ossetia, but also the old “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, or the no longer existing Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh). Nevertheless, Abkhazia distinguishes itself because of a unique feature: it challenged its master, Russia.

Bzhania’s resignation follow a period of tension that began in summer, when the local parliament retired the so called “appartement bill” that allowed non-residents (Russians) to build and buy real estate properties. Russia retaliated by withholding its financial aid until restrictions on Russian investors in the real estate market were not eliminated. When the Abkhaz parliament had to ratify a deal giving up to Russian demands, street protests broke out, with protesters storming government buildings.

An autumn of paradoxes is unfolding from Sukhumi to Tbilisi: in Georgia, the ‘Georgian Dream’ party, owned by Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch with ties to Moscow, is accused of rigging the elections. Over the last months, the same party had backed and had passed laws on the model of those produced by the Duma in Moscow (namely, one limiting the rights of the LGBT community and one on ‘foreign agents’, which requires any entity that receives more than 20% of its funding from abroad to declare itself an ‘organisation representing the interests of a foreign country’) to improve relations with Russia, a country that continues to militarily occupy two parts of its territory. However, one of these occupied territories - Abkhazia - is resisting at least one Russian diktat, even going so far as to force its president to resign.

If from Moscow one could look favourably at the news coming from Georgia, those arriving from Abkhazia are more disturbing, as it is a territory completely dependent that is reacting so vigorously to its demands. The fact that this is happening in the Caucasus, a strategically important area for Russia, whose mountains constitute the only real geographical border of the Federation and whose populations have often created problems for the central power, is even more worrying.

The territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia now constitute Russia’s last Caucasian redoubt: the two wars in which Azerbaijan reclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh marked the rise of Baku (in tandem with Ankara) whilst the lack of support for Armenia alienated Yerevan. If in the rest of Georgia Russia has had poor reputation since the 2008 war and is being challenged even in the separatist republics it sustains, it means that the regional picture is rather bleak when viewed from Moscow.

In any case, for Sukhumi, the hypothesis of breaking away completely from Russia remains unrealistic, even though it is signalling growing discontent with the current status quo - which is paradoxical, given that it owes its ‘independence’ to Russian intervention and protection, as well as Moscow’s possible retaliation against Georgia in the event of an attempted reconquest of the region. The protests of November 2024 were preceded by other tense moments in 2021 and 2022, although it had been ten years since the Abkhazians stormed their own government buildings, when the then president Alexander Ankvab had to resign.

Hence, while uprisings, even violent ones, are no novelty in Abkhazia, the fact that they are directed against a decision emanating from Moscow marks a new dynamic in recent years. Aware of their subordinate position, the Abkhazian demonstrators made it clear that their acts were not to be interpreted as anti-Russian: in Sukhumi they cannot forget the grip of Russia, which holds the keys to the Abkhazian economy and possesses military and naval bases (the value of which is high, given that, for the Russian Federation, the Black Sea is today a war zone).

Moscow’s aim in supporting Abkhazian separatism was to maintain influence at its borders and particularly in Georgia, breaking its territorial integrity and making Tbilisi less attractive to other partners or preventing it from joining other alliances. Today, however, this strategy may be called into question if the vassal is reluctant to obey the orders of an increasingly unattractive, more isolated and perceived as economically rapacious master. 

On the Georgian side, however, the conditions do not seem to be in place to capitalize on these frictions and to regain territorial integrity. After the last elections, the country is split. On one hand, the opposition is putting the emphasis on the European future of the country, a difficult basis on which to build peaceful relations if one’s biggest neighbour is the Russian Federation. The government in Tbilisi, on the other hand, is betting on a strategy of appeasement with Moscow, although one may doubt its sincerity: in a country where the wounds of the Russian invasion are still fresh, the Georgian Dream has presented itself as the party of peace in order to win the last elections, and its decision to delay EU membership talks to 2028 has reignited vibrant street protests. ‘’

Tbilisi, however, does not lack domestic reasons to be accommodating towards Moscow, given the high number of Russians who have settled in the country since the invasion and the economic opportunities offered by the circumvention of sanctions (in which Georgia first participated by exporting directly to Russia and now by triangulating with other countries).

The Georgian-Abkhazian picture is thus evolving, after years in which all the frozen conflicts inherited from the dissolution of the USSR seemed impossible to resolve given Russia’s willingness to use them as a foreign policy tool. Now, however, with the Federation engaged in the war in Ukraine and given its regional declining influence, different and hardly predictable scenarios are opening up, where local and regional actors are ready to take advantage of the weakness of who has been the hegemon of the area for the past 200 years.

Francesco Stuffer is a geopolitical analyst at the Spykman International Center for Geopolitical Analysis. He is a graduate of the Paris School of International Affairs – Master in International Governance and Diplomacy, his centers of interest are the Post-Soviet Space and the Balkans.