Stephan Goss

Conflict Photographer

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

I also think a few things need to be acknowledged:

1. GD's message of: "Vote for us or your children will die in another war with Russia" is effective and not without merit. Especially for the older generation that knows what Russian repression is like. Hard to say if the war would have been hot, cold or somewhere in between (green men) but the implication was clear and Georgia was going to lose. Believing that they will not get Russian style repression with GD is likely a fallacy but one can hope that Ukraine will break Russias back before Georgia gets full RU attention now. Even if you didn't like GD, voting against a war in the short term isn't all that unreasonable especially given how weak western support is for Ukraine. Certainly can't expect the EU to do anything meaningful.

2. When I spent time in Georgia in May, the protesters were continuously chanting anti-Ivanshvili chants. But they never chanted FOR anyone that could put the country on the right course. There was no real opposition candidate but many opposition parties without unity. Hard to convince people to go into a hot or cold war against Russia without a leader that will fight for you.

3. I think Georgians overestimated the ability of peacful protest and voting to get rid of the Russians once they run the government. If Russians believed in free elections and the will of the people, the world would be distinctly different.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

Thanks for your support Robin! Hopefully Georgia will get a free and fair vote today!

[Robin Forestier-Walker @robinfwalker]

This is another troubling development for freedom of the press in Georgia. Stephan is a Swiss national, and worked with me earlier this year to document the mass protests against the govt's law on foreign agents.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

@Nebyerhydse @IFJGlobal I don’t speak Georgian so could be the Georgian phonetic pronunciation?

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

I tried to enter Georgia (the country, not the state) to photograph the election. I’m an @IFJGlobal accredited journalist. On arrival my passport had clearly been flagged. They took it, I waited for 1.5h and then got paperwork saying I was denied entry and was being deported.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

And as a fun parting gift they also lost all my luggage. Apparently it never made the deportation flight.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

Forgot to add in my sleep deprived state, they took away my phone for the whole time as soon as they put me into holding and didn’t return it until right before boarding the deportation flight to Dubai. I landed safe and sound though!

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

@RayBaseley @IFJGlobal Yeah I saw your post before I left and figured: certainly this won’t be a problem for me! 😂

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

@FRHoffmann1 Agreed. Poland, the Baltics and the Nordics certainly should consider the same.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

@PhillipsPOBrien That feels premature, given election year politics, I could easily see the WH sending large aid shipments after Nov 5th. Not that Biden has been particularly strong, but the exceptional weakness has certainly aligned with the election cycle.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

@Mylovanov Ukraine doesn’t need peace with russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world needs peace from russia.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

The vast majority of the “pro-peace” pundits, most of which have of course never set foot onto Ukrainian soil, either don’t understand or ignore what would happen to the people sacrificed to Russia in a peace deal. Their false assumption is that a peace deal would stop Ukrainian civilian deaths when it is the exact opposite. If left alone, Russians will be able to torture, rape and murder occupied Ukrainians at an even larger, industrial scale, just like they did in all the occupied areas, except their army won’t be busy fighting. Ukraines choice is to lose thousands upon thousands of soldiers or to lose even larger amounts of civilians to an ethnic cleansing of immense scale. That was Russias goal to begin with and 3 years of active resistance war combined with people openly declaring their hate for Russia will make their revenge exponentially worse.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

@YaroslavAzhnyuk They even explain in their FAQs that they do not use end to end encryption except for secret chats, which they’ve hidden in an obscure UX corner. So TG team and anyone they share with can read all the messages. Yet somehow people believe they are private because Durov says so…

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

Don’t fall for TG’s privacy marketing. There are plenty actually private options available like @signalapp. Those apps are banned in Russia, the supposed haven of free speech, while Telegram isn’t just allowed, it’s the main comms for Oligarchs and the Russian military.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

Durov’s Arrest and the potential civilian impact: Durov was effectively the head of communications for the Russian invasion army. But not just them, also for the Russian propagandists, politicians, oligarchs as well as the paid and unpaid friends of Russia all over the world.

[Stephan Goss @GossStephan]

Its basically guaranteed that the usual pro-Kremlin voices will be extremely focused on calling this an anti-privacy crackdown which is ludicrous given that TG never provided privacy to begin with and made decisions that actively let them monitor the communications.