In the middle of the night, two scantily clad, long-legged Russian women teetering on lethally high heels recently invaded Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s cliff-top residence. The hour was late, but the blonde and the brunette, both decked out in bleach-white mini-dresses, had tough questions for the Georgian leader and they were not going to leave without the answers.
It was the first time since the 2008 Russia-Georgia war that Saakashvili had granted an exclusive interview to a Russian media outlet (the Russian-language version of GQ, no less), and the two media divas, columnists Ksenya Sobchak and Ksenya Sokolova, were going to make the most of it.
Why have you been provocative toward Russia? Why did you chew on your tie? What is your take on the Sarkozy-Medvedev agreement?
But for those Russia-based readers anticipating a story about monumental evil and lunacy with some adult content, the article the two Ksenyas wrote for GQ will prove a disappointment.
After clip-clopping around the Georgian presidential palace, the two media invaders were whisked off by Saakashvili via plane to the showcase Black Sea resort city of Batumi. On the dark road into the city, the duo started theorizing which of them Saakashvili, routinely portrayed by Russian media as an inveterate womanizer, would drag into the bushes first.
Instead, events took a prosaic turn -- a twilight-hours tour of the fountains, disco clubs and seaside promenade of the town Saakashvili hopes will become the Barcelona of the Caucasus.
Apparently feeling that the story was not going as provocatively as expected, Sobchak later decided to take things a notch higher and put on a T-shirt featuring Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Saakashvili’s bête noire.The move sparked a remonstrance from the presidential press people, but only an observation from the target-in-chief that "What T-shirt to wear -- this is exclusively a question of good taste. In a free country, you can decide such questions yourselves."
Sokolova later ended up defending Saakashvili and his ways in a television interview with Russian news hosts. A PR victory for Georgia? Part two of the Russian GQ coverage is yet to come . . .
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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