The clampdown on Georgian media is accelerating. Starting Thursday, May 1, the opposition-aligned television channel Mtavari will cease broadcasting amid Tbilisi's growing rapprochement with Moscow and persecution of opponents. On Monday, April 28, the channel's employees received a notification from its director general, Giorgi Gabunia, indicating the complete shutdown of the media outlet that had been founded in 2019 and had since become one of the most watched in the country.

Several journalists confirmed the information on social media, including Irakli Bakhtadze, who lamented that he was being "driven out of his home": "I have always believed that critical media should be the voice of the people. Their primary mission is to say what others keep silent," he wrote on his Facebook page. His colleague Tatia Tsotsonava, who had been purged from the Rustavi 2 channel for political reasons by the same government in 2019, sadly recalled having "built Mtavari from scratch, fighting for it at the cost of our health and our lives."

"Mtavari TV plays a very important role in counterbalancing the propaganda media that promote the pro-Russian discourse," said Vano Chkhikvadze, head of the European integration program at the human rights NGO Civil Society Foundation.

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