Mr. Vice President, you are visiting two of the three states of the South Caucasus. The third, Georgia, was the undisputed leader of the wider region. We, the political prisoners in Georgia, have a ray of hope after your administration released political prisoners in Belarus. I would like to ask you to pay attention to our situation and help Georgia’s democracy, -Mikheil Saakashvili, the third President of Georgia, says in an open letter to the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, which is posted on his Facebook page.

Saakashvili says that when he heard JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference that “opposition leaders should not be imprisoned,” he thought there was hope.

“Dear Mr. Vice President, I am the former President of Georgia, the former Governor of the largest Ukrainian region of Odessa, and currently, nominally, the head of Zelensky’s Reform Council.

I am a great admirer of yours, having been deeply impressed by the book “Hillbilly Elegy” that I read a few years ago, and recently I watched the film in my cell for a single prisoner and was even more moved.

You are a young, energetic and deeply religious man. Everything I aspired to in 2004, when I was elected as the youngest head of state in Europe.

When I heard you say at the Munich Security Conference, emphasizing that opposition leaders should not be imprisoned, I immediately thought that there is hope for me, as well as for all the other opposition leaders in Georgia who are either in prison or in court, on their way to prison.

Georgia is ruled by an oligarch who has isolated Georgia from its neighbors and the rest of the world. Its chief ideologue regularly publishes manifestos in which he describes your administration as part of the “deep state” and accuses it of being hostile to Ivanishvili.

The latest charge against me, which carries an additional several years in prison, is based on a Facebook post I made expressing my desire to take a “selfie” with a shark in Ivanishvili’s private aquarium, which the oligarch’s prosecutors believe is inciting violence after the rigged 2024 elections.

Mr. Vice President, you are visiting two of the three states in the South Caucasus. The third, Georgia, had been the undisputed leader in the wider region. We are, of course, impressed by the progress made by Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In 2012, Donald Trump launched the Trump Tower project in our coastal city of Batumi. A project that Ivanishvili canceled after the peaceful transfer of power as a result of the elections. In 2012, President Trump said of us: “This man has done the most amazing job, and we can use this brainpower in our great country.”

Mr. Vice President, we, the political prisoners in Georgia, have a ray of hope after your administration released political prisoners in Belarus. I would like to ask you to pay attention to our situation and help Georgian democracy,” Saakashvili writes.