"Their masks are off' - Georgian activist who was beaten says attacks increasing

Zuka Berdzenishvili's face was a canvas of rainbow colours, his piercing blue eyes partly blood-stained above a pronounced purple bruise. Berdzenishvili, a prominent activist and co-founder of the Georgian pro-democracy movement Shame, was ambushed and beaten outside his house last week by a group of unknown assailants who pushed and kicked him to the ground.

- Pjotr Sauer

"I got lucky. I had just arrived home on my scooter and was still wearing a helmet when they started beating me. Without it, my brain would have turned to soup," he said, speaking outside the Georgian parliament in central Tbilisi, where a month earlier the ruling Georgian Dream party passed a "foreign agents" law that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to protest.

The "foreign agents" law, which obliges civil society organisations and media that receive more than 20% of their revenues from abroad to register as "organisations serving the interests of a foreign power", is regarded by critics as a copy of legislation introduced in Russia in 2012 by Vladimir Putin to silence dissenting voices.

It has also derailed Georgia's long-held EU aspirations in favour of closer ties with Moscow. Mass protests have largely simmered out since the law was passed.

Meanwhile, the Georgian government is doubling down on its anti-western shift before the October parliamentary elections, openly casting critics as traitors and accused of orchestrating violence against them.

More than a dozen NGO workers, opposition politicians and activists have been physically targeted by unidentified gangs, which are widely believed to have links to the government.

Berdzenishvili's attack occurred exactly an hour after the speaker of Georgia's parliament, Shalva Papuashvili accused him and other activists in a Facebook post of engaging in "politically motivated terror" sponsored by the EU.