TBILISI, GEORGIA—On 24 July 2026, the European Union gave Georgia's only oil refinery six months to stop processing Russian crude, the clearest sign yet that the Black Sea assets Georgia meant to use as leverage have become a liability. A short flight to the south-west, Turkey is doing the opposite: expanding its authority over the Bosphorus, negotiating gas terms with a weakened Gazprom from a position of strength, and building a second overland route to the Caspian that no longer needs Georgia. The same geography that once made both countries hard to ignore is now pulling them apart.
A Corridor Georgia Was Built to Own
Since the Soviet collapse, three projects have moved Caspian oil, gas and freight around Russia and Iran: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the South Caucasus Pipeline, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway. All three needed Georgia. That need was Georgia's main strategic asset—it is what kept Western money and diplomatic attention flowing into a small country beside a much larger neighbour.
That exclusivity is now ending, on a timetable Tbilisi does not set. Construction has begun on the Zangezur Corridor, a US-brokered rail and road link through southern Armenia that will connect Azerbaijan to Turkey without touching Georgian territory. Engineers from the American firm AECOM were in Armenia in mid-July, surveying the route with Armenian officials. Once finished, the new corridor could cut delivery times by around a day compared with the traditional Baku-Tbilisi-Kars line—a modest saving, but a clear signal to shippers that Georgia's near-monopoly on East-West Caucasus transit will not last.
The anxiety this has produced is visible on the ground. In November, Azerbaijani lorries carrying goods to Europe were held for close to three weeks at Georgian customs posts in Batumi and Tbilisi, with no explanation given. The episode fed a narrative already common in Georgian and Armenian media: that Tbilisi risks losing its transit revenue the moment Zangezur opens.
Ankara Is Not Choosing.
For Turkey, Zangezur is not a replacement for Georgia. It is one more entry in a growing list of levers, each one independent of the others. Turkey controls the Bosphorus, through which more than 50,000 vessels pass each year carrying Black Sea grain, Caspian crude and steel exports, and it raised transit fees by 15% in 2025 under authority granted solely by the 1936 Montreux Convention. On Turkey's Mediterranean coast, the Akkuyu nuclear plant is entering its final stage too: construction of the first reactor was confirmed complete in June, cold testing is under way, and Rosatom expects to load fuel by autumn. The plant, financed in part by $9bn in fresh Russian credit, is expected to supply around 10% of Turkey's electricity once running.
None of this has stopped Ankara from pressing its advantage over the country financing it. Turkey's gas contracts with Gazprom, covering some 22bn cubic metres a year, expire at the end of 2026, and Russia is negotiating from an unusually weak position: an expanded Turkish LNG portfolio, a new supply deal with Azerbaijan, and closer US gas ties give BOTAŞ, Turkey's state gas importer, room to demand shorter, more flexible terms. Gazprom, for its part, has quietly dropped its own plan to build a gas-distribution hub inside Turkey, reportedly for lack of onward capacity into an EU that intends to phase out Russian gas entirely by 2027. Russia wanted to make Turkey its hub. Turkey built one of its own instead.
The Ports Georgia Isn't Building, and the One It Might Lose
Georgia's difficulty is not only that Turkey is diversifying around it. Its own comparable assets keep stalling or turning into liabilities. Anaklia, the deep-water port billed since 2016 as Georgia's answer to shallow, ageing Poti and Batumi, has now been through three failed ownership models in six years: a Western consortium, cancelled in 2020; a Chinese-Singaporean consortium, awarded the tender in 2024 and quietly gone by mid-2026; and, since early July, a new 'landlord' model, under which the state owns the port outright but has yet to confirm a single investor, with completion not expected before 2029.
Kulevi, an oil terminal further down the same coast, tells a sharper version of the same story. Built by Azerbaijan's state oil company, SOCAR, in 2008, it began taking Russian crude at a newly built adjoining refinery in late 2025. On 24 July, the EU placed that refinery under a transaction ban, giving it six months to stop handling Russian oil, after tankers linked to Russia's 'shadow fleet'—the ageing, often uninsured vessels that move sanctioned oil while evading Western tracking—were traced switching off their tracking systems in Georgian waters. A similar pattern runs through Tbilisi's diplomacy: the prime minister travelled to Iran twice in 2024, and Georgia has faced repeated Western warnings over Iranian sanctions evasion allegedly routed through Georgian companies.
None of this is really about Turkey, and Georgia's choices have their own domestic logic. But the effect is the same: just as Turkey compounds leverage across four fronts at once, Georgia's comparable assets are either stalled or radioactive.
What This Means for the Region
For shippers, insurers and investors, the lesson is straightforward. Georgia's chokepoint status can no longer be treated as reliable collateral for cheaper transit or steady political attention, in the way it could a decade ago. Turkey's position, by contrast, keeps compounding: each new lever—the straits, the gas contracts, the nuclear capacity, now Zangezur—raises the cost of leaving Ankara out of any regional settlement, whether over sanctions enforcement, energy pricing, or the terms of the next Caucasus peace deal.
Georgia's position is not fixed. After all, Georgia remains the only South Caucasus nation with direct access to the Black Sea. A deliberate, sustained commitment to establishing the Anaklia deep-sea port could significantly boost Tbilisi’s economic momentum and preserve its indispensable transit role in the region. However, to make this work, Tbilisi needs to make doing business easier and focus on attracting a wide range of Western investors. Instead, Georgia's recent move away from integration with the West—alongside democratic backsliding and rising tensions with the EU and the US—risks ruining this potential. This is especially dangerous now, as Armenia is successfully stepping up to replace Georgia as the West's primary, reliable partner in the South Caucasus. Anaklia could yet attract a serious operator, and Zangezur's own construction still depends on financing and security guarantees that are not finalised. But the direction of travel is visible from Tbilisi, even where it is not yet visible from Brussels or Washington. Turkey did not need to take Georgia's leverage. It only needed to keep building its own. wait.
