Breakaway South Ossetia Leader Alan Gagloev Resigns to Become Putin Adviser

The de facto leader of Georgia’s Russian-occupied South Ossetia region, Alan Gagloev, resigned on Tuesday to become an advisor to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Gagloev, who took office in 2022, stepped down just weeks after the ratification of a key integration agreement with Moscow, according to The Moscow Times on June 23.

He announced that Prime Minister Marat Kambolov, a former Moscow bureaucrat from the Russian republic of North Ossetia, will serve as the temporary president. The unexpected leadership change follows an agreement ratified last month by Putin to align South Ossetia’s legal framework with Russia.

Under the new integration agreement, Moscow committed to delivering social support and increasing local living standards. While Putin highlighted the economic and social cooperation aspects of the deal, Gagloev frames it as a step toward joining Russia.

In Georgia, the ruling Georgian Dream party and opposition groups condemned the integration treaty, characterizing it as a de facto annexation of the territory by Moscow.

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South Ossetia and Abkhazia are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia but have remained under Russian control since the August 2008 war, with Moscow maintaining active military bases on both territories.

“Today our task is to ensure that our cherished dream comes true — to overcome the fate of a divided people and reunite with North Ossetia, reunite with Great Russia,” Gagloev stated in a video address.

While facing setbacks from Ukrainian drone strikes and counter-offensives on the battlefield, Russia is simultaneously tightening its political grip on occupied Georgia. Vladimir Putin complained to military and security academy graduates at the Kremlin that a huge flow of Ukrainian drone strikes targeting domestic infrastructure was a calculated strategy intended to eclipse Russian battlefield progress and sow public anxiety.

While Putin insisted that his forces maintained pressure across all sectors of the frontline, independent intelligence assessments directly contradicted the Kremlin’s narrative, revealing that Ukrainian units successfully executed localized counter-offensives and advanced near Borova in the Kharkiv region and within the Donetsk region.

The Russian leader completely omitted any mention of a recent record-breaking strike that severely damaged a critical oil refinery in Moscow, choosing instead to frame Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine through the lens of psychological operations.

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