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Jailed ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili, who ended a seven-week hunger strike on November 20, has been seen in public for the first time since his arrest in early October. On Monday, November 29, Saakashvili was brought to the Tbilisi City Court to be put on trial on charges of abuse of power over the violent dispersal of an opposition demonstration in November 2007. Several hundred of Saakashvili’s supporters gathered outside the courthouse on Monday; police allegedly used tear gas to break up the crowd. Saakashvili was president of Georgia from 2008 to 2013. He was convicted in absentia on several counts of abuse of power in 2018. Georgian authorities arrested Saakashvili on October 1, after he secretly crossed the border into Georgia, returning to the country for the first time in eight years. There are several other criminal cases against Saakashvili, including one opened in October on charges of illegally crossing Georgia’s state border. 

On Thursday, November 25, Russia’s Supreme Court began a hearing on the liquidation of Memorial International, the country’s oldest human rights organization. The Attorney General’s Office has accused Memorial of “systematic violations” of the law for allegedly failing to tag its public statements with disclaimers about its “foreign agent” status. Before the start of the hearing on Thursday, more than 300 people gathered outside the Supreme Court, Meduza’s correspondent reported from the scene. Police officers arrested one woman outside the courthouse — she was holding a sign that read “Thank you, Memorial, for remembering us” along with two portraits (presumably of her relatives). The Supreme Court hearing on the prosecutors’ claim will resume on December 14. 

On November 10, 2021, Russian peacekeepers marked the one-year anniversary of their deployment to Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia’s peacekeeping forces arrived in the self-declared republic on November 10, 2020 — just hours after Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a ceasefire agreement, brokered by Russia, to end armed hostilities in the region. On the first anniversary of the peacekeepers’ deployment, a Russian military tattoo took place in a military town outside of Nagorno-Karabakh’s administrative center, Stepanakert. In the photo above, Russian soldiers are waving the flags of the Russian Federation and the Russian Peacekeeping Forces.