Tskhinvali has announced that the trial of Tamaz Goloev, who was detained in the government-controlled territory of Georgia on espionage charges, was scheduled for June 25 but has been postponed indefinitely. Egor Kochiev, the representative of the occupied region at the Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism (IPRM) meetings, stated that Tbilisi representatives confirmed this information during a routine hotline contact on July 10.
Tbilisi maintains that Goloev’s health condition is not a cause for concern, but Kochiev emphasized that Tskhinvali does not fully trust this information.
He recalled that during the 67th round of the Geneva talks, the de facto authorities demanded that representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or the OSCE be granted access to the detained Gagloev to verify his detention conditions and health status.
Additionally, the issue of Goloev’s release was raised during the meeting in Ergneti and via the hotline. Tskhinvali is demanding the release of Tamaz Gagloev and his return “to his homeland” in the occupied Tskhinvali region.
As a reminder, Tamaz Goloev is a 27-year-old resident of occupied Akhalgori. He is of Ossetian descent on his father’s side and Georgian on his mother’s. He studied in Tskhinvali and regularly visited Tbilisi. On April 21, 2026, he traveled to the government-controlled part of Georgia through the so-called “Razdakhan” checkpoint, and on April 22, he was detained by officers of the Counterintelligence Department of the State Security Service of Georgia (SSG). On April 23–24, he was charged with espionage, and the court ordered a pre-trial detention measure of two months.
The SSG of Georgia claims that Gagloev was recruited by a foreign intelligence service, operated under a pseudonym, and collected information detrimental to Georgia’s interests for financial reward. This allegedly included information on the deployment sites and assets of law enforcement agencies, as well as the locations of strategic facilities, complete with photo and video confirmation.
Tamta Mikeladze, head of the Social Justice Center, previously stated that members of civil society knew Goloev; he maintained contact with Georgian society and was perhaps the only Ossetian from Akhalgori who sought such connections. The representative of the Georgian NGO noted that, given Goloev’s vulnerable position and the history of pressure from security forces in the Tskhinvali region, she finds it difficult to believe he could have carried out serious assignments for foreign intelligence services.
