Today marks the anniversary - in the countries of the former Soviet Union (western European countries mark the victory a day earlier) - of the victory over fascism: a victory for which over 300,000 Georgians gave their lives.

Given the scale of sacrifice the pride of this day will always be laced with heavy sorrow. But perhaps no more than in Georgia's second city, Kutaisi, where, last December, a memorial to the glorious dead was destroyed on the orders of Mikheil Saakashvili and the destruction - rushed and botched to ensure that widespread anger at what many saw as a desecration did not result in public protest - took the lives of two bystanders.

That tragedy, as well as the victory won for humanity in May 1945, were marked today.

Voters in the western Georgian town of Ozurgeti get to choose a new member of parliament in a 30 May byelection - the same day as Georgia elects new local councillors and Tbilisi picks a mayor - but are faced with a choice between two pro-regime candidates and a member of a party - said by opinion polls to have minimal support - that says its defeat at the polls should be the spark for a revolution.

The byelection has been caused by the resignation of ruling party MP and noted folklorist Anzor Erkomaishvili, who has taken up a job paid out of public money. Despite their complete dominance of parliament and earlier suggestions that they might not contest byelections the United National Movement are standing Gocha Shanidze (pictured).

"Opposition" candidate Maia Orjonikidze, of Gia Tortladze's Democratic Party, uses her blog and frequent TV appearances to defend even the most extreme actions of the Saakashvili regime - recently posting material in defence of the faked Imedi news broadcast of 13 March saying that the panic caused by its report of a Russian invasion was a timely reminder to people of the threat to the country, defending the destruction - which killed a mother and her daughter - of the "Memorial of Glory" in Kutaisi and frequent images of Vladimir Putin in Nazi regalia.

The other non-UNM candidate is Ilia Kalandadze of the Movement for a Fair Georgia - the party led by Saakashvili's former prime minister Zurab Noghaideli. In recent weeks Noghaideli has threatened the lives of senior ministers and promised a revolution if the the ruling party falsifies the election results in the 30 May polls. Ignoring all the evidence that the population are fed up with blow-hard statements from opposition politicians and that, in fact they play into the hands of Saakashvili, Noghaieli has chosen to define falsification as a victory for the ruling party.

More moderate members of the opposition have chosen to maintain their boycott of parliamentary elections while the Christian Democrats - who, like Tortladze's Democratic Party - are given favourable media treatment but have also maintained a critical stance on a number of issues, are only contesting a parliamentary byelection in Tbilisi.

Some in the opposition think that Noghaideli's strategy is to seek a physical confrontation with the authorities - for while there is little enthusiasm for street protest at present, Georgians are often quick to take sides if a confrontation with the authorities turns violent. Such events would give Noghaideli - the man who headed the government at the time of the 7 November attacks on the opposition and Imedi TV - credibility but might also suit the government, as it would allow them to say the opposition was more extreme and dangerous than ever.

Georgia's Central Elections Commission (CEC) has decided to cut the number of polling stations observed by video cameras for the 30 May local elections.

Citing recommendations from the Council of Europe that cameras could intimidate voters, the commission propose that they should only be installed in Tbilisi, Batumi and Kutaisi.

Opposition parties have previously called for them to be installed in all polling stations - and their output made freely available - as a guard against fraud and multiple voting.

Three directors of the demolition company that destoyed the "Memorial of Glory" in Kutaisi in December have been sentenced to prison today after debris from the botched explosion killed a mother and her eight-year-old daughter as they stood in their courtyard.

The three - Avtandil Darsavelidze, Elguja Gadabadze and Tengiz Darakhvelidze -   have been jailed for breaking safety regulations. Central to the state's case was that the public were not evacuated from a wide enough area.

However the police - the public authority who carried out the evacuation and who have a duty to ensure the law is being upheld - have faced no legal sanction. Nor has there been any examination of the president's role in bringing the demolition forward to pre-empt protests against the destruction of a memorial to those who died in the war against fascism and what impact that may have had on safety preparations.

Yesterday, 41 days after the disastrous demolition of the Memorial of Glory in Kutaisi - which killed two local residents after the police failed to evacuate the area - president Mikheil Saakashvili finally got around to visiting Georgia's second city.

When the demolition took place - on 19 December - the president rushed back to Georgia from the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, taking personal charge of the situation and sacking the regional governor.

Reportedly the demolition of the memorial to the 300,000 Georgians who died fighting fascism between 1941 and 1945 had been brought forward on the president's orders and every impression was given that the Georgian state was looking for scapegoats. Officials of the demolition company have been thrown in jail and blamed for the improper evacuation while the police, the public authority actually responsible for enforcing the law, have not been touched.

Throughout the following week the Georgian media reported that the president was likely to visit Kutaisi "tomorrow". But he did not show.

He went to plenty of other places. Indeed he has been out of the country twice since then: on a mysterious visit to Munich (to a conference for which no public record appears to exist) and to Estonia.

But yesterday, he finally returned. To promise an ice skating rink and to claim that the city, which was economically devastated after the collapse of the unified markets of the Soviet Union, was again an industrial powerhouse.

There appears to have been no mention of the demolition and no visit to the greiving family who lost a mother an her eight-year-old daughter to what many regard as a vanity project of Saakashvili: the building of a second home for the Georgian parliament.