After the invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Russians fled to Tbilisi. But the graffiti that has sprung up across the city suggests not everyone is pleased to see them.
After the invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Russians fled to Tbilisi. But the graffiti that has sprung up across the city suggests not everyone is pleased to see them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, announced a general mobilisation at the end of September, Belysh, as a man of draft age, had no choice but to leave the country or risk being conscripted into an army he did not support, to fight a war he found unjust.
Intrinsic to Georgia’s post-Soviet national identity is its centuries-long domination by Russia, dating from the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when Georgian kings requested Russian protection as a security guarantee against attacks from the Persian Empire to the south.
There are regular controversies about Russian opposition-linked figures who are not let in to Georgia: critical journalists, a lawyer for opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and a member of the activist group Pussy Riot are among those who have reportedly been denied entry since the war began.
There have been a few small social media brouhahas on the rare occasions when the city has cleaned up some anti-Russia graffiti; to many liberal Georgians, these cleanup efforts fed the theory that the government was secretly pro-Russia.
The occupation narrative also denies the agency of Abkhazians and Ossetians themselves – for the most part they do not consider themselves occupied, and view Russian backing as a necessary evil protecting them against what they deem the greater danger of Georgian nationalism.
“The Russia-Ukraine war paralysed the process of rethinking our conflicts, making it almost impossible to discover and realise our own mistakes,” wrote Anna Dziapshipa, a Tbilisi-based film-maker of Georgian and Abkhazian background.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!