These Russians Fled But Couldn’t Escape Repression

Since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, more than 100,000 Russians have crossed the border with Georgia. While their country devolved into autocracy and spurned the West, their small southern neighbor seemed to be moving in the opposite direction—toward democracy and membership in the European Union.

Soon, however, the authoritarianism they’d tried to escape began spilling over the border. The Kremlin appeared to exert greater influence over Georgia’s leaders, and Russian refugees saw their adoptive home come to resemble their native one.

“Repressive laws that Georgia adopts are copied from the Kremlin’s,” Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, a human-rights activist who has served multiple prison sentences in Russia, told me, and Moscow’s brand of oppression is “catching up with Russian exiles.”

In 2006, Dmitriyevsky became the first activist that the Russian regime convicted under its so-called counter-extremism laws. But he didn’t decide to try to leave until the fall of 2022, when he found out that Russia’s Federal Security Service was investigating him for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Dmitriyevsky applied for asylum in Georgia, where he lived for two years awaiting a ruling. On New Year’s Eve, Georgian authorities denied his petition, explaining in a letter that “no facts of international or internal conflict or significant violations of human rights were recorded.” He was dumbfounded. “They must be blind,” Dmitriyevsky told me. He plans to appeal.

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Dmitriyevsky is one of a growing number of asylum seekers whom Georgia has rejected. In the first days of the war, the country mostly welcomed Russian refugees, but then it started closing itself off. Authorities interrogated border crossers, arrested some, and deported others to nearby Armenia. Russians who applied for permanent residency confronted increasing rates of rejection. And some of the Russians who made it across the border haven’t been able to stay, including those who face prison time back home.

Georgia’s evolving stance toward refugees mirrors the country’s recent turn away from the West. In December 2023, the European Council granted EU-candidate status to Georgia—a goal that the country’s leaders had long pursued. But late last year the ruling party, Georgian Dream, abruptly suspended accession talks.

That decision came after several indications that repression in Georgia was deepening. Earlier in 2024, the country’s Parliament had enacted a law requiring media companies and NGOs to register as “foreign agents” if more than 20 percent of their funding came from a “foreign power,” which was generally understood to mean any Western country. And in September, lawmakers passed legislation curtailing LGBTQ rights. Some Georgians followed the Russians’ example and went into exile themselves.

Georgia was once a refuge for the Russian opposition. In the first year of the war, thousands of activists crossed the border. Some founded NGOs, such as Volunteers Tbilisi, which organized aid for Ukrainian refugees—the kind of venture that would lead to a prison sentence in Russia. Georgia welcomed them initially but has since cooled to Putin’s opponents. In December, authorities blocked the Russian founder of Volunteers Tbilisi from returning to her home in Georgia.

Even Russian visitors are having a hard time getting into Georgia. Several members of the protest group Pussy Riot tried to see their family members over the holidays, but Georgia denied them entry. The country’s border control also rebuffed Andrey Kurayev, a dissident priest whom the Kremlin has designated as a foreign agent, even though he was reportedly invited by a Georgian university.

Georgia’s realignment toward Moscow has been especially painful for Ivan Pavlov. A Russian lawyer, Pavlov moved his family to Georgia in September 2021, after the Federal Security Service opened a criminal case against him, seemingly because his firm had defended critics of Putin. Even though he’s Russian, Pavlov’s move to Georgia was a kind of homecoming: His mother was born in Tbilisi, where he spent time as a child. But in February 2023, he was forced out. “First Georgia banned entry to seven of my colleagues, and eventually canceled my residency permit on an order from counterintelligence,” Pavlov told me. “I was called a threat to national security.”

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“I don’t think authorities ban Russian exiles out of their love for Putin. They do it out of fear,” Pavlov said. He appealed to Georgia’s supreme court, which denied his petition to stay; his case is now pending before the European Court of Human Rights.

Georgian authorities may be shirking their duties under international law, some advocates say. “They have obligations to give people in need the opportunity to apply for asylum,” Rachel Denber, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch, told me.

Anna Rivina, a Russian women’s-rights activist, was rejected by Georgia, too. In February 2023, authorities kicked her out of the country after she had been there for eight months and registered her NGO, which provides support for women fleeing the war in Ukraine. “The reason is still classified, even after I have appealed to the supreme court,” Rivina told me. “I was told that my case fell under a law about terrorist activities. I am a threat to the nation in their view.” She was able to resettle in Western Europe, an option that many Russians don’t have.

The journalists Marfa Smirnova and Vladimir Romenskyi were able to get into Georgia, unlike Rivina, but given how quickly the country’s political situation has changed, the couple are not sure they’ll be able to stay. In Russia, they had reported on the country’s opposition movement for an independent television station. Now Smirnova regularly receives threats from anonymous users on Telegram. In 2023, somebody sent her photographs of her two children, who were visiting their grandparents in Russia during a school break. “When we travel in order to do reporting,” she told me, “we never know if we can get back home.”

Protesters and police clash on the streets of Tbilisi every night, a reminder to Dmitriyevsky, the human-rights activist, of the repressive politics he escaped in Russia. On a recent Sunday evening, he watched as law-enforcement officers beat demonstrators until they fell to the ground. He told me he felt a “powerful sense of déjà vu” as riot police dragged dozens of them away—a scene he’d witnessed in Russia many times.

When Dmitriyevsky first arrived in Georgia, he welcomed recent anti-corruption reforms in law enforcement. Now he avoids the police whenever he can. He’s worried that they’ll target him, as they have other opposition activists. Last month, Georgia detained two Russian opposition activists, who allege that police planted drugs on them. “I don’t want to run away from Georgia,” Dmitriyevsky said. “If we run from every authoritarian regime, we’d have to move to the moon soon.”