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.

  • johan@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    This post was made only 10 minutes ago and is now on -7. It takes longer than 10 minutes to read the article. What’s going on here? Bots?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    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!

  • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s extremely common here. There it feels like every other block in Tbilisi says “Fuck Putin” or “Russia is a terrorist state” or something along those lines… “No Russian is welcome, good or bad” was the most impactful for me.

    I was having drinks with my neighbors and they were toasting for all the nationalities there. “For the Georgians! For the Turks! For the Ukrainians! For the Americans!”

    I said, “But not the Russians.”

    He got dead serious and looked me right in the eyes… “NO! FUCK the Russians!”

    The Georgians are generally very friendly. I love it here.