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Occupied territories

A fifth of this country is held at gunpoint.

Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali Region are Georgian land under Russian military occupation. Two wars, a campaign of ethnic cleansing, an invasion, and a barbed-wire fence that is still being pushed deeper into the country every year.

~20%
of Georgia occupied
12,560
square kilometres held
280,000+
people still displaced
2
regions, one border, no return
How it happened

Two regions

What Was Taken

Abkhazia

Apkhazeti

8,660 km² · Occupied since 1993

Before the war, Abkhazia held about 525,000 people, and Georgians were the largest group among them - close to half the population.

When Sukhumi fell on 27 September 1993, the killing of Georgian civilians and the emptying of Georgian villages that followed drove out around a quarter of a million people in a matter of weeks. Three OSCE summits - Budapest in 1994, Lisbon in 1996, Istanbul in 1999 - named it for what it was: ethnic cleansing.

Most of those families have never been allowed home. Their houses stand in other people's hands, or in ruins, thirty years on.

Tskhinvali Region

Samachablo

3,900 km² · Occupied since 1992

In August 2008 the Russian army came through the Roki tunnel, bombed Gori, and drove as far as Senaki, Poti and Zugdidi - deep inside undisputed Georgian territory.

The Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali - Kekhvi, Kurta, Achabeti, Tamarasheni, Eredvi, Vanati and the rest - were looted, burned and bulldozed after the shooting stopped, so that there would be nothing to come back to. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights found Russia responsible for exactly that: an administrative practice of killing, torture, looting and arson, and for blocking the return of those it displaced.

Russia has never pulled back to the lines it agreed to on 12 August 2008, and it has never once let EU monitors past the fence.

1990 to now

Thirty Years of It

Every step of this was Russia’s doing: arming the separatists, flying the aircraft, sending the tanks, and then calling the result a country.

  1. 1990-92

    The first war in the Tskhinvali Region

    Moscow-backed separatist forces fight Georgian troops for a year and a half. Around a thousand people are killed and roughly a hundred Georgian villages are emptied before the June 1992 ceasefire freezes the front.

  2. 1992-93

    The war in Abkhazia

    Fighting begins in August 1992. Russian aircraft, artillery and North Caucasian volunteers fight alongside the separatists. Between ten and fifteen thousand people die.

  3. 27 Sept 1993

    Sukhumi falls

    The city is taken the day after Georgian forces withdraw under a Russian-brokered truce. What follows is the systematic killing and expulsion of Abkhazia's Georgian population - some 250,000 people, driven out over the Kodori pass in the snow.

  4. 1994-99

    The word is said out loud

    The OSCE summits in Budapest, Lisbon and Istanbul each record the ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia. Nothing changes on the ground.

  5. 7-12 Aug 2008

    The invasion

    Russian regular forces cross the border in strength. Gori is bombed. Tanks reach within forty kilometres of Tbilisi. Georgian villages inside the Tskhinvali Region are burned to the ground after the ceasefire, house by house.

  6. 26 Aug 2008

    Russia “recognises” what it took

    Two weeks after invading, Moscow declares both occupied regions independent states. Almost no country in the world agrees.

  7. 2008 -

    The monitors are locked out

    The EU Monitoring Mission deploys that October under the ceasefire Russia signed. It has never been permitted to cross the line, not once, in more than fifteen years.

  8. 2011 -

    Borderization

    Russian troops begin laying barbed wire and planting “state border” signs across farmland, orchards, cemeteries and, in places, straight through the middle of villages. The wire moves again most years. It has never once moved back.

  9. 21 Jan 2021

    Georgia v. Russia (II)

    The European Court of Human Rights rules that Russia has been in effective control of both territories since 12 August 2008, and is answerable for the killings, the torture, the burnt villages and the families it refuses to let home.

  10. Today

    It has not ended

    The fence is still being moved. People are still being detained for walking across land their family has farmed for generations. This is not a frozen conflict; it is an occupation happening now.

Ethnic cleansing

The People Who Cannot Go Home

More than 280,000 Georgians are still displaced inside their own country - the largest displacement in Europe relative to population, and one of the longest-running anywhere. Most were driven out of Abkhazia in 1993. Around 26,000 more were driven out in 2008 and have nothing left to return to.

They are not refugees from a natural disaster. They were removed on purpose, because of who they were, and they are kept out on purpose still. The houses were burned so that returning would be pointless. The land registry was destroyed so that ownership could be denied. This is what the OSCE meant when it wrote the words “ethnic cleansing” into three summit declarations and then did nothing else about it.

Georgians who stayed in the Gali district of Abkhazia may not be taught in their own language. Georgians in Akhalgori need permission from an occupying army to see a doctor on the other side of the wire.

Burned and emptied after August 2008

  • Kekhvi
  • Kurta
  • Achabeti
  • Tamarasheni
  • Kheiti
  • Dzartsemi
  • Eredvi
  • Vanati
  • Avnevi
  • Nuli
  • Argvitsi
  • Disevi
  • Beloti
  • Berula
  • Gugutiantkari
  • Ksuisi
  • Sveri
  • Tsinagari
  • Zemo Achabeti
  • Kvemo Achabeti
  • Karbi
  • Koshka
  • Mereti
  • Tseronisi

Georgian villages in the Liakhvi and Frone valleys and around Akhalgori. Some were levelled so completely that satellite imagery is the only record they were ever there.

Borderization

The Fence Is Still Moving

There is no border here. There is a line Russian soldiers draw with razor wire, at night, a little further south each time - through pasture, through orchards, through the middle of a village called Khurvaleti. Walk the wrong side of it and you are arrested in your own country.

Pasture
Orchard
Houses
Vanishvili house
Cemetery
Church

Occupied

Georgia

Today · 6 of 6 goneOver fifty kilometres of fencing, and hundreds of people detained every year for crossing land their families have farmed for centuries.

Killed at the line

Names, Not Statistics

  • 2014

    Davit Basharuli

    Twenty-two years old. Taken in the occupied Akhalgori district and found dead months later. No one has answered for it.

  • 2016

    Giga Otkhozoria

    Shot dead at the Khurcha crossing by an Abkhaz border guard who walked onto Georgian-controlled ground to do it. It was filmed. He was thirty-one, and had four children.

  • 2018

    Archil Tatunashvili

    Detained in Akhalgori and dead in Tskhinvali custody within a day. His body was held for a month and returned to his family with organs missing.

  • 2019

    Irakli Kvaratskhelia

    Died in the hands of Russian border guards in occupied Abkhazia. Thirty years old.

  • 2023

    Tamaz Ginturi

    Shot by Russian occupation forces near Kirbali while visiting a church on the far side of the wire. Fifteen years after the invasion, and still.

  • And no one tried

    Georgia keeps a list - the Otkhozoria–Tatunashvili list - of those implicated in killings, torture and kidnapping in the occupied territories. No one on it has ever stood trial.

Abkhazia and Samachablo are Georgia.

Everything else on this site - the mountains, the coast, the wine - belongs to a country that is still missing a fifth of itself. If you come to Georgia, come knowing that.

Back to Georgia Overview

Figures and findings drawn from the OSCE summit declarations (Budapest 1994, Lisbon 1996, Istanbul 1999), UN General Assembly resolutions on displaced persons, EU Monitoring Mission reporting, and the European Court of Human Rights judgment in Georgia v. Russia (II), 2021. Boundaries after geoBoundaries and Natural Earth.