Opinion | The Russians Are Coming. There Could Be Downsides.

For a country that was invaded by Russia back in 2008, Georgia would have good reason to be hostile to its much larger, imperialist neighbor. Georgia, like Ukraine, has a distinct language and culture and leans westward, having expressed a desire to join NATO. Russia has thwarted that by occupying 20 percent of its territory.

But despite those tensions, on a recent trip to its capital, Tbilisi, I saw how Georgians continue to welcome most things Russian. The city’s premier drama theater, founded in 1845 during the heyday of the Russian Empire, is still playing Russian classics in the Russian language including “Uncle Vanya” by Anton Chekhov. The city’s main opera and ballet theater, founded in 1851, features Russia’s iconic classic “Swan Lake” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 

This welcome extends to Russians themselves. Georgia has already accepted well over 100,000 Russian exiles, more than any other country as a proportion of its small population of 3.7 million. Most of the exiles are legitimate anti-war refugees who oppose their country’s invasion of Ukraine and are deeply thankful to the Georgian people and the Georgian state for providing refuge. In one of Tbilisi’s small, family-owned restaurants, I encountered a group of young Russians who escaped from Moscow where they had made a living as standup comedians. They fled conscription and censorship; there is no place for political satire in Russia now, since Russian law enforcement has recently begun indicting people for political jokes. These young men and women told me they would happily go back as soon as the political situation permits.

I also encountered two young gay men who fled St. Petersburg not just from the war but, as they put it, from the psychological and political nastiness of Russian life under Putin. They emphasized they cannot believe how nicely they are treated in Tbilisi (even though Georgia is not the friendliest place for the LGBTQ community).

Inside Russia, Kremlin propaganda spits out lies that Russians in other countries are mistreated and that Russian culture is being cancelled. It is the opposite. Countries from Germany to Kazakhstan and even Mongolia have accepted Russian anti-war refugees by the thousands.

It is noble of the international community — and especially of countries like Georgia that in different periods have been occupied by Russia — to accept these Russian exiles. Indeed, these young Russians deserve both admiration and help since, importantly, they could become allies for the West in communicating with ordinary Russians in Russia. They could also play a crucial role in rebuilding Russia after the political regime built by Vladimir Putin ceases to exist.

Yet notwithstanding this promising mission, the Russian exiles also pose a major security risk to the countries where they are landing. The main reason is that the Kremlin has long exploited the Russian diaspora as part of its irregular warfare operations. Given the size and spread of the new Russian diaspora, there is no doubt that strategists in the FSB are taking the opportunity to plot nasty operations.

Georgia is one of the few countries where Russians can travel without visas or any serious vetting, and then can stay there for long periods of time — a great way to escape from the military draft. But it is also a great way for the Kremlin to plant its loyalists, spies, and operatives on Georgian soil — something the Georgians I met on my trip were well aware of. And from there, it’s far from unthinkable that the Kremlin will spread its agents elsewhere; a recent report indicates that already more than a dozen FSB agents have been caught trying to enter the U.S. across the U.S.-Mexico border pretending to be political refugees who face persecution in Russia for independent journalism and work for NGOs.

There is opportunity in the new Russian diaspora for the West. And danger.

The goal of Russia in a country like Georgia is to cause social unrest, instability, and chaos. And Georgia is already aflame.

In recent weeks, Georgia has been experiencing a political crisis that included a fistfight in the parliament and a violent standoff between protesters and the police on the streets of Tbilisi. Since 2012, Georgian politics has been dominated by a party named “Georgian Dream” that is sponsored by a pro-Russian billionaire named Bidzina Ivanishvili. The unrest was caused by the ruling party’s effort to introduce a law that would require non-governmental organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funds from abroad to register as foreign agents. The law, by no coincidence, is very reminiscent of the law Russia imposed on the eve of its invasion of Ukraine that forced most non-governmental organizations and media outlets in Russia to close or flee.

At the same time, more and more Georgian politicians are spreading anti-western sentiments, even accusing U.S. Ambassador Kelly Degnan of allegedly forcing Georgia to go to war with Russia. The Georgian opposition claims that the anti-western rhetoric is being promoted by Ivanishvili, but the roots of the problem are more likely in Moscow, which has been waging both hot and irregular wars against Georgia since the Georgian government expressed its desire to join the European Union and NATO.

This time, the protestors or more accurately the people of Georgia, gained a big victory. The ruling party recalled their proposal.

But that victory could be short-lived. In this state of political disarray, Georgia provides fertile soil for Russia’s psychological operations. For example, disinformation suggesting the United States was working to drag Georgia into the Russian-Ukrainian war could lead both to the escalation of conflict among the elites and violence on the streets. This is just one hypothetical line of disinformation. There could be many. With the rise of populism around the world, including in the United States, utter lies become a tool of both domestic and international politics.

There is more the FSB could do to unsettle the region. The FSB can blackmail refugees by threatening the safety of their relatives in Russia; there is evidence that the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin ally, has been doing this for years with the Chechen diaspora in Europe and Canada. Kadyrov’s methods are brutal, including taking relatives of refugees as hostages, threatening the Chechens who do not cooperate with torture, paying those who cooperate, recruiting young Chechens through martial arts clubs, and fabricating criminal charges against refugees.

The FSB may also be planning red-herring operations with the purpose of creating tensions between refugees and their hosts. The Russians already did something similar in Germany in 2016, when Russian media used an alleged kidnapping and rape of a 13-year-old Russian girl by refugees from the Middle East in Berlin to accuse Germany of being lenient on child abuse and Muslim immigrants’ alleged criminal behavior. After an investigation, the case turned out to be a fake, yet it caused a series of protests by Russian speakers in German cities. The goal of the operation was to spike anti-immigrant sentiment and boost support for right-wing political parties.

Lastly and most disturbingly, the FSB could stoke anti-western attitudes among the refugees themselves. Nationalism is not alien to the Russian diaspora. Russians can vote abroad as long as they maintain Russian citizenship, and many do so, in spite of living permanently in other countries. Many among those who left the USSR or Russia in the 1980s, 1990s and in early 2000s — especially in the United States and United Kingdom – initially voted against Putin yet switched their allegiance after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. In 2018, Putin received a stunning 81 percent of the vote by Russian citizens in Germany, 72 percent in Israel, 63 percent in France, 63 percent in the United States of America, and 52 percent in the United Kingdom — a country which is a home to many anti-Putin activists.

The Russian diaspora also tends to support the most conservative parties in the countries where they live: Alternative für Deutschland and PEGIDA in Germany, Likud and Israel Our Home in Israel. In Europe, especially in Germany, quite a few Russians actively participate in anti-immigrant, anti-Ukraine, and even pro-Putin demonstrations. The hypocrisy is that, while supporting Russia and opposing German military and financial aid to Ukraine, they do not want to go back to Russia. While the countries with the highest concentrations of Russian exiles have the most at risk, the United States is not insulated from this danger. Already, some Russian high-profile expats have supported conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Clearly, the Russians who have fled Putin’s regime now are not fond of Putin and war. But Russia’s vision of itself as a great power with a world mission is a powerful one with a long history, a mission which, in the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, is pan-European and universal, aimed at “the final brotherly communion of all nations.” It is difficult to predict what political preferences the Russian anti-war refugees will have if they stay in a country like Georgia for many years, or what side they will take in the case of a new hot war between Russia and Georgia.

These are security concerns for Georgia and other post-Soviet countries that currently accept Russian refugees, concerns that those countries must take seriously, boosting both intelligence operations and integration efforts. Otherwise, these exiles could pose as much peril as promise.