By AFP and Kontur | 2023-11-29

ERGNETI, Georgia -- Sitting among fading rose bushes in her yard in northern Georgia, Lia Chlachidze said locals live under "a permanent threat" from Russian troops stationed nearby in the separatist Tskhinvali district.

Tskhinvali city is capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia.

The 70-year-old's village of Ergneti lies just meters from a Russian checkpoint at the de facto border with South Ossetia, which Moscow has controlled since it invaded in 2008.

"The locals' number one challenge is the problem of security. Russian soldiers could come at any moment and arrest us," Chlachidze told AFP.

"Life here is like sitting on a powder keg."

Her concerns -- echoed in villages throughout the region -- were validated this month when authorities announced that Russian troops had killed a 58-year-old civilian.

They said the man, Tamaz Ginturi, along with several other villagers, went to pray in a church that Russian soldiers had denied Georgians access to earlier this year.

Authorities in the capital Tbilisi say that hundreds of ethnic Georgians have been detained by Russian troops since the five-day war 15 years ago.

In a particularly egregious incident in 2018, one of the detainees, a 35-year-old vegetable seller Archil Tatunashvili, was tortured to death in a South Ossetian prison.

His mutilated body was returned to his family only after weeks of diplomatic negotiations by Western countries.

"We're afraid of the Russians. They're too close," said Levan Iluridze, 58, a resident of the village of Tirdznisi.

'Illegal borderization'

Tskhinvali sits in the autonomous South Ossetia enclave -- created by the Soviet Bolsheviks upon their annexation of Georgia in 1921 because of its largely Ossetian population.

Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 after Tbilisi launched a large-scale military offensive against South Ossetian militia who were shelling Georgian villages.

After routing Georgia's small army in just five days, Russia officially recognized the pro-Kremlin authorities in Tskhinvali and in another secessionist Georgian region, Abkhazia, and stationed military bases there.

Moscow still controls the breakaway regions, where Russian is widely spoken, even though the territories are recognized internationally as part of Georgia.

Since 2008, Russia's military has been building barbed wire fences between South Ossetia and the rest of Georgia, with the aim of transforming the line into a "state border."

The process has been dubbed "illegal borderization" by international observers and has forced almost a quarter of the local population to move deeper into Georgia.

"As the line divides communities and families, the fence along it produces an array of difficulties for people living on both sides," the International Crisis Group said last year.

"For years, no child was born in Ergneti; living conditions are dire here; the village is dying out," said Chlachidze.

"But I can't leave this place; I feel like something terrible would happen, that there will be the end of the world if I leave," she added.

'War a problem for the whole world'

While Chlachidze's house was burned down during the war, in 2014 she opened a makeshift "museum of occupation" in the wine cellar of her rebuilt home.

It features photos of war victims and exhibits like a Russian shell fragment and a book by the German poet Friedrich Schiller bearing the footprint of a Russian soldier's boot.

"This is not a museum of aggression. This is a museum for peace," she said.

"If not for the Russians, we -- Ossetians and Georgians -- would have made peace long ago," said Chlachidze, whose husband was killed by an Ossetian militia in the 1990s.

Many in Georgia pin their hopes on the prospect of Tbilisi joining the European Union (EU), a long-standing bid that recently received a boost after the European Commission (EC) recommended granting the country official candidate status.

The EC is part of the EU's executive arm.

"If we enter the [EU], Russians will leave Georgia. If not, they will invade again," said farmer Iluridze in the village of Tirdznisi.

His fellow villager, 79-year-old Robinson Imedashvili, agreed.

"[Russian President Vladimir] Putin wouldn't dare to attack an EU country," he said.

"We are part of Europe. Europe has been Georgians' primordial dream, for centuries," he added.

But Chlachidze linked her country's future to the battlefield in Ukraine, saying Georgia would be "saved" when Russia is defeated.

"There wouldn't be a war in Ukraine if the world had raised its voice against what Russia did in Georgia," she said.

"A war is not a single nation's problem. Every war is a problem for the whole world."