These are tense days in Tbilisi.
 
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shifted everyone’s idea of what might be possible, and all the new possibilities seem bad.
 
One colleague told me that now, when she walks around the streets of Tbilisi, she imagines how the buildings would look in rubble, Mariupol-style. “I never used to think like this,” she said. I didn’t either, but a lot of things didn’t seem possible until recently.
 
Another Georgian woman I met volunteered a prediction that, if Russian troops invaded as they have in Ukraine, Georgians would understand they are too weak to fight back and would simply resign themselves to conquest.
 
These are far-fetched scenarios, of course, but they are going through everyone’s head.
 
Even the more realistic scenarios are disorienting. Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelenskiy has openly acknowledged that he is ready to accept foreign policy neutrality as part of a peace agreement with Russia. That would mean renouncing hopes for NATO membership, and in that case, how could Georgia hold on? Its own NATO aspirations have been inextricably linked with Ukraine’s since the alliance’s 2008 Bucharest Declaration said that both countries “will become members of NATO.”
 
NATO membership was a distant prospect at best, but formally renouncing it would be a nearly existential shift for the Georgian elite, and it’s still almost taboo to discuss. One Georgian journalist who broached the subject on Facebook was shouted down and forced to take the suggestion back. Тhe idea is starting to become part of the conversation, but actually going through with it would make all the country’s recent political crises pale in comparison.
 
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Russians have flooded into Tbilisi to escape the wave of repression and punishing economic sanctions that have resulted from the war. In many cases, Georgians’ justified mistrust of the Russian government has turned into a desire for collective punishment of ordinary Russian people. Anti-Russian sentiment has soared and “Russians go home!” graffiti can be seen around Tbilisi. This, even though by all accounts the Russians coming to Tbilisi are overwhelmingly anti-war and anti-Putin.
 
They often wear Ukrainian flags, whether out of conviction, fear, or some of both. One friend who rents her apartment on Airbnb recently got a rental request from a St. Petersburg couple. They explained that they opposed the war and fled because of a fear of persecution. “We fully understand the current situation, however, and will accept rejection because of our nationality,” they concluded.
 
Still, it’s the stories of ugly Russians that seem to travel much more quickly. One recording of a Russian woman who snapped after being told to speak Georgian in a grocery store, flipping off the bystanders and shouting “Slava Rossii!” (“Glory to Russia!”), went viral.
 
All of it seems to be coming to a boil. Last weekend I heard two firsthand reports of fights in bars between Russians and Georgians. If that’s what I heard about, how many more must there have been?
 
This, in turn, reinforces everyone’s fears of what the Kremlin might have in store for Georgia. For years Moscow has justified punitive policies against Georgia, like a ban on direct flights, by citing “Russophobia” in the country. That had been mostly a bogus pretext, but now that Russophobia has become real, the Kremlin and Russian state media are curiously quiet about it. Perhaps that is a trump card Moscow is holding until the right time to play it. Just another thing to worry about.
 
-Joshua Kucera