Russian imperialist aggression against its neighbors is more relevant today than ever. The war Russia launched against Ukraine has been raging for three years. But the first case of Russian military expansion in the 21st century happened much earlier—and is now rarely discussed.
In August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, and within just a few days of active warfare, Russian troops nearly reached the capital city of Tbilisi. Parts of Georgian territory remain under occupation to this day.
South Ossetia is one of the regions Georgia lost as a result of the invasion. The line of contact between South Ossetia and the rest of Georgia stretches nearly 400 kilometers, with around 10,000 people still living on the Georgian-controlled side. The areas along this line are known as the "Zone of Fear"—a name that reflects the reality on the ground as Russian troops continue to seize bits of Georgian land, including pastures, cemeteries, and entire villages.
The semi-abandoned villages of the Zone of Fear are mostly home to impoverished farmers. The main goal of the Russian occupying forces is to break the will of these people and drive them off their land.
Since 2008, more than three and a half thousand residents of the Zone of Fear have been abducted by Russian border troops and illegally detained in South Ossetia. Illegal arrests and detentions are a tool Russian military forces use to intimidate the local population.
Here are the stories of some of these people.
Luka
— I resisted arrest. But I didn’t fight them—I only shouted that this wasn’t their land and they had no right to detain me. They struck me with the butt of a rifle. After that, they beat me on the head with a baton.
Nowadays Russian forces installed barbed wire where I was detained, but back then there was nothing there.
During one of our meetings, Luka handed me a drawing of a church, sketched on a scrap torn from a school notebook. The first time he was imprisoned, he couldn’t sleep at night—so he scratched an image of a church onto the wall of his cell. Beneath it, he signed his full name.
A few months after Luka was released, a young man he didn’t know came to his village and found him. He told Luka that he had been held in the same cell—and that he often looked at the drawing on the wall.
— My brother was only 15 when he died. I was 12. He died in my arms.
He’d been paralyzed from the waist down since he was nine. Everyone in the village knew how I cared for him. We didn’t have a wheelchair, so I pushed him around in a wheelbarrow. When I went to play football, he always wanted to come. Neighbors barely recognized me without him—we were always together. I couldn’t go anywhere without him, not even to the stadium.
He loved watching us play football. He always cheered for us. If only he were alive now, everything would be just like it used to be.
Courtesy of David Katsarava
Luka was detained several times at the cemetery where his brother is buried. Russian border forces drew the demarcation line right through the middle: the entrance remained on Georgian-controlled land, but his brother’s grave ended up on land occupied by Russian forces.
After a brutal beating during one of his earlier arrests, Luka began having seizures. He would collapse in the street, and strangers would help him get up. Eventually, he was hospitalized and diagnosed with epilepsy. Since then, he has had to take medication three times a day.
In April 2024, Luka was arrested again at his brother’s grave—it was his fifth arrest. The people who managed to get his medication delivered to him in prison likely saved his life. He returned home in October 2024.
Vazha
— I was walking toward the village of M. when I was detained. There were three Russian soldiers with a dog. There was no point in resisting. As soon as they saw a stranger, they came closer and asked me who I was.
They took me to a military base and asked for my ID. Later, an officer came in and said: “So, you’re the president of the association of traumatologists and orthopedists? Why…? How did you end up here? What are you even doing here?
The Russian border guards led me out of the base and handed me over to the Ossetian forces. They wanted to film a video of me saying I had no complaints and was treated well.
They asked, “Do you have any complaints against us?” I answered, “Yes, of course—that you’re here. I hope you go back to where you came from as soon as possible.” They said nothing.
— On the way to the detention center in Tskhinvali, the Russian border guards received word that another man had been detained in the Akhalgori area. He was in the forest with his child, who was about eight years old. The Russians first detained the child, and when the father came to rescue him, they beat the father. The father was taken to Tskhinvali, and the child was left alone in the forest.
They let the man call home to say his child had been left alone in the forest and someone needed to come for him. He had been beaten with a rifle—his nose was broken. So much blood poured from his nose that he had to swallow it.
Vazha was detained on Saturday, and by Tuesday, the trial had already taken place. His lawyer expected two months of pre-trial detention. Instead, the court sentenced him to one year and nine months in prison.
According to Russian legislation used on the territory of South Ossetia, the maximum punishment for violating the border regime is two years. Until then, no one had ever been sentenced to prison for a first-time offense under this article—it usually ended with a fine and deportation.
The story of Vazha has come to symbolize the issue of widespread detentions carried out by Russian forces along the occupation line. These posters were part of a public campaign calling for his release, initiated largely through the efforts of his wife Tamila while he was still in detention in 2019.
Due to political pressure and media attention, Vazha was eventually released after forty-nine days in detention. While in prison, he refused to eat the food provided by the jail authorities or sign any form of confession.
— The worst thing is that out of all four thousand Georgians who were detained at the line of occupation, very few speak out. Everyone is silent.
The road that Vazha took to cross the occupation line is clearly visible from the window of the house where Giorgi and Tamar live.
Courtesy of David Katsarava
Giorgi
— I was little [when my father was detained], but I remember the police coming. I was surprised. At first, I didn’t understand what had happened, who had taken my dad, or why. Then my mom and I sat down, and she explained everything. I was worried because my dad wasn’t there—he had been detained.
We didn’t know when he’d be released, and I started thinking he might never come home.
In 2024, after the Georgian government abandoned Eurointegration and turned the country’s political course toward Russian-style authoritarianism, tens of thousands of young Georgians took to the streets to defend the freedom and independence of their country. Giorgi was among them.
— When I was two, we were in our apple orchard near the line of occupation—my sister, my mom, and dad. We saw several Russian border guards standing on the hill just above us.
They started firing flares at us to drive us out of our own orchard. After that, I never went back. I’m seventeen now, and I know that [our land] can be taken from us at any moment—but I’m not afraid anymore.
Tamar
— In 2008, Russian troops entered the territory of Georgia. They didn’t hurt us directly, but we had to live in constant fear because of all the APCs and tanks moving through. Seeing those vehicles packed with armed soldiers was terrifying.
Russian helicopters flew very low—so low I could almost reach them from the balcony. For three years after the war, my son [Giorgi] would crawl under the bed at the sound of a tractor in the field. He was that scared.
— In 2013, my husband went to our apple orchard to do some spring work. On his way back home, two Russian border guards chased him, and a third ran to cut him off.
During the arrest he resisted, and they struck him in the back with a rifle butt. He couldn’t get away, and they took him to a detention facility in Tskhinvali. Thank God, there was only one attempted assault in the week he spent there. My husband got lucky—many others in that prison were regularly beaten.
After the 2008 war, many residents of the Zone of Fear abandoned their homes and left. Few are willing to live right at the line of occupation in constant fear of Russian expansion.
In the village where Giorgi and Tamar live—like most villages in the region—half the houses are empty and slowly falling apart.
Many Georgian villages in the region were completely destroyed during the 2008 war. Some houses were bombed, others—burned. This map includes data from CNES / Airbus
Tornike
— It was August 2008. I heard gunfire from both sides. My mom and I were picking beans near the house. I remember a Russian military helicopter flying so low I thought it was looking for a place to land.
It was very hot, and we returned home to rest. Then a neighbor came by and said that troops had already entered the village and were detaining people. I didn’t believe him. About half an hour later, I went outside and saw armed soldiers herding villagers toward the church. I went back and told my mother she should leave. She left the house and hid in the garden.
When the soldiers arrived, I opened the gate myself. I was calm—I had never harmed any of them. Where could I run anyway? I opened the gate and let them in. One of them immediately hit me with the butt of his rifle.
Inside Tornike’s house, the soldiers turned everything upside down. They opened closets and wardrobes, flipped beds over. All possessions—clothes, jewelry, money—everything inside the house was left exposed and vulnerable.
This broadcast was filmed by correspondents from Russian state-backed channel NTV in the village where Tornike was on the day Russian and Ossetian forces burned his house and took him prisoner.
— After the search, they took me to the church, where about forty fellow villagers were already being held. Then the soldiers shoved me and another guy into a truck. From what I overheard, I realized the Russians planned to exchange us as war prisoners.
We were kept in detention for two weeks. The way they treated us—I wish I had jumped out of that truck and been shot in the back. I would’ve preferred death to the humiliation.
— When I returned to the village [two weeks later], my house was gone—burned to the ground. Nothing remained except the clothes on my back. The militants had burned everything. But it didn’t matter since we got out alive.
Nothing was left of the house but ashes. They even took the livestock. The damage they caused forced us to start our lives from scratch.
Shota
— It was a hard time. In 2008, Russian and Ossetian troops entered our village and looted homes. My mom, my grandfather, and I didn’t have time to flee. Those who couldn’t hide or escape were rounded up near the church. Men and women were separated.
I was sure they did it so we wouldn’t witness the killing of our loved ones. I was terrified my mother would see me being killed. They led us like we were going to be executed. We didn’t even hope they’d let us go.
While we were being held in the church, they looted our homes. The next day, the militants left, but tanks arrived and blocked every road to the village. It was terrifying. Russian troops set up checkpoints and completely cut us off from the rest of Georgia.
During the three months they stayed, most villagers left. A few of us, including me, stayed behind. When things got tense, we had to sleep out in the fields.
— You can hear Russian troops conducting artillery drills from my house. They fire toward the mountains, not toward us, but it’s still deafening. Windows in my house rattle every time they shoot.
If you climb into the forest, you can see flashes of gunfire and smoke rising from their artillery. They say many Ossetian soldiers were mobilized and sent to fight in Ukraine, but the Russians stayed behind on the bases. And they’re still firing—just like before.
The Death of Tamaz
On November 5, 2023, I visited a village in the Zone of Fear to interview a local resident. The next day, all of Georgia was shaken by the news that a relative of the person I had spoken to—Tamaz Ginturi—had been killed by Russian border guards near the demarcation line between South Ossetia and Georgia.
Courtesy of David Katsarava
That day, Ginturi and his friend L. visited a local cemetery where their loved ones were buried. Afterward, they got into Ginturi’s car and drove to a church located in the occupied territory. The church had long been boarded up by Russian border guards to prevent Georgians from nearby villages from visiting. Ginturi and his friend broke open the door with an axe and went inside.
Not long after, they heard gunfire and ran back to the car. As they tried to drive away, Russian border guards opened fire. Following the killing of Tamaz Ginturi, Georgian forensic investigators recovered thirty-five Kalashnikov bullets from the bed of his truck.
Tamaz Ginturi was buried in his home village—in the same cemetery he had visited on the day he died. Hundreds of people from across Georgia came to pay their respects.
Rezo
— When I was detained, I asked the Russian border guards how I was supposed to know where the "border" was. One of them said, “See that bush? Everything beyond it is ours.”
After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, their troops took control of the forest where our pastures were. They want to intimidate people. They have dogs and guns—we have nothing. Of course we’re afraid. Once, a Russian guard took my bull. A few days later, he demanded a ransom—200 US dollars. I borrowed it from a neighbor and paid, but I never got the bull back.
— The day I was detained, my neighbors and I were walking home from the forest when Russian guards stopped us. They forced us into a car and took us to a military base, where they interrogated us.
They asked all kinds of questions: who our parents were, how many children we had, whether we had any tattoos. Then they put us in a car with barred windows and drove us to the pre-trial detention center in Tskhinvali. We spent a week there before being transferred to prison. The guards took our phones—we couldn’t call anyone.
— At trial, the judge claimed we were caught in a car and had chainsaws with us. I was shocked. I told him we were near the forest by our village, with no car or chainsaws. The judge said we needed witnesses to prove it and postponed the hearing.
A week later, the witnesses arrived. All three confirmed my words. In the end, the court sentenced me to two and a half years in prison—but after my lawyer intervened, I was given a suspended sentence and released. If I get caught near the occupation line again within the next two and a half years, I’ll be sent straight to prison for five years—no trial.
Jemal
— I was coming back from the fields, hauling corn for the cattle. As soon as I got home, my mom told me my father had been taken. I looked up the hill and saw Russian border guards dragging him away. My mom was crying. I saw them beating my father. Everything inside me twisted.
What could I do? I realized I was powerless. The advantage was theirs. What could I do — even though they were right there, just behind the church?
Zurab and Eka
— In May 2023, my wife and I were herding cattle about 200 meters from the occupation line. A Russian border guard appeared — he was drunk. I saw two more further down the slope. We tried to run. I might have made it, but my wife couldn’t.
I stopped to wait for her, and two of the guards jumped on me, while the third went after Eka. One of them fired seven shots into the ground right next to my feet. Then they struck me in the head with a rifle butt several times and I fell. They threw a dog leash around my neck, trying to choke me. I managed to knock one of them down. Another shouted that they should drag me across the occupation line and bury me there.
Their goal was to drag us onto Russian-controlled territory. One guard twisted my wife’s arm, and when he tried to twist the other, I yelled for her to bite him. She bit his arm, and he backed off.
— We struggled with them for 25 minutes until the Georgian police arrived from the village. As they were trying to detain us, I asked one of the Russian guards, “What did we do wrong? Why are you doing this to us?” He answered, “Because you’re killing our brothers in Ukraine. I f***ed your mom.” I don’t think they cared at all about us crossing the occupation line.
The Sorrows of This Field Are Yours / 2025
This project would not have been possible without the support and help of David Katsarava and other members of Strength in Unity, as well as Teimuraz Tsimintia, A.V., A.Y., Michael Grieve, Rafał Milach, Isabel Latza, N.T. and S.N.