Remind Russia every day: You are an occupant!

Every year, a question resurfaces in Georgia: did the war with Russia begin on the night of August 7 or on August 8, 2008? The debate is almost ritual, tied to the tragic anniversary of the five-day war. Yet those who live along the occupation line remind us that the story did not begin in 2008. Nor in Abkhazia in the early 1990s. Nor even in the turmoil of the twentieth century. The history of Russian imperial expansion into Georgia stretches back centuries, from the annexation of Kartli-Kakheti, Imereti, Guria, Svaneti, Abkhazia, and Samegrelo, to the abolition of the Georgian Church’s autocephaly, to Sovietization. The pattern is as old as the relationship itself.

On August 7 this year, one of the darkest dates in Georgia’s modern history, I found myself in Ergneti, a village pressed against the occupation line. From here, the view opens onto Tskhinvali, desolate, muted, a city suspended in abandonment. The weight of that sight was physical: it pressed on my head, slid onto my shoulders, and tightened around my throat like a ball of iron. Breathing grew heavy. Anger followed.

Russia’s creeping occupation is not just a geopolitical maneuver but a lived reality. In every Georgian town and village, open support for Russian imperialism should be regarded as shameful and unacceptable. The legacy of Moscow’s domination is not a recent grievance. For centuries, Russia has stood in the way of Georgia’s dream of a unified, independent state. Even today, patriotism risks being dismissed as reactionary, while the fundamental truth remains: Georgia’s survival depends on its people’s willingness to claim responsibility for their own future.

In Ergneti, only meters from the line, stands a modest but powerful space: the Museum of the August 2008 War. Created in her own home by Lia Chlachidze in 2017, it preserves memory against the tide of erasure. Every Georgian should visit, not only to honor the dead but also to keep sight of the enemy’s face.

Chlachidze’s story embodies the pull of home. On August 19, 2008, while Russian troops still occupied Gori, she dressed in a long black gown and began the journey back to her destroyed village. “What is a house, and why does it call to you so relentlessly?” she recalls. “I had no news of mine, but I walked. Every time I saw a Russian or Ossetian soldier, I shut my eyes. When I reached Ergneti, the wind carried the terrible creak of burnt tin roofs.”

That day she picked up a Georgian flag, abandoned and soiled in the mud. She carried it back to her house, hid it in the attic, and only rediscovered it years later. Today it holds pride of place in the museum. For her, it must one day be raised in Tskhinvali as a symbol of return.

Chlachidze’s resilience borders on mythic. She rebuilt her house, created a museum in its lower floor, and turned her personal grief into collective memory. In her words: “Would a mother ever abandon her child? Could I ever abandon my home?” Even as she admits to fear, of footsteps outside, of the sound of a falling leaf mistaken for an intruder, she chose to remain. She chose defiance.

In her yard lie the remnants of cluster bombs, the same outlawed weapons now used in Ukraine. Visitors from that country, she says, often leave in tears, recognizing the same “handwriting” of Russian aggression. The tactics do not change, not in Abkhazia, not in Tskhinvali, not in Ukraine. What fails to change is the world’s ability to stop them.

The museum in Ergneti is both fragile and indestructible, a testimony that resists silence. It is a reminder, as the Georgian scholar Alexander Rondeli once said: "Remind Russia every day: You are an occupant!"