Hunting with drones

In the distance, far beyond the brown-green fields along the Georgia and South Ossetia border, rise the jagged Caucasus Mountains. There an antenna can be spotted on a hill with the naked eye, standing near  a few white barrack buildings. “That’s a military base, the Russians are over there,” says Dato, lowering his binoculars. It is not the Georgian activist’s real name as he wants to remain anonymous. For more than seven years, he and other volunteers have been documenting the land grab underway in their home region.

Since the 1980s, the northern Georgian region of South Ossetia has been contested and since the Caucasus War of 2008 it has been under de facto Russian control. On paper, there is a clearly laid out ceasefire line between the occupied territories and Georgian territory. In theory.

Several times a week, Dato comes to the “occupation line” and launches his drone. He films Russian field camps that are little more than shelters covered with camouflage tarps, as well as the large military bases near the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali. Above all, he documents the course of the border. And this border is changing: “Piece by piece, Russia is appropriating Georgian territory,” says Dato.

During the Caucasus War, Georgia lost around twenty percent of its territory with South Ossetia and Abkhazia; since 2008, the border has continued to shift and an additional five percent has been occupied. “Sometimes it’s three hundred square meters at once, sometimes just a few meters,” says Dato.

Take, for example, the story of an elderly man whose property, lay on the Georgian side of the ceasefire line until 2013. Then, one morning he woke up to find that the border fence had been moved overnight to the other side of his house. Without any notice, the man suddenly found himself living in Russian-controlled South Ossetia.

In principle, it should not be the responsibility of private individuals to monitor border demarcations in conflict regions. Yet Georgian border guards simply look the other way. This is due to the pro-Russian stance of the ruling party “Georgian Dream,” which was re-elected to power in October 2024 and which makes policies with a view to avoiding another war with Moscow. It is the party of Bidzina Ivanishvili,  a billionaire with close business ties to Russia.

At the same time, lives are at stake: “villagers are abducted across the occupation line and sometimes also killed,” says Dato.

On average, a Georgian from the local rural population is detained by Russian soldiers every third day and forcibly taken into South Ossetia. The story is usually the same: villagers are working alone in their fields until they are forced at gunpoint by Russian soldiers to cross the border. They are then made to sign a statement admitting that they illegally crossed a “state border.” Only after paying a fine of up to 800 lari (about 250 euros) are they released again.