Snipers, Goncharenko and Azov: how Russian propaganda found 'Ukrainian trace' at protests in Georgia

Russian propagandists falsified documents, manipulated and edited photos to 'confirm' Ukraine's meddling in Georgia elections

Parliamentary elections were held in Georgia on October 26. According to the Georgian Central Election Commission, the pro-Russian ruling party "Georgian Dream" won the elections. However, the country's president Salome Zourabichvili and opposition political parties did not recognize these results and declared massive falsifications. Against this background, many Georgian citizens, who do not agree with these results, began to protest.

Russian propaganda immediately "found" a "Ukrainian trace" in these protests to aggravate the situation.

Russian propaganda media began to spread fake materials even before the vote in Georgia. On October 25, the TASS news agency created two related news stories about the alleged training of "extremists" by the Ukrainian special services, supposedly to destabilize the situation in Georgia. Later, they began to be replicated by other Russian media outlets and many Kremlin bots on X.

Initially, TASS published an alleged response of the head of the Mariupol District Police Department in the Donetsk Region, Oleh Yaholnyk, to a query from the SBU's Main Directorate in the Dnipropetrovsk Region. This "document" says that the SBU is supposedly looking for Ukrainian and Georgian citizens who previously lived in Ukraine but after the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion moved to Georgia or plan to do so.

The text of the propagandists' "news story" also states that the national police of the Dnipropetrovsk region, at the request of the Security Service of Ukraine in the same region, is allegedly "looking for" ethnic Georgians living in Ukraine to "organize riots in Georgia." In particular, the issue concerns current and former soldiers of the Azov regiment and military personnel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. At the same time, there is no information about this in the "letter," which TASS published as "evidence."

However, the Russian news agency did "find" a "former Azov fighter." TASS published another "news story" about this on the same day. Propagandists claimed that Kyiv had allegedly sent a Ukrainian citizen of Georgian origin Zakro Nodarovich Avaliani, born in 1997, who is a native of Mariupol, to Sakartvelo. Fakers claimed that this person was a former fighter of the Azov regiment who was supposed to lead extremists allegedly planning to organize riots in Georgia. A photo of the man is also attached to the material.

These two "news stories" from TASS are fake. Let's analyze the forged document.

First of all, the address indicated by the propagandists in the header of the letter, namely, 15B Volodymyra Velykoho Street in Dnipro, has nothing to do with either the police or the SBU. According to YouControl, 19 legal entities are registered at this address and specified government agencies are not among them.

Secondly, the text of the "document" contains a number of grammatical errors and uses a number of words and phrases that are not typical for the Ukrainian language.

In order to confirm the Mariupol origin of the "saboteur," TASS decided to find at least one Azov fighter in the next story. Using the search4faces service for searching for people by photo on VKontakte, a Russian social media site banned in Ukraine, we were able to identify the man. In the photo, it is indeed a native of Mariupol, who has the surname Avaliani, but he is mentioned as Oleksandr, rather than Zakro Avaliani. In the photo, he is on the right.

Among his friends, there is a profile without a photo with the name "Zakro Avaliani", but it contains a date of birth of September 22 (the same as that of Alexander Avaliani - ed.) 1996.

In addition, in the Russian search engine Yandex we also managed to find the account of the so-called Zakro Avaliani on the Internet portal Mail.ru. In the profile of this person, it is indicated that he was born on September 22, 1996, rather than in 1997, as claimed by the propagandists.

All three profiles most likely belong to the same person. However, nothing among the photos confirms involvement in the Ukrainian army and the Azov regiment. It should be noted that he posted the latest photos from Germany on his VKontakte page in April 2024.

Later, on October 28, Russian media outlets and pro-war Telegram channels shared a video of protesters outside the building of the Georgian parliament. In the video, demonstrators walk towards the retreating police. The post under the video states that Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko personally brought "professional protesters" who led the crowd to Georgia.

This is a fake. These photos were taken on May 14 in Tbilisi and are related to a protest rally against the Georgian law on "foreign agents. In the video, we see the protesters heading towards the police.

It should be noted that Oleksiy Goncharenko was indeed in Georgia on the day of the elections, but as an observer from PACE, as he wrote about this in advance on his social media accounts.

Another fake spread by propagandists is the information that Ukraine allegedly openly recruits men to "interfere" in Georgian politics. To confirm this, the fakers published a photo of the advertisement about a job in Georgia, in particular for men, who, if they agree, will be supposedly helped to cross the border. For this work, they promise a payment of 100 euros per day for an ordinary "mass gathering" and 150 euros for those who will rally with flags.

When creating the fake, the propagandists forgot to cut out the watermark with the logo of the Rivne website from the uppermost corner of the original photo. Further, by searching for the keywords "site:www.0362.ua announcement" we managed to find the original photo, which was published on the website of the city of Rivne back in 2021. However, the propagandists "upgraded" the original photo, changing some elements - the gate, the roof of the building, asphalt, a mailbox and stairs with bricks in the background.

An analysis of the fake using the photo and video verification plugin InVID also confirmed that the propaganda "photo" was fabricated.

Another pseudo-news item spread by the state propaganda Russian media outlets, in particular RIA Novosti, is the report about the so-called "Ukrainian snipers" who were sent to Georgia for protests.

This is a fake. It was refuted by fact-checkers from the Myth Detector project. They were able to identify a protester who was wearing camouflage clothing. He turned out to be a citizen of Georgia, Lasha Katsiashvili, who works as a civil affairs teacher at a school and has no relation to the Ukrainian army. According to Katsiashvili, he is a hiker and often goes to rallies with his friends in uniform. "My friends and I often go hiking, and clothes in this style are also related to this. Because of convenience, I always go to such rallies and similar gatherings in this form," Katsiashvili said.

The man also provided Myth Detector with information about other people standing next to him in the video shared by Russian media. He said that he was with four friends at a rally in front of the parliament building on October 28, but three of them were dressed in hiking uniforms, including Katsiashvili, and the footage circulated by the propaganda media showing a hiking backpack and a chevron with the image of the Ukrainian and Georgian flags belongs to Giorgi Kotolashvili.

The news story about "snipers trained in Ukraine" was invented by Russian propaganda to intimidate Georgian protesters with the events on Maidan Nezalezhnosti and Instytutska Street in Kyiv back in 2014, when snipers killed the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred.

In general, this is a targeted attack to destabilize the situation in Georgia. Immediately after that, Kremlin propagandist Sergei Mardan wrote on his social networks that in response to the "Ukrainian snipers," it was necessary to send "Russian snipers" to Georgia, thereby calling for direct military aggression against Georgia.

Thus, the Russian Federation is conducting a large-scale disinformation campaign in Georgia. Kremlin propagandists are trying to pass off the protest of the Georgian people and the opposition against election fraud by the pro-Russian ruling party as a "Ukrainian special operation" aimed at destabilizing the situation in the country.

Earlier, Ukrinform refuted a fake about the mobilization of men aged 19 to 21 who were offered payments of UAH 400,000.

Andriy Olenin, Dmytro Badrak