Opinion | The Russians Are Coming. There Could Be Downsides.

At the same time, more and more Georgian politicians are spreading anti-western sentiments, even accusing U.S. Ambassador Kelly Degnan of allegedly forcing Georgia to go to war with Russia. The Georgian opposition claims that the anti-western rhetoric is being promoted by Ivanishvili, but the roots of the problem are more likely in Moscow, which has been waging both hot and irregular wars against Georgia since the Georgian government expressed its desire to join the European Union and NATO.

This time, the protestors or more accurately the people of Georgia, gained a big victory. The ruling party recalled their proposal.

But that victory could be short-lived. In this state of political disarray, Georgia provides fertile soil for Russia’s psychological operations. For example, disinformation suggesting the United States was working to drag Georgia into the Russian-Ukrainian war could lead both to the escalation of conflict among the elites and violence on the streets. This is just one hypothetical line of disinformation. There could be many. With the rise of populism around the world, including in the United States, utter lies become a tool of both domestic and international politics.

There is more the FSB could do to unsettle the region. The FSB can blackmail refugees by threatening the safety of their relatives in Russia; there is evidence that the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin ally, has been doing this for years with the Chechen diaspora in Europe and Canada. Kadyrov’s methods are brutal, including taking relatives of refugees as hostages, threatening the Chechens who do not cooperate with torture, paying those who cooperate, recruiting young Chechens through martial arts clubs, and fabricating criminal charges against refugees.

The FSB may also be planning red-herring operations with the purpose of creating tensions between refugees and their hosts. The Russians already did something similar in Germany in 2016, when Russian media used an alleged kidnapping and rape of a 13-year-old Russian girl by refugees from the Middle East in Berlin to accuse Germany of being lenient on child abuse and Muslim immigrants’ alleged criminal behavior. After an investigation, the case turned out to be a fake, yet it caused a series of protests by Russian speakers in German cities. The goal of the operation was to spike anti-immigrant sentiment and boost support for right-wing political parties.

Lastly and most disturbingly, the FSB could stoke anti-western attitudes among the refugees themselves. Nationalism is not alien to the Russian diaspora. Russians can vote abroad as long as they maintain Russian citizenship, and many do so, in spite of living permanently in other countries. Many among those who left the USSR or Russia in the 1980s, 1990s and in early 2000s — especially in the United States and United Kingdom – initially voted against Putin yet switched their allegiance after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014. In 2018, Putin received a stunning 81 percent of the vote by Russian citizens in Germany, 72 percent in Israel, 63 percent in France, 63 percent in the United States of America, and 52 percent in the United Kingdom — a country which is a home to many anti-Putin activists.