Russian activist’s disappearance alarms anti-Putin exiles in Georgia

Anti-Kremlin activist Rafail Shepelev did not take his safety for granted in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, where he moved to in 2021 after being arrested several times in his Russian homeland for protesting against the regime of president Vladimir Putin.

So friends quickly became concerned when Shepelev said he was going out to the shops on October 12th and never came back. They reported his disappearance to the Georgian police, but discovered only this week that he is back in Russia, and behind bars.

Court documents show that Shepelev was brought before a court in the Russian city of Vladikavkaz, on the other side of the Caucasus Mountains from Georgia, on a minor hooliganism charge the day after he vanished from Tbilisi. Sources say he is now facing much more serious allegations – probably of terrorism – and the possibility of a long jail term.

The spectre of an abduction by Moscow’s security services sent a chill through the Russian-exile community in Georgia, which includes about 70,000 people who fled the country after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and several thousand activists, journalists and others whose opposition to Putin is publicly known.

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The Georgian interior ministry gave its first public account of Shepelev’s disappearance this week, and it may be no less strange or sinister than a possible kidnapping in Tbilisi.

Georgia says Shepelev took a taxi, alone, to the remote village of Kirbali, about 115km northwest of Tbilisi. It sits on the edge of the South Ossetia region of Georgia that has been controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists for 30 years, and which Russia recognised as independent after a brief war with Tbilisi’s forces in 2008.

Locals say he asked for directions to a church in part of the village where Russian troops are often seen and where, last week, they shot dead one Kirbali resident and abducted another. Ignoring the villagers’ warnings, Shepelev walked to the church, where he appeared to be met and taken away by Russian troops.

“He said he was going out to the shop, took very little money and his phone, and that’s it. He always told neighbours when he’d be back and was extremely cautious about security,” Egor Kuroptev, director of the Free Russia Foundation in the South Caucasus, says of Shepelev’s departure from his Tbilisi apartment.

“When he was so cautious, how could he go of his own free will to the occupation line, when locals told him not to go there? And when he knew he was facing charges in Russia and couldn’t go back there because he’d immediately be arrested?”

Kuroptev says the answer might be a possible threat to Shepelev’s son, who still lives in the activist’s home region near Yekaterinburg and was visited by Russian police in recent weeks.

“We know of cases where people were contacted from Russia and made to go back there because of relatives still in Russia,” he says.

“It is very easy to threaten relatives in Russia ... Most likely [Shepelev] was made to go there. Either he was threatened or manipulated in some other way to go back. I’d say there’s only a 0.1 per cent chance that he went there of his own free will.”

Two Russian anti-Putin activists were detained in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia in recent months and covertly handed over to Moscow, in cases that Kuroptev believes could be connected to Shepelev’s disappearance. All three have been linked with anarchist groups in Russia, where the security services are concerned about the role of anarchists in sabotaging the war effort with attacks on conscription offices, rail lines and other facilities.

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“The main reason [for the arrests] is probably to threaten anarchist groups inside Russia. They [the authorities] are threatening patriots, groups of football fans and others who could actually do something [against the regime],” Kuroptev says. “When they demonstratively kidnap someone abroad it is to show groups in Russia that they can even capture them over there [in other countries].”

Kuroptev says he cannot be sure that Shepelev left Georgia under duress, but describes the case as “extraordinary” for a country where Russian emigres have felt safe.

It has added to concern among political exiles over the Georgian government’s perceived eagerness to improve ties with Moscow; it refuses to join western sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and relaunched direct flights to Russia this year.

“The community is very nervous,” says Kuroptev, adding that the Free Russia Foundation is now questioning its future in Tbilisi. “We’re rethinking the situation – we’re not sure whether we should stay.”