More Than 100,000 Russians Traveled To Georgia In One Week
1- 28.08.2026, 13:11
Russian citizens fear mobilization.
While in the fall of 2022, Russians fled the country en masse after Vladimir Putin announced mobilization, they have now begun leaving in advance amid rumors of another mobilization.
Over the past week, about 113,000 Russians crossed the Verkhny Lars border checkpoint into Georgia—one of the few countries that can be reached by land without a visa, notes Politico. On August 20, more than 20,000 people crossed the border, a figure that “significantly exceeds” previous years’ figures, according to Russia’s Federal Customs Service. On the same day, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, stated that mobilization was “neither planned nor expected”. Similarly, he assured that there would be no invasion of Ukraine: on January 31, 2022, for example, Nebenzya called Western countries’ claims that an attack was being prepared “baseless and provocative.”
The human rights organization “Conscript School” has recorded an increase in the number of requests for help from men of draft age, “primarily from among reservists,” its director Alexey Tabalov told Politico. According to him, in recent months, the authorities have been actively collecting reservists’ personal data through their employers, “even finding out the addresses of their relatives,” in order to track them down in case of draft evasion. For now, these men are being summoned to military registration and enlistment offices and issued assignments specifying which unit they must report to in the event of a call-up.
This creates the foundation for more efficient and covert recruitment into the army, even if mobilization is not officially declared, Tabalov believes:
“All it takes is to send, say, 10 buses to a specific steel mill and pick up a predetermined number of specific people right from their workplaces: ‘Petrov, Ivanov, Sidorov—please get on the bus,’—and then it heads to a military base.”
It is becoming increasingly difficult for the Kremlin to recruit contract soldiers for the war, says a lawyer from the organization “Call to Conscience,” which helps people exercise their right to conscientious objection. According to the Ukrainian military, in recent months, Russian losses on the front lines have exceeded 30,000 people per month, reaching as high as 40,000. At the same time, it has been virtually impossible to recruit more than 30,000 people per month into the army this year; in some months, the figure has dropped to 27,000.
“That’s why the government’s interest in reservists has surged since spring,” notes a lawyer from “Call of Conscience.”
Reservists are mainly men under the age of 55 who have completed mandatory military service. In 2022, then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu estimated their number at approximately 25 million. “As a rule, these are the people most likely to be called up in the event of mobilization,” says Tabalov.
Against this backdrop, federal authorities are forcing regions to carry out administrative and organizational preparations for mobilization, working out procedures for conscription, deployment, feeding, and arming local residents.
And in July, the leadership of the Russian Guard proposed amendments to a departmental order that requires the advance preparation of personnel, facilities, and property for protection against threats, replacing the wording “in the event of military conflicts and emergencies” with “during periods of mobilization, martial law, and wartime.”
Russians began leaving the country in advance, since now, when an electronic summons is sent, the person called up for service is automatically prohibited from traveling abroad, even if they did not pay attention to it.
Armenia could become another “reception point” for refugees fleeing mobilization, as was also the case in the fall of 2022. Yerevan will not stand in the way of those who wish to avoid being sent to the Ukrainian front, said Alen Simonyan, Secretary of the Armenian Security Council, in an interview with the TV channel “Dozhd.” “To the Russian people, I can say only one thing: ‘Welcome to Armenia.’ Here, we love and respect everyone. And they will find everything here that they hoped to find when they came to Armenia. And they will return to Russia when it suits them,” he noted.
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