A mother and her 18-year-old son have been detained and expelled from Abkhazia to Russia after taking pictures with a Georgian flag at the entrance of Sukhumi (Sukhum).
Abkhazia’s Security Service has reported that the pair, Nina Bronik and her son Timur Ugurov, drove to Abkhazia from Sochi to visit relatives.
The agency claimed on 10 April that they stopped at the entrance of Sukhumi and posed for pictures with a Georgian flag by the city’s welcome sign.
The two were stopped by security officers and brought to the Security Service headquarters, where officers conducted what the service describes as a ‘preventive conversation’. Following the conversation, Bronik and Ugurov were escorted out of Abkhazia by the agency’s personnel.
In a recorded interrogation published by the agency, Ugurov addressed Abkhazian authorities directly.
‘We in no way intended to insult or offend the people of Abkhazia’, he said.
In turn, Bronik stated in the video that she was born in Sukhumi and moved to Sotchi in 1993. She also said that she wished to offer ‘a sincere apology to the citizens of the Republic of Abkhazia’ and that she considers Abkhazia to be an independent state and had no intent to call its sovereignty into question.
For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.
Elizaveta Chukharova
