When I came to Georgia from Kyiv in early February 2022, as warnings were heating up about an impending full-throated Russian invasion, I could not have fathomed it would even begin on the scale it did on 24 February, let alone that it would be still going on four years later. I never did end up going back to my life in Kyiv, apart from a few visits to Ukraine over the past few years, including one in 2025 when I had my first personal experience with a Russian drone and missile attack.
There isn’t much profound to say about Russia’s war that hasn’t already been said at this point. Russia is throwing away hundreds of thousands of its men into a pointless quest to attain something impossible — the subjugation of Ukraine. Ukrainians are still fighting and holding their own against a much larger and more powerful enemy. Ukraine’s most important ally, the US, has thrown in the towel even though it was never in the fight (a few days ago, the US abstained in a UN vote calling for ‘support for a lasting peace’). The nations of the South Caucasus continue to have a schizophrenic approach to Russia and its full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine. We know all of this already, because it has been four years (12 years, really), and not much has changed.
As I reflected on the anniversary earlier this week, I thought about the scenes in Tbilisi on that day in 2022 — the massive crowds, the outpouring of support, and one fact that Georgians made sure us foreigners understood — that this was just the latest in an endless history of Russian imperialism. I also reread OC Media’s editorial published on 24 February 2022, the sentiment of which rings just as true four years later as the day it was written.
‘It is hard to overstate what is at stake, for Ukraine, for Russia’s other neighbours, including here in the Caucasus, and indeed, for the world. Today the cause of Ukraine is the cause of the Caucasus, and indeed the world’, the editorial read.
One other line in particular stood out to me, how the invasion was described as ‘a resurgence of Russia’s imperial ambitions that concern all of us, not least in the Caucasus’.
Four years into the full-scale war, I worry this is the lesson we have struggled most to truly process. Russian officials repeat ad nauseam that the war cannot be resolved without addressing its ‘underlying causes’ (in Ru-speak, meaning the elimination of Ukraine as an independent state), and to a certain extent, they are correct. The war is the latest iteration of Russia trying to snuff out the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian nation, but is also an expression of the deep imperialist rot at the core of Russia. And yes, it is also a symptom of Russia’s longstanding conflict with the West, particularly the US, but I believe this too stems from its internalised sentiment that the world should be divided into spheres of influence.
Writing from Tbilisi, I see no indication whatsoever that Russia has let go of its imperial ambitions in the South Caucasus or anywhere else in what it considers its historical backyard. Russia has time and time again used military force to obtain its neocolonial goals, in large part because it does not have much else to offer, certainly not much in terms of soft power. When it does not use military force, it has countless other nefarious methods up its sleeves, which we can see at work in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
It is not just that I fail to see this widely grasped in the West, even after four years of full-scale war in Ukraine, but I also unfortunately struggle to see many Russians, including ones who consider themselves well-meaning, internalise this.
Today’s Russia is an empire, it is not a normal country. While I believe calls for the widespread ‘decolonisation’ of Russia to be naive — largely because they are unrealistic — Russia’s colonialism is alive and well in the Caucasus, and should be recognised as such.
Unfortunately, I think we will be marking 24 February again next year as Russia’s full-scale war enters its sixth year. Perhaps by then we may be just a bit closer to recognising the ‘underlying causes’ of Russia’s insatiable imperialist ambitions.
