Don’t blame us Russians for Putin’s war

Thousands of Russians who have fled to Georgia in the wake of Putin’s crackdown are receiving a poor welcome. ‘F*** Russia’ and ‘Russians go home’ are scrawled on the walls, and there are campaigns to boycott Russian goods. A Russian girl asked in a local chat about the best way to transfer money, and received several responses of roughly the same content: ‘Get out, lousy occupants, no one wants you here.’

In the US, owners of Russian restaurants (even if they are non-Russians) have received bomb threats or seen their premises vandalised. Even the pianist Alexander Malofeev, who took to social media just after the invasion to declare that ‘every Russian will feel guilty for decades’ for this ‘terrible and bloody decision’, has been cancelled by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra for the crime of his nationality.

All this, one should point out, suits the Kremlin very well. When internationally condemned for some crime, be it the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury or Litvinenko in London, Russian officials have put the accusations down to ‘Russophobia’, insolently equating the Russian government with the Russian people.