Tornike Mandaria has been working for RFE/RL's Georgian Service since 2019. He mostly covers issues of human rights, media, the environment, and politics in Georgia and the South Caucasus.
Journalists who fled to Georgia from Azerbaijan to escape government harassment are finding it not to be the safe haven they hoped it would be. Even from their new home, many of them are being hassled by Azerbaijani state security organizations.
Russian forces took Ukrainian students from a school in the Mykolayiv region that provided accommodation for children with special needs. They were sent to live at a sanatorium in Russia's Krasnodar region. The school's director, Natalia Lutsyk, fought to get the children out.
Olena Strukalyova says she was forced to remove clothing and saw a man being brutally beaten at a Russian filtration camp, which civilians from occupied areas of Ukraine had to pass through before being taken to Russia. Ukraine estimates that 1.6 million of its citizens have been through the camps.
In the mountains of Georgia, workers risk their lives to collect cones that supply seeds to Christmas-tree farms in Europe. While millions of Christmas trees hail from the area, the people there get only a tiny portion of the proceeds from this multimillion-dollar seasonal industry.
A series of deaths in Georgia linked to the opioid fentanyl has left ravers and other club-drug users scared, wary, and a local NGO scrambling to help.
An ethnic Azeri woman in Georgia speaks out about domestic violence, sexual harassment, and forced marriages.
In July, a planned LGBT Pride March in Tbilisi was called off after right-wing protesters attacked activists and journalists, whom they accused of spreading "anti-Georgian sentiments." In the wake of the violence, LGBT activists say their sense of purpose and solidarity is stronger than ever.
What prompted hundreds of people to fight each other with stones and iron bars in a small Georgian town in May 2021? Two locals reflect on long-standing ethnic tensions.
