Last week, just days after the southern Caucasus nation of Georgia celebrated its newly awarded visa-free travel access to 30 EU countries, Russian news outlets began reporting a different story.
Georgia’s visa liberalization wasn’t the result of Tblisi’s successful, long-planned reforms targeting European integration, Russian outlets said, but part of a seedy quid pro quo that would require the former Soviet republic to build camps for displaced Syrian refugees on its own soil.
The Russian news outlets, along with their pro-Russian counterparts in Georgia, based their claims on one source: German newspaper Bild’s interview with Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, who expressed support for the idea of building camps in Georgia and the West Balkans.
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