WHEN THE SEA

An animated film · Annecy Festival 2026 Selection

A note before we begin

It isn't really a war story. It's a sea story.

When Sea Was Calm takes place in Georgia in 1992 and 1993, during the war in Abkhazia: thirteen months that turned a coastline of summer sanatoria into a place people fled from on foot, across a mountain pass, in winter.

The sea didn't stop watching when that war ended. It's the same water that touches Sokhumi, Sevastopol and Odesa. What follows isn't a list of battles. It's a short walk along one coastline, and the things that have happened on it since the film's story ends. Every claim below is sourced; numbers in brackets link to Sources at the bottom.

Long before 1992

The violence of the 1990s did not appear from nowhere. Soviet governance built power through party appointments, security structures, and managed autonomy, which shaped who held office in Abkhazia and how political legitimacy was framed when the USSR collapsed.13 In the post-Soviet vacuum, those networks became part of the institutional base for separatist mobilization.14

The deeper historical picture is longer than the late Soviet period. In mainstream historical scholarship, Colchis, Egrisi (Lazica), the Kingdom of Abkhazia, and later polities such as the Kingdom of Imereti are usually treated as successive political formations within the wider western Georgian historical space, including the territory of present-day Abkhazia.15 Historians still debate identity, terminology, and political interpretation, but these debates concern how the past is interpreted, not whether the region sits inside a long and continuous Black Sea Caucasian historical continuum.16

1992 August

The first shot reaches the shore

On 14 August, Georgian National Guard units move into Abkhazia, officially to protect a railway line. Within hours it's a war.1 Over the next thirteen months, fighters and heavy weapons cross the Caucasus from the Russian side: North Caucasian volunteers, Cossack units, and, as Human Rights Watch later documented, support from parts of the Russian military that Moscow officially denied.1 Sokhumi, Gagra, Ochamchire, places people knew from holiday photos, turn into front lines.

Abkhazia · Georgia · Russian Federation

1993 September

The fall of Sokhumi

A July ceasefire breaks down. On 27 September, Sokhumi falls.1 In the days and weeks that follow, around 250,000 ethnic Georgians are pushed out of Abkhazia, one of the largest forced displacements in post-Soviet Europe.2 Many leave on foot through the Kodori Gorge and the Svaneti mountains; the people who didn't make it across are still being counted. Three OSCE summits (Budapest 1994, Lisbon 1996, Istanbul 1999) would later use the words "ethnic cleansing" for what happened.3

Around 250,000 displaced · Sokhumi fell 27 September 1993

2008 August

Five days in August

Fighting flares around South Ossetia on the night of 7–8 August. Within hours, Russian armoured columns are inside Georgia, and a second front opens in Abkhazia. The war lasts five days. The EU's own fact-finding mission, led by Heidi Tagliavini, later concluded that the opening shots were Georgian, and that Russia's response went "far beyond the reasonable limits of defence."4 On 26 August, Moscow recognises Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states; almost no one else does.5 Roughly a fifth of Georgia's internationally recognised territory remains outside Tbilisi's control to this day.6

7–12 August 2008 · Tagliavini Report, 2009

2014 February to March

The sea changes coasts

In late February, soldiers without insignia (the "little green men") take over the Crimean parliament and key infrastructure. A hurried referendum follows on 16 March; Russia annexes the peninsula days later.7 The UN General Assembly votes 100 to 11 to call the annexation invalid.8 Fighting begins in Donbas in April. From Tbilisi, the script is recognisable: unmarked troops, a referendum, a "protection" mission. Many Georgians say out loud what their grandparents felt in 1993: we've seen this film before.

Crimea annexed March 2014 · UN GA Res. 68/262

2022 February 24

Full-scale invasion

Before dawn on 24 February, Russia attacks Ukraine from three directions. Two weeks later, the UN General Assembly demands an immediate withdrawal, with 141 states in favour.9 Mariupol is besieged for almost three months and largely destroyed.10 On 14 April, the Russian Black Sea flagship Moskva sinks after Ukrainian Neptune missile strikes, making her the largest warship lost in combat since 1982.11 Grain corridors out of Odesa close, reopen, close again. The Black Sea isn't a backdrop now. It's the front.

Largest war in Europe since 1945

2026 today

Still watching

Ukraine is still fighting. In Tbilisi, in spring 2024, tens of thousands fill Rustaveli Avenue night after night against a "foreign agents" law modelled almost word-for-word on a Russian one.12 Abkhazia and South Ossetia are still under Russian troops.6 A whole generation of Georgian kids has grown up never having seen Sokhumi. A whole generation of Ukrainian kids is growing up with a phone app that tells them when to go to the basement.

And the sea keeps washing the same shore. The same sea.

The film

When Sea Was Calm

An animated short set in the summer of 1992, before the war reaches every house. A child's-eye view of a coastline that's about to disappear from the maps the family knows.

We made this film about a war that never really finished, so that the next one wouldn't have to be explained from the beginning.

Primary witness

Andrey Kozyrev on the 1990s

Andrey Kozyrev was Russia's first Foreign Minister after the Soviet collapse and a direct participant in every major decision of the 1990s: the dissolution of the USSR, the wars in Abkhazia and Chechnya, NATO expansion, and the choice between Yeltsin and Zhuganov in 1996. In this interview, he recounts how many of the era's largest problems often stemmed from accidental, absurd mistakes—and how Russian state authorities deliberately supplied weapons to Abkhazi separatists, a decision that shifted the balance of the war.17

Kozyrev also speaks candidly about how Russia's political establishment deliberately cultivated an image of NATO as an enemy, who benefited from that narrative, and why the 1996 election was never as binary as history now suggests.

Watch full interview on YouTube

Russian with English subtitles · approx. 1 hour

Sources & further reading

Where these numbers come from

Everything stated as fact above is drawn from public reporting by human-rights organisations, international institutions, and major news outlets. Links open in a new tab.

  1. Human Rights Watch, Georgia/Abkhazia: Violations of the Laws of War and Russia's Role in the Conflict (March 1995). The most detailed independent account of the 1992–93 war, including documented Russian military involvement. hrw.org
  2. UNHCR / Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre: figures of roughly 250,000 ethnic Georgians displaced from Abkhazia in 1992–93, many still registered as IDPs in Georgia today. internal-displacement.org
  3. OSCE Summit Declarations, Budapest 1994, Lisbon 1996, Istanbul 1999. All three formally describe the expulsion of ethnic Georgians from Abkhazia as ethnic cleansing. Budapest 1994 (PDF) · Istanbul 1999 (PDF)
  4. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (the Tagliavini Report), commissioned by the EU, September 2009. Full report (archive)
  5. BBC News, "Russia recognises Georgian rebels," 26 August 2008. bbc.co.uk
  6. U.S. State Department & Council of Europe: both continue to describe Abkhazia and South Ossetia (≈20% of Georgia's territory) as Russian-occupied. state.gov
  7. Reuters / BBC, coverage of the seizure of Crimean parliament (27 February 2014) and the 16 March 2014 referendum. bbc.com
  8. UN General Assembly Resolution 68/262, "Territorial integrity of Ukraine," 27 March 2014. Adopted 100–11 (with 58 abstentions); declares the Crimea referendum invalid. UN Digital Library
  9. UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1, "Aggression against Ukraine," 2 March 2022. Adopted 141–5. UN Digital Library
  10. OHCHR / Associated Press, reporting on the siege of Mariupol (24 February – 20 May 2022) and the destruction of the city. ohchr.org · AP coverage
  11. Reuters, "Russian missile cruiser Moskva sinks in Black Sea," 14 April 2022. reuters.com
  12. Reuters / Radio Free Europe, reporting on Georgia's "foreign agents" law and the mass protests of April–May 2024. reuters.com · rferl.org
  13. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Cornell University Press, 2001), and an overview of Soviet indigenization policy (korenizatsiia) in the 1920s and 1930s. policy summary
  14. Svante E. Cornell, Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus (Routledge, 2001), on Soviet institutional legacies and post-Soviet conflict dynamics in Abkhazia. routledge.com
  15. Fridrik Thordarson, "COLCHIS," Encyclopaedia Iranica (1992, updated 2016), on Colchis/Lazica and western Georgian historical geography, including continuity into later medieval formations. iranicaonline.org
  16. Kingdom of Abkhazia historical synthesis, with references to medieval chronicles and modern historiography debates on statehood, terminology, and later unification in the Georgian monarchy. historical overview
  17. Andrey Kozyrev, Russia's first Foreign Minister (1992–1996), in a detailed interview recounting his direct involvement in the 1990s: Soviet collapse, Abkhazia war, weapon supplies to separatists, NATO relations, and the 1996 election. YouTube interview

Where sources differ on exact numbers (for example, total displaced from Abkhazia, or casualty figures in Mariupol), this page uses the more conservative figure cited by the institutions above. If you spot something that should be corrected, please get in touch. Accuracy matters more to us than rhetoric.