Georgia’s Protest Fines Run on Sanctioned Russian Face Software

Georgia’s Interior Ministry has used Polyface, a Russian facial recognition system, to identify protesters and issue 5,000 lari fines, a June 2026 investigation found. The matcher comes from Moscow-based Papillon AO. The same firm, and the company behind its latest algorithm, already sit on a U.S. export blacklist written for biometric work in occupied Ukraine.

That is the second problem hiding inside the first. Tbilisi is not only tagging people on Rustaveli Avenue. It is running the opposition’s faces through software that Russian law can compel the vendor to open.

Polyface Inside the Ministry Since 2013

Berlin- and Zurich-based AlgorithmWatch published the findings on June 27, 2026, after matching tender files and protest camera footage. The Interior Ministry has been buying Polyface from Papillon AO since 2013, the year after Georgian Dream took power. The watchdog counted six contracts and five upgrades across eleven years.

A prosecutor gave the software away in court, according to Nika Simonishvili, a lawyer who has handled dozens of protest cases. “We use Artificial Intelligence,” the prosecutor said, before a colleague cut her off. Then came the safer line: “We use a special program.” Simonishvili later named that program as Polyface.

Papillon’s products are used mainly by Russian police and by governments that work closely with Moscow, including Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. The company appears on Swiss, Japanese, Ukrainian and U.S. lists. AlgorithmWatch notes that any Russian firm in this position is obliged, if compelled, to cooperate with Russian security services.

THE POLYFACE BUYING RECORD

1. 2013: The Interior Ministry places its first Polyface contract with Papillon AO.
2. 2018: An upgrade contract has Russian staff train ministry operators, with a cap of 30 people running live searches at once.
3. February 27, 2023: The U.S. Commerce Department adds AO Papilon and 3DiVi to the Entity List.
4. October 2024: Tbilisi grants a perpetual license and asks for unlimited operator seats.
5. Early June 2025: Polyface 3.7.0 is delivered, after mass remote IDs and fines have already begun.
6. June 27, 2026: AlgorithmWatch publishes the investigation.

The newest build uses a deep-learning matcher from 3DiVi, a Novosibirsk AI firm backed by a Russian state venture fund. AlgorithmWatch says it can record high-definition images of large crowds in poor light and pick out faces under masks or partial cover.

The Same Firms Were Listed for Ukraine Filtration

The U.S. listing is older than Georgia’s protest wave, and it was not written as a tech footnote. In a final rule dated February 27, 2023, the Commerce Department added AO Papilon, 3DiVi, and related Papillon entities to the Entity List. The stated reason included support for Russia’s filtration operations in occupied parts of Ukraine, including biometric tools used to suppress resistance and enforce loyalty.

Georgia is now running that family of code against its own street opposition. The overlap is the part that does not show up in a simple “cameras vs. protesters” brief. A system designed, in Washington’s telling, to sort a hostile population is the same stack Tbilisi uses to turn a Saturday march into a later court date.

WHO BUILT THE MATCHER

License terms on the Entity List carry a presumption of denial for U.S.-controlled items. That does not by itself stop a Georgian ministry from running a Russian product it already owns. It does mark both vendors as part of a biometric toolkit the United States tied to occupation policing.

How a 5,000 Lari Fine Lands Weeks Later

The protests that filled Tbilisi after the October 26, 2024 parliamentary vote, and after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze froze EU talks until 2028, were large enough to spread to 37 of Georgia’s 55 cities and more than 40 cities abroad. AlgorithmWatch put the street run at 580 days. Georgia had become an EU candidate in 2023, and an International Republican Institute poll that autumn found 86 percent support for EU accession.

Force did not empty the avenue. The Public Defender’s Office recorded 282 cases of physical abuse, and at least 486 people were detained in November and December 2024. Then the identifications started arriving by post and by frozen bank account. That sequence sits inside a wider 500-day crackdown on street dissent that mixed new assembly rules with money penalties.

The road-block fine rose from 500 lari to 5,000 lari (about €1,620). By March 2025, the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association had tallied at least 2 million lari (about €640,000) in those penalties. GYLA says the usual proof in court is a still from a face camera, often treated as enough on its own.

In mid-March 2025, a Tbilisi PR lecturer in her 40s got a court call about a road block two and a half months earlier. At the hearing she watched camera video of herself trying to cross while others came the other way. The system had marked her as an unlawful protester. The court never sent the ticket. Five months later her accounts were frozen, and she crowdfunded the fine. “Now, I practically don’t go outside. I only go to the marches,” she told AlgorithmWatch, which used the name Nino and changed identifying details.

A civil servant quoted in the same investigation, given the name Shako, put the strategy in one line: they cannot make the protest disappear from people, so they try to make it disappear from the streets. Luka, a man in his late twenties with three unpaid road-block fines, said each unknown number still spikes his stress because a freeze can hit without warning. He started parking money in someone else’s account so his own could be seized.

GYLA, looking at footage from a January 2025 Rustaveli protest, found a camera tracking one person in real time and zooming in on a document in their hands. “This is aimed at instilling fear in the protestors that the state will not only identify them and impose a hefty fine, but also track them,” the group said in March 2025.

Papillon Must Cooperate if Moscow Asks

Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 in a five-day war, then recognised the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. AlgorithmWatch notes that Moscow still controls roughly 20 percent of Georgian territory. Against that map, a ministry matcher that lives under Russian legal duty is not a neutral IT purchase.

The investigation says that as of April 2026, a core piece of Georgia’s state security kit remains under the legal jurisdiction of occupied Georgian territory. The practical claim is narrower and harder: Papillon AO, like other Russian companies in this setting, must cooperate with Russian security services if compelled. Mamuka Mdinaradze, the minister of state for coordination of law-enforcement bodies, later called the idea that Russian services could reach Georgian personal data through the system “ridiculous.” The paper trail does not prove a live FSB feed. It does show a vendor that U.S. export rules already treated as part of a filtration toolkit, bound by Russian law.

Papillon Systems is a core part of the Russian security infrastructure. Integrating this kind of Russian-developed biometric technology into the national infrastructure represents a substantial risk to Georgia’s national security. Deploying adversarial AI surveillance is a mechanism for long-term dominance over another country’s citizens in the information domain.

Eto Buziashvili, research associate, Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab

Buziashvili, who previously advised Georgia’s National Security Council on Russia, split the danger in two. Integrity attacks could teach software to ignore chosen people, including a hostile intelligence officer, while mapping everyone else from officials down to street activists. Archive access, she said, lets an adversary profile a population. She pointed to the Taliban’s use of U.S.-built biometric systems in Afghanistan after 2021 to find Afghans who had worked with American forces.

Giorgi Lubaretsi, a Georgian cybersecurity expert, described the domestic version of that archive. Once the matcher has a face from one protest, it can pull the same person out of every other recorded event.

The software doesn’t only identify who someone is. It can reconstruct a full protest history: when a person arrived, how long they stayed, how many times they came back.

Giorgi Lubaretsi, cybersecurity expert, to AlgorithmWatch

Mdinaradze Wants Cameras in Every District

On July 1, 2026, four days after the investigation landed, Mdinaradze answered it by promising more cameras, not fewer. “We will try to install facial recognition cameras not only on Rustaveli Avenue and in central districts, but throughout the country, based on security measures, including crime prevention,” he said.

He also said no surveillance technology had been purchased from Russia since he took his current post. AlgorithmWatch’s contracts start in 2013, long before that caveat, and include the 2018 training clause with Russian personnel. The denial and the tenders can both be true only if “since I arrived” is doing all the work. It does not unwind a perpetual license issued in October 2024 or a 3.7.0 drop in June 2025.

GYLA warned that using face cameras on protests, without a public account of what the system can do and who may query it, presses on the right of assembly. The European Court of Human Rights, in Glukhin v. Russia, has already treated real-time facial recognition against a lone demonstrator as incompatible with a democratic society. Tbilisi’s model is the mass version of that fact pattern: a crowd, a matcher, a fine that shows up later.

Adding cameras does not answer who can compel the vendor. A nationwide grid makes that unanswered question larger. The government’s line is crime prevention. The tenders AlgorithmWatch reviewed asked for enough operator seats to watch bigger demonstrations.

The Cap on Operators Came Off in 2024

Until 2025, Polyface allowed 30 simultaneous operators. The latest tender asked for licenses with no cap. AlgorithmWatch reads that change as a ministry that expected larger crowds on the glass. The same files, read against the product manuals and the protest video, point to three jobs the software can do.

THREE JOBS THE SOFTWARE CAN DO

• Automated sweep: Polyface scans a live feed, holds each usable face long enough to grab a still, then moves on, with no one steering the camera.
• Operator zoom: A staff member points a camera, zooms, and runs the face against government databases in real time; the 2024 contract dropped the old 30-person limit on this mode.
• Watchlist ping: Pre-loaded faces of activists and people already fined can trigger an alert when they reappear.

The matcher can draw on a unified bank of civil-registry photos. After a 2024 ministry request, it can also search images from social media and other databases. Elene, a civil-society researcher who spent a year watching protest video for demonstrators, described a friend at the edge of a frame whose every expression was still readable. Nino remembered a clip in which the text on a sheet of paper was sharp, and another in which a phone screen was readable as someone typed.

Covering a face became an administrative offense in 2024. In 2025, face coverings and road blocks moved into the criminal code, and even a sidewalk gathering needed state registration. In 2026, calling the government illegitimate, or criticising it online with words classed as offensive, became a criminal act. Transparency International Georgia concluded that the amended laws had effectively abolished the constitutional freedom of assembly. Polyface is the lookup table those rules attach to.

Daily Rustaveli Thins Out, Saturday Marches Hold

Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgian Dream’s founder, built his fortune in post-Soviet Russia. His party has governed since 2012. The camera network did not appear for the 2024 crisis; it was already in the ministry, waiting for a political use that could turn a still image into a debt.

The lecturer who paid 5,000 lari through a crowdfunder still attends the large Saturday marches built around a single issue. She dropped the daily ones on Rustaveli, outside parliament, because another hit would land on people who had already chipped in. That is the working product: not a dramatic raid, a bill that arrives after the crowd has gone home.

Mdinaradze’s July plan would copy that product off the avenue and into the rest of the country. The ministry would get more glass. The vendor would remain a sanctioned Russian firm whose sister algorithm-maker was listed for filtration work in occupied Ukraine. The faces in the file would still be Georgian.