Ilya Pilpani, a thirteen-year-old boy from Almaty in Kazakhstan, had traveled with his father Rogald to the remote and mountainous Svaneti region of western Georgia for what was meant to be a short winter visit with relatives. Then the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic trapped them there far longer than anyone had anticipated.

On the afternoon of July 18, 2020, in the village of Lenjeri within Mestia Municipality, Ilya left home at around 11:00 am, allegedly after an argument with family members and was never seen again. The sole witness, a brother of one of their neighbors, watched as the boy climbed onto his bicycle and rode off into the surrounding countryside, disappearing from view.

News of his disappearance spread quickly and his father almost immediately filed the missing persons report, prompting an immediate and large-scale search operation that mobilized eighty rescuer-firefighters from Georgia’s Emergency Situations Service, along with specialized police units, drones for aerial surveillance, a patrol boat navigating the rivers, and a helicopter from the border police, all working around the clock across the rugged terrain of Svaneti and extending their efforts down toward the Black Sea coastline.

Speaking only Russian and knowing no Georgian, he would have found it hard to connect with the local people in the isolated highland villages. The idea that he ran away was always remote and the communication difficulties would have made it infinitely more difficult.

Search teams methodically covered an immense geographic area, including dozens of named villages such as Lengeri, Ushguli, Becho, Mazeri, and Latali, as well as numerous others, while carefully inspecting abandoned houses and ancient stone towers, traversing the steep slopes of Mount Kuruldi, following the popular tourist route near the Tchaladi glacier, exploring dense forest areas beside the Mestia ropeway, and even checking four disused tunnels close to Hoko Pass. In total, rescuers examined at least thirty-eight villages and seven rivers in their determined hunt for any sign of the missing boy.

At the same time, Georgia’s Public Safety Management Center 112 broadcast multilingual text messages containing Ilya’s photograph to mobile phones throughout the country, appealing to the public for any information that might help locate him. From the outset, authorities investigated the case under Article 143, Part 3, Subparagraph D of the Georgian Criminal Code, which addresses the unlawful deprivation of liberty of a minor when committed with prior knowledge, treating the possibility of kidnapping as a serious line of inquiry.

Ilya’s family emphasized that they had found no video footage or telephone records suggesting he had crossed any of Georgia’s recognized international borders, although his father acknowledged that the porous and largely unmonitored de facto boundaries with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia could not be entirely dismissed. In an effort to generate new leads, the family publicly offered a substantial reward of fifty thousand Georgian lari to anyone who located their son, along with thirty thousand lari for credible information identifying individuals connected to his disappearance. Despite these incentives and the extensive ongoing searches, both domestic and international, remarkably little useful information came to light.

No credible developments have emerged since the later months of 2020. The case remains active, and Ilya Pilpani is still officially listed as a missing person through Interpol. Anyone possessing information, however small, is encouraged to contact Interpol or the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs, as his family continues to hope for answers in the shadow of the towering Svaneti mountains where he vanished.

*Interpol states that he may have traveled to Russia, likely because (A) he spoke the language and (B) he would have had to go through Russia to Kazakhstan if he tried to go home via the land route. Plus, the border is very close to where he disappeared.