Footage of a hotel attack in Georgia has racked up 17 million views, with viewers casting it as a hate crime. Georgian police say the real cause of the fight was a wedding DJ’s ruined equipment.

A man broke into a hotel room at the Agarani Estate in Kakheti and punched one of the female tourists staying there in the face. The victim’s friend, Polina Kurta, posted a video of the incident on Instagram. As of publication, the clip had drawn more than 17 million views and 227,000 likes.

Warning: this text contains profanity.

“In Georgia, men break into rooms and beat the shit out of girls for speaking Russian,” Kurta wrote in the video. Her friend Yulia was hurt, she said. An ambulance was called after the attack, and Yulia was taken to the hospital. The women also gave statements to police.

In her stories, Kurta said the man who barged into their room had overheard them speaking Russian on the balcony. Hotel management, she said, had told the attacker which room the tourists were staying in.

In the comments, some users said the tourists had disrupted a wedding other hotel guests were celebrating. The Telegram channel Paper Kartuli quoted one commenter who wrote: “Why did you pour water on the wedding table, claiming you’d been disturbed? That’s exactly where the conflict started — with your actions … I categorically condemn a man raising his hand against a woman — hitting a woman is unacceptable under any circumstances, and there’s no justification for it. But what does the Russian language have to do with it? Tell the truth — what actually started the conflict.”

Other users questioned the video’s version of events. “How could they have heard you speaking Russian if you were on the second floor, inside a room, while they had an event with music going on downstairs?” wrote one commenter.

On social media, the women say they aren’t commenting on what happened while the investigation is ongoing.

The Telegram channel Baza said it had spoken with Yulia, who said she stepped in to defend her friends after the attacker insulted them. Her nose is broken, she said.

Another friend of the victim, Vladislava, told the channel that she and her friends had checked into a room on the third floor before the attack, with a balcony overlooking the site of a Georgian wedding. One of the women opened a bottle of champagne on the balcony, and someone below shouted up that the women had damaged the DJ equipment. The women talked to hotel security and went back out onto the balcony, where a wedding guest aggressively told them to leave. Soon after, a man came to their room and said the group was speaking Russian and ruining his brother’s wedding.

The management of Agarani Estate said the “incident on hotel grounds” resulted from the actions of individual guests. It “does not reflect the conduct or values of our hotel or our team,” the statement said. The hotel declined to share further details out of respect for guests’ privacy. In a separate statement, the hotel condemned the violence and said Agarani Estate staff had not disclosed guests’ room numbers and had not taken part in the fight. Users who commented on those posts criticized the hotel, Paper Kartuli reported. Comments are now disabled on Agarani Estate’s posts.

Georgia’s Interior Ministry said the attacker had been detained. According to the ministry’s version of events, the fight broke out after foreigners insulted wedding guests from the balcony of a hotel room in Telavi and doused equipment with water. Police are investigating the case on a charge of intentionally inflicting minor bodily harm. The attacker faces up to three years in prison.

Russian media outlets, including pro-government ones (1, 2), identified Yulia as a Russian tourist. In her stories, Kurta said she speaks Russian even though she was born in Ukraine, and that she now lives in Russia. Her friends are from Ukraine and also speak Russian, she said. They all came to Georgia to celebrate a birthday, Kurta said. Her profile lists her as the founder of the Moscow beauty salon Lab.Organic. Kurta also has a masterclass scheduled in Tallinn in August.

After the Russian state news agency TASS contacted Georgia’s Interior Ministry, the ministry did not confirm that the victim is a Russian citizen — but, as the agency said, it did not deny it either.