In July 1802, when the anti-Russian opposition became more vocal in Georgia, the Russians attempted to lure Vakhtang out of Dusheti. Vakhtang escaped from his castle to the mountains of Mtiuleti, but, when the Caucasian Grenadier Regiment under the command of Major-General Sergei Tuchkov advanced into the area, he surrendered on 10 August 1802 to avoid bloodshed. He was brought to Tbilisi and placed under house arrest together with his mother Darejan at the palace of Avlabari. On 19 February 1803, Vakhtang and his former foe, David, son of George XII, departed under the Russian military escort to St. Petersburg, where he died in 1814 and was interred at the Annunciation Church of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. The epitaph in Georgian, commissioned by Vakhtang's widow, laments his having died in a foreign land, not being able to see the motherland.
