Georgia just a pawn in ‘Tsar’ Putin’s master plan to restore the old order

I SPENT part of last week in the Crimea. It used to be the playground of the Soviet elite: the whole politburo had dachas there.

It is a place that has an overwhelming sense of history. The conference at Yalta, now a popular Ukrainian holiday resort, determined how post-war Europe would be carved up between the great powers. Around the coast is Sebastapol, Ukrainian territory but still (for now) home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet. From there ships were sent last week to provide the support for the troops pouring into Georgia.

You can’t see Georgia from Crimea, of course, but looking out across the glassy surface it was hard not to have Georgia on your mind. The full story of the horrors meted out by neighbours against each other has yet to emerge.

Who started the conflict between Russia and Georgia? In a sense it doesn’t really matter. Recall from the history you learned at school the details of the Sudeten crisis leading to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Did anyone imagine at the time that it would be the precursor to a much bigger conflagration? Knowing what followed, though, it seems like a minor episode in a far more important drama.

It is a similar impression that the events of the last fortnight will probably leave in people’s memories. This war didn’t have its origins in the miscalculation of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili: Moscow has been trying to provoke a conflict for some time.

The man who called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, and who has restored a quasi-Tsarist regime in Russia, is trying hard to re-establish its formerly dominant position in eastern Europe.

Emboldened by the oil and natural gas resources at its disposal, falling back on a million soldiers, thousands of nuclear missiles and the third-largest military budget in the world, Vladimir Putin obviously considers the time is right to lay his strong hand of cards on the table.

Georgia’s misfortune is to be on the edge of a new faultline that runs through the western borders of Russia. From the Baltic states in the north, to the Balkans, to the Caucasus and central Asia, a power struggle is taking place between a vengeful, resurgent Russia and the EU and the US.

Putin’s aggression directed at Georgia could not be explained merely by the latter’s desire to join NATO or Russia’s own feelings of disappointment about Kosovan independence. It is instead, first and foremost, an answer to the Orange and Rose revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia when pro-western governments replaced pro-Russian ones. What the west celebrated as victories for democracy were seen by Putin as encirclement.

Ever since, Putin has appeared determined to reverse these worrying tendencies on Russia’s borders. Not only is he seeking to prevent their further integration with the west, he is actively seeking to bring them back under Russia’s effective control. Furthermore, he intends to carve himself a zone of influence within NATO at the expense of neighbouring countries. There lies the reason behind Moscow’s opposition to the installation of anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The offensive against Georgia is part of the bigger strategy. Putin is no more concerned by a few thousand Ossetians than he was about the small Serbian minority in Kosovo.

Pan-Slav solidarity is really just a means to fire up nationalism within Russia and to extend his influence abroad in order to provide a distraction from the growing denial of civil and human rights at home. Sadly, such age-old tactics are still as effective as ever. While Russian bombers attack Georgian bases and ports, officials in the EU and the Americans criticise the west for being too demanding vis-a-vis Russia on too many points.

It is true most Russians felt humiliated by the way in which the Cold War ended. Putin convinced many of his countrymen that Boris Yeltsin and Russian democrats were responsible for the capitulation to the west. There are obvious parallels with the climate in Germany after the First World War when many Germans resented the Versailles ‘diktat’ and attacked corrupt politicians for stabbing the nation in the back as they saw it.

Today, as then, these feelings were manipulated to justify an autocracy and to convince western powers that conciliation — appeasement — is the best policy.

So it is Russia that upped the stakes and not the west, let alone tiny Georgia with its nine fighter planes ranged against Russia’s 2,000. It is Russia that made things difficult in Kosovo. It might have had a point about the danger of legitimising separatist movements, but it had no strategic interests at stake beyond nationalism. Again, it is Russia which decided to turn the deployment of a very small number of missiles in Poland — matchsticks against Russia’s own arsenal — into a major confrontation.

Finally, it is Russia that precipitated a war against Georgia by encouraging South Ossetian rebels to turn up the pressure with Tbilisi by formulating demands unacceptable to any Georgian leader, let alone one like Saakashvili. If he hadn’t fallen into Putin’s trap this time, the conflict would have been triggered some other way. European and American diplomats reckon Saakashvili made a mistake by sending troops into South Ossetia. Maybe so, but his real crime is to be the president of a small, fundamentally democratic, pro-western nation on the borders of Putin’s Russia. Whatever his faults, Saakashvili is no Milosevic — and wild Russian allegations of genocide seem far-fetched indeed.

Georgian-Ossetian relations were not great, but nor was there any of the intense hatred that one found in the Balkans, for instance, between Muslims and Orthodox.

Historians will probably consider August 8, 2008 just as pivotal a turning point as November 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall collapsed.

RUSSIA’S offensive in Georgia’s sovereign territory has marked the return of history and even the return to a style of rivalry between great powers inspired at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Again we see unbounded nationalism, a confrontation over access to natural resources, struggles for influence at the borders of spheres of influence and the resort to military force for political ends.

Globalisation, economic interdependency, the EU and other efforts aimed at building a better international order will of course carry on. But these efforts will be met with the harsh international reality of raw power that has persisted since time immemorial and occasionally come to the surface. We fooled ourselves if we thought those days were gone.

If there is one positive in all the ghastly events of the last fortnight, it is to give European politicians a sense of perspective. Doesn’t the argument over the Lisbon Treaty appear like so much rearranging of the deckchairs when the EU finds it impossible to speak with one clear voice about a matter as fundamental as the sovereignty of small nations?

Too often European governments succumb to the fatalism of believing that Russia is beyond influence. It is all too easy to allow frustration to slip into something approaching indifference. Let’s hope that the next US president at least is better prepared to tackle these problems.