The following excerpts from three articles in this weekend's New York Times is a crash course on the war on the Black Sea.
GORI, Georgia — The conflict between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia moved toward all-out war on Saturday as Russia prepared to land ground troops on Georgia’s coast and broadened its bombing campaign both within Georgia and in the disputed territory of Abkhazia.
The fighting that began when Georgian forces tried to retake the capital of South Ossetia, a pro-Russian region that won de facto autonomy from Georgia in the early 1990s, appeared to be developing into the worst clashes between Russia and a foreign military since the 1980s war in Afghanistan.
Georgia’s president,
Mikheil Saakashvili, declared that Georgia was in a state of war, ordering government offices to work around the clock, and said that Russia was planning a full-scale invasion of his country.
Prime Minister
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, eclipsing the authority of President
Dmitri A. Medvedev, left the Olympics in China and arrived Saturday evening in Vladikavkaz, a city in southern Russia just over the border that is a military staging area. State-controlled news broadcasts showed Mr. Putin meeting generals, suggesting that he was in charge of the operations on Georgian soil.
...Russian armored vehicles continued to stream into South Ossetia, and Russian officials said that 1,500 civilians had been killed in South Ossetia and that 12 Russian soldiers had died. A Georgian government spokesman said that 60 civilians had been killed in airstrikes on the city of Gori. Each side’s figures were impossible to confirm independently.
Attending the Olympic Games in Beijing, President Bush directly called on Russia on Saturday to stop bombing Georgian territory, expressing strong support for Georgia in a direct challenge to Russia’s leaders. “Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected,” Mr. Bush said in a hastily arranged appearance at his hotel in Beijing. “We have urged an immediate halt to the violence and a stand-down by all troops. We call for the end of the Russian bombings.”
...The fighting, and the Kremlin’s confidence in the face of Western outcry, had wide international implications, as both Russian and Georgian officials placed it squarely in the context of renewed cold war-style tensions and an East-West struggle for influence on Russia’s borders. The East and West were stuck in diplomatic impasse, even as reports from both sides of heavy civilian casualties indicated that the humanitarian toll was climbing.
...Alexander Lomaya, secretary of Georgia’s
National Security Council, said ...conflict arose because Russia sought to “thwart its neighbors’ movement toward Western society and Western values....Russia has clearly decided to redraw the borders of the Eastern Europe map of the post-cold war situation....If the world is not able to stop Russia here, then Russian tanks and Russian paratroopers can appear in every European capital.”
In the early 1990s, he said, Russia began cultivating separatist movements along the outer limits of its territory — in Moldova, Georgia and the Baltic states — in an attempt to consolidate its sphere of influence. Russia has funneled military and financial support to large ethnic-Russian populations in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia....
...For years, the Russians have claimed that Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has been preparing to retake the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and have warned that they would use force to block such a bid. Mr. Saakashvili, for his part, describes today’s Russia as a belligerent power ruthlessly pressing at its borders, implacably hostile to democratic neighbors like Georgia and Ukraine. He has thrown in his lot with the West, and has campaigned ardently for membership in NATO..... ...while Russia has a massive advantage in firepower, Georgia, an open, free-market, more-or-less-democratic nation that sees itself as a distant outpost of Europe, enjoys a decisive rhetorical and political edge. In recent conversations there, President Saakashvili compared Georgia to Czechoslovakia in 1938, trusting the West to save it from a ravenous neighbor. “If Georgia fails,” he said to me darkly two months ago, “it will send a message to everyone that this path doesn’t work.”
During a 10-day visit to Georgia in June, I heard the 1938 analogy again and again, as well as another to 1921, when Bolshevik troops crushed Georgia’s thrilling, and brief, first experiment with liberal rule.
Georgians...have good reason to fear the ambitions, and the wrath, of a rejuvenated Russia seeking to regain lost power. Indeed, a renascent and increasingly bellicose Russia is an ominous spectacle for the West too. While China preaches, and largely practices, the doctrine of “peaceful rise,” avoiding confrontation abroad in order to focus on development at home, Russia acts increasingly like an expansionist 19th-century power, pressing at its borders. Most strikingly, Russia has bluntly deployed its vast oil and gas resources to punish refractory neighbors like Ukraine, and reward compliant ones like Armenia....
SUBMISSION AND REBELLION
...Modern Georgian history is a record of submission to superior Russian power. Threatened by the expanding Persian empire, in 1783 the Georgians formally accepted the protection of Russia; this polite fiction ended when Russia annexed Georgia in 1801. The chaos of the Russian Revolution finally gave Georgia a chance to restore its sovereignty a century later. ...
... Stalin, though himself Georgian, kept the republic subdued through brutal purges. The head of the Georgian Communist party was Lavrenti Beria, a cold-blooded killer who would become the master architect of Stalin’s terror. The Georgians, though helpless, never accepted their Soviet identity, and preserved their language, culture, religious practice and sense of national identity, as they had under the czars. And when, at last, the Soviet empire collapsed as the czarist one had, Georgia immediately broke away and declared its independence, in 1991.
The infant country spent the next decade stagnating under the Soviet-style rule of Eduard Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister to
Mikhail Gorbachev.
But in 2003, Mr. Shevardnadze was peacefully overthrown in what came to be known as the Rose Revolution. Mr. Saakashvili was elected the following year. Since then, Georgia has become a poster child for Westernization. The growth rate has reached 12 percent. The countryside remains impoverished, but ...Tbilisi is a charming city, its ancient Orthodox churches restored to life, the lanes of the old city lined with cafes and art galleries. Mr. Saakashvili has also made Georgia one of the world’s most — or few — pro-American countries. ....
RUSSIA RESURGENT
It was, of course, at this very moment that another ambitious young figure was reshaping Russia’s politics, economy and self-image. The combination of Vladimir Putin’s reforms and the dizzying rise in the price of oil and gas have rapidly restored Russia to the status of world power. And Mr. Putin has harnessed that power in the service of aggressive nationalism.
...Mr. Putin has established a “petrostate,” in which oil and gas are strategically deployed as punishments, rewards and threats. ...Mr. Putin has gone [to great lengths] to retain control over the delivery of natural gas from Central Asia to the West. A proposed alternative pipeline would skirt Russia and run through Georgia, as an oil pipeline now does. ...If Georgia collapses in turmoil...investors will not put up the money for a bypass pipeline. And so....Mr. Putin has done his best to destabilize the Saakashvili regime.
But economic considerations alone scarcely account for what appears to be an obsession with Georgia. The “color revolutions” that swept across Ukraine, the Balkans and the Caucasus in the first years of the new century plainly unnerved Mr. Putin, who has denounced America’s policy of “democracy promotion” and stifled foreign organizations seeking to promote human rights in Russia. Georgia, with its open embrace of the West, thus represents a threat to the legitimacy of Russia’s authoritarian model. And this challenge is immensely compounded by Georgia’s fervent aspiration to join NATO, one of Russia’s red lines.
Russian officials frequently recall that President
Bill Clinton promised
Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not expand beyond Eastern Europe.
Of course NATO is no longer an anti-Soviet alliance, and the fact that Russia views NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat to its security is a vivid sign of the deep-rooted cold war mentality of Mr. Putin and his circle.Still, they seem to mean it. Both Mr. Putin and his successor as president,
Dmitri Medvedev, have reserved their starkest rhetoric for this subject. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has threatened that Georgia’s ambition to join NATO “will lead to renewed bloodshed,” adding, as if that weren’t enough, “we will do anything not to allow Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO.”
After Mr. Saakashvili, then 37, became president, Mr. Putin made no attempt to court him, and Mr. Saakashvili, made a point of showing the regional hegemon no deference. The open struggle began in late 2005 and early 2006, when Russia imposed an embargo on Georgia’s agricultural products, then on wine and mineral water — virtually Georgia’s entire export market. After Georgia very publicly and dramatically expelled Russian diplomats accused of espionage, Mr. Putin cut off all land, sea, air and rail links to Georgia, as well as postal service. And then, for good measure, he cut off natural gas supplies in the dead of winter.
ECHOES OF TRAGEDY
This new round of bellicosity struck Georgians as frighteningly familiar. Alexander Rondeli, the director of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, recited to me a thought he attributed to the diplomat-scholar
George F. Kennan: “Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals.” Here, for him, was further proof, as if it were needed, that imperialist expansion and brute subjugation are coded in Russia’s DNA.
The Georgian elite came to view Russia as an unappeasable power imbued with the paranoia of the K.G.B., from which Mr. Putin and his closest associates rose, and fueled by the national sense of humiliation over Russia’s helplessness in the 1990s. “You should understand,” Mr. Saakashvili said, mocking the Europeans who urge forbearance on him, “that the crocodile is hungry. Well, from the point of view of someone who wants to keep his own leg, that’s hard to accept.” ...
THE WEST GETS SCARED
There is real alarm in the West about the deteriorating situation in the Caucasus. Diplomats from Washington and the major European capitals, as well as from the United Nations, the
European Union and NATO, have been crisscrossing the region trying to bring the parties together.
....What is striking, though, is the growing consensus about Russian behavior. The United Nations, the European Union and NATO have all sided with Georgia in the disputes over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Mr. Saakashvili was deeply disappointed when NATO declined in early April to put Georgia and Ukraine on the path to membership, but he says that the German chancellor,
Angela Merkel ... “gets it” about Russia — “because she knows Russia from her own experience.”
...People of all political persuasion now seem to get it about Russia. ...
Robert Kagan, the neoconservative foreign policy expert who is advising
John McCain, writes of Mr. Putin and his coterie: “Their grand ambition is to undo the post-cold war settlement and to re-establish Russia as a dominant power in Eurasia.” Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford who is advising
Barack Obama, also views Russia as a premodern, sphere-of-influence power. He attributes Russia’s hostility to further NATO expansion less to geostrategic calculations than to what he says is Mr. Putin’s cold war mentality. The essential Russian calculus, he says, is, “Anything we can do to weaken the U.S. is good for Russia.” ...
HOPING FOR PATIENCE
Administration officials have regularly cautioned Mr. Saakashvili to be patient on Abkhazia and South Ossetia, even as they have given private and public reassurances about NATO membership.
It would, in fact, be surprising if Georgia had consciously provoked a war in South Ossetia, since Mr. Saakashvili understands that doing so would almost certainly put an end to the NATO bid; indeed, Russia may well calculate that NATO will continue to exclude Georgia so long as the country is embroiled in hostilities along its border.
...Russia threatens Georgia, but Georgia threatens Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia looks like a crocodile to Georgia, but Georgia looks to Russia like the cats’ paw of the West. One party has all the hard power it could want, the other all the soft. And now, while the world was looking elsewhere, the frozen conflict between them has thawed and cracked.....
From a New York Times Analysis, August 9, 2008, by HELENE COOPER: ... While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.
And State Department officials made it clear on Saturday that there was no chance the United States would intervene militarily.
Mr. Bush did use tough language, demanding that Russia stop bombing. And Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice demanded that Russia “respect Georgia’s territorial integrity.”
What did Mr. Putin do? First, he repudiated President
Nicolas Sarkozy of France ...when [he]tried to dissuade Russia from its military operation. ...
Then, Mr. Putin flew from Beijing to a region that borders
South Ossetia, arriving after an announcement that Georgia was pulling its troops out of the capital of the breakaway region. ...the Russian message was clear: This is our sphere of influence; others stay out.
“What the Russians just did is, for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, they have taken a decisive military action and imposed a military reality,” said George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor, a geopolitical analysis and intelligence company. “They’ve done it unilaterally, and all of the countries that have been looking to the West to intimidate the Russians are now forced into a position to consider what just happened.”
And Bush administration officials acknowledged that the outside world, and the United States in particular, had little leverage over Russian actions. “There is no possibility of drawing
NATO or the international community into this,” said a senior State Department official in a conference call with reporters.
.... one Security Council diplomat said it remained uncertain whether much could be done.
“Strategically, the Russians have been sending signals that they really wanted to flex their muscles, and they’re upset about Kosovo,” the diplomat said. He was alluding to Russia’s anger at the West for recognizing Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.
...For the Bush administration, the choice now becomes whether backing Georgia — which, more than any other former Soviet republic has allied with the United States — on the South Ossetia issue is worth alienating Russia at a time when getting Russia’s help to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions is at the top of the United States’ foreign policy agenda.
... there is a growing feeling among some officials in the Bush administration that perhaps the United States cannot have it all, and may have to choose its priorities, particularly when it comes to Russia.
The Bush administration’s strong support for Georgia — including the training of Georgia’s military and arms support — came, in part, as a reward for its support of the United States in Iraq. The United States has held Georgia up as a beacon of democracy in the former Soviet Union; it was supposed to be an example to other former Soviet republics of the benefits of tilting to the West...
...Russia’s emerging aggressiveness is now also timed with America’s preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming confrontation with Iran. These counterbalancing considerations mean that Moscow is in the driver’s seat, administration officials acknowledged.
“We’ve placed ourselves in a position that globally we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything,” Mr. Friedman of Stratfor said....
