A FIVE-DAY WAR?
The Russian version of the war in Georgia is as follows: on the night of August 7, 2008, Georgian troops entered the breakaway province of South Ossetia and launched a surprise attack on its capital, Tskhinvali. During the attack the Georgian troops killed two thousand civilians: a clear case of genocide. Many of the victims were Russian citizens. In addition, Russian peacekeepers, stationed in South Ossetia, were killed. To stop this genocide Russian troops started a “humanitarian intervention.” They entered South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other breakaway province, to drive the Georgian aggressors back. This version of the facts was not only broadcast nationwide by the Russian media and disseminated by Russian diplomats abroad, it was personally explained by Vladimir Putin to US President George W. Bush, who were both attending the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8.
This official Russian narrative, however, was a prime example of active disinformation, a deception method of which the Russian secret service is the unrivaled champion. When the war began the Kremlin immediately launched cyber attacks against Georgia and effectively blocked the websites of the Georgian government and the Georgian media. In so doing it was able to impose its own version of the events from the very start of the conflict. It even managed, with considerable success, to influence Western public opinion. Most correspondents of Western media in Moscow accepted uncritically the Russian narrative “that the war started with a Georgian attack, which was followed by a Russian response.” The only criticism to be heard was concerning the “disproportionate” character of the Russian response, a euphemism for the massive attacks outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the Georgian heartland and the destruction of the military and economic infrastructure of the country.[2] The Russian disinformation campaign was very successful. It is telling that even Pavel Baev, an analyst who could never be accused of being naïve vis-à-vis the Putin regime, wrote on August 11—one day before the ceasefire: “[the Russian] surprise was so complete that Putin, according to those who saw him in Beijing, was pale with barely controlled rage, which he tried to convey to U.S. President George Bush and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.”[3] For this interpretation of the facts Baev referred to a Russian source. A similar version of the facts could be found in a report by a European think tank, published some weeks after the war. In this report it was stated that “Moscow has responded to Saakashvili’s military attack on South Ossetia by escalating a conflict over a secessionist region into a full-scale inter-state war with Georgia.”[4]
Does this interpretation of the Russian war against Georgia as a Russian response, provoked by a Georgian aggression that led to a genocide, stand up to the facts? No, it does not. This war, far from being—as most media at the time wanted to believe—a reckless act, initiated by an impulsive Georgian president, was a carefully planned operation. It had been prepared by the Russian leadership since 2000 through a process of gradual and purposive escalation. Step by step this process was implemented and brought to its final dénouement in August 2008. If we want to analyze this war and the factors that led to it we should, therefore, analyze its complete history and this history does not start on August 7, 2008, but in the year 2000. That we take this choice of start date is no coincidence, because it is the same year in which Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation. From this point Russia’s Georgia policy changed radically, although not particularly in terms of its objectives. These remained generally the same as at the beginning of the 1990s. These objectives were to divide Georgia and undermine its viability as an independent and sovereign state. The active military support given by Russia to separatist movements during the civil wars in South Ossetia (1991–1992) and Abkhazia (1992–1993), as well as its support for the corrupt autocrat Aslan Abashidze in Adjara (Southwest Georgia) until his forced resignation in 2004, had no objective other than to weaken Georgia. Plans to incorporate Abkhazia into Russia already existed in the 1990s, as became clear from a remark made by Pavel Grachev, then Russian minister of defense, who told Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze: “We can’t leave Abkhazia, because then we’d lose the Black Sea.”[5] Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote shortly after the civil wars: “In Georgia, military intervention gave Moscow the pretext for political mediation. In the course of it Georgia learned… that Russia as an umpire is not very different from Russia as an empire.”[6]
With the arrival of the new strongman in the Kremlin it was the strategy, not the objectives, that changed. This strategy was no longer based on ad hoc initiatives and on blocking solutions aimed at reintegrating the breakaway provinces into Georgia. From this point on there was a well-organized long-term planning. Every single step was deliberately calculated in advance, and a war with Georgia became an option. After the war with Chechnya, the war with Georgia became Putin’s second war of choice. Contrary to the official Kremlin version that insists on calling the war in Georgia a “Five-Day War,” three different phases in this conflict can be discerned:
• the period of a Russian-Georgian cold war (December 2000 to spring 2008)
• a period of a lukewarm war (spring 2008 until August 7, 2008)
• the hot war (August 7–August 12, 2008)
THE RUSSIAN-GEORGIAN COLD WAR: THE PASSPORT OFFENSIVE
The Russian-Georgian Cold War started in December 2000, when the Russian government imposed visa requirements for Georgians who worked in Russia—an unfriendly measure that was directed against the thousands of Georgian citizens who worked in Russia and sent remittances to their relatives at home. Georgia was the first and only CIS country for which visas were introduced. Moscow said the measure was necessary to prevent Chechen rebels from entering Chechnya via Georgian territory. This decision, taken in the first year of Putin’s presidency was the first sign of a more aggressive stance toward Georgia. In 2002 this anti-Georgian policy entered a new phase when the Russian authorities started distributing Russian passports on a wide scale to the inhabitants of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.[7] This “passport offensive” made it clear that Moscow’s intention was to “thaw” the frozen conflicts in Georgia and then resolve them in a way that suited Moscow’s interests. By creating a majority of “Russian citizens” in the two breakaway provinces Russia seemed to be preparing these provinces for some form of integration into Russia. Ronald Asmus wrote:
Russian passports were welcome as a way to travel although in reality few residents ever left the country except to visit Russia. For Moscow it created a fake diaspora and another lever of control. Having handed out thousands of passports to individuals living on what it still recognized as Georgian territory, Moscow would subsequently claim the right to defend its newly minted “citizens.”[8] …[That] doctrine was reminiscent of what Nazi Germany had done in the Sudetenland in the late 1930s, using the German diaspora to agitate in favor of unification with Germany and then justifying the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia with the need to protect ethnic Germans suffering persecution in Prague.[9]
2
Hans Crooijmans, the Moscow correspondent of the Dutch weekly
3
Pavel K. Baev, “Russian “Tandemocracy” Stumbles into War,”
4
Nicu Popescu, Mark Leonard, and Andrew Wilson, “Can the EU Win the Peace in Georgia?” Policy Brief (London: European Council on Foreign Relations
5
Cf. Thornike Gordadze, “Georgian-Russian Relations in the 1990s,” in
6
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,”
7
Cf. Andrey Illarionov, “Another Look at the August War,” Center for Eurasian Policy, Hudson Institute, Washington (September 12, 2008), 7.
8
Ronald D. Asmus,