Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine at exactly the same time, the American scholars Michael McFaul (later nominated by President Obama to become ambassador to Moscow) and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss came to similar conclusions. They wrote that although state resources had increased under Putin, allowing pensions and government salaries to be paid on time, and greater spending on roads and education, overall the state still performed poorly: ‘In terms of public safety, health, corruption, and the security of property rights, Russians are actually worse off today than they were a decade ago.’18 Security, ‘the most basic good a state can provide for its population’, had worsened: the frequency of terrorist attacks had increased under Putin; the number of military and civilian deaths in Chechnya was much higher than during the first war, and conflict in the North Caucasus region was spreading; the murder rate was rising; the death rate from fires was around 40 a day in Russia – roughly ten times the average rate in Western Europe. Health spending had gone down under Putin, the population was shrinking, alcohol consumption had soared and life expectancy had declined during the Putin years. ‘At the same time that Russian society has become less secure and less healthy under Putin,’ McFaul and Stoner-Weiss wrote, ‘Russia’s international rankings for economic competitiveness, business friendliness, and transparency and corruption all have fallen.’ Corruption, in particular, had skyrocketed. Property rights had been undermined: not only had the state engineered the sell-off of Yukos assets to Rosneft, but the oil company Shell had been compelled to sell a majority share in Sakhalin-2 to Gazprom.
Such was the state of the Russia that Dmitry Medvedev took over after his inauguration on 7 May 2008. There were signs that he shared, or at least understood, the kind of criticisms levelled at his predecessor’s record. The main sound-bite to emerge from his only election campaign speech was ‘Freedom is better than non-freedom’, and in his inauguration address he promised that ‘we must achieve a true respect for the law and overcome legal nihilism’.
In foreign affairs, Medvedev wanted to make a quick impression. He rushed to Berlin (just as Putin had done) shortly after becoming president to make what he hoped would be a ground-breaking speech, in which he grandly called for a new European Security treaty. This, apparently (though it was not made clear), would replace all existing treaties and alliances, making NATO and the OSCE redundant and, of course, giving Russia its rightful place at the top table of a new organisation. The initiative was largely ignored, and not just because it was half-baked and raised more questions than it answered. It was ignored mainly because it was divorced from reality: Russia was still acting in ways that reminded most people of the USSR, it played gas wars with its neighbours, appeared to condone the murders of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko, it bullied Georgia and Ukraine… nobody wanted lectures about European security from a country like that. We in Ketchum sent memos explaining that foreign policy initiatives like this had to be part of a ‘package’, together with internal liberalisation, if they were be taken seriously. We pointed out why Mikhail Gorbachev had been so successfuclass="underline" he was a communist leader, but his arms-control gestures were taken seriously because he had also initiated glasnost and freed political prisoners. No one, we told the Kremlin, would take their security proposals seriously so long as they were rolling back democracy at home.
Maybe – one liked to think – President Medvedev actually wanted to implement changes at home. But any hope of liberalisation was about to be dashed, as Russia for the first time since its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 went to war with one of its neighbours. The invasion of Georgia in August 2008 destroyed at a stroke all the efforts made by Putin, and then Medvedev, to present their country as a truly post-Soviet, European, democratised and trustworthy power. The events leading up to the ‘five day war’, and the question of who bore ultimate responsibility for it, were surrounded with controversy – and obfuscated by a fierce PR war in which the Georgians proved considerably more adept than the Russians. In the following chapter I will attempt to shed some light on what happened – without claiming to provide definitive answers.
10
THE DESCENT INTO WAR
From Kosovo to Bucharest
On Sunday 17 February 2008 Serbia’s breakaway Albanian-majority province of Kosovo declared itself independent. The next day the United States recognised it, and on Tuesday a reporter asked President Bush, ‘Isn’t this a poke in the eye to Vladimir Putin and others who say you’re approving of secession movements everywhere implicitly?’
Bush replied: ‘Actually we’ve been working very closely with the Russians… You know, there’s a disagreement, but we believe, as do many other nations, that history will prove this to be a correct move to bring peace to the Balkans.’
It was not the Balkans that Putin was worried about. Russia had good reasons to oppose the recognition of Kosovo – and its ‘brotherly ties’ with Serbia were the very least of them. Pandora’s box was open. However forcefully the Americans and their allies insisted that the Kosovo case for independence was sui generis – a unique set of circumstances, setting no precedent – there were a number of other secessionist nations around the world who were delighted. If the Kosovars could vote for independence and secede from Serbia, against the ‘parent state’s’ wishes, citing military attacks, ethnic cleansing and acts of brutality committed against them, then could not the Chechens say the same about their position within Russia, or the Abkhaz and South Ossetians about theirs within Georgia?
Above all, Russia did not want to encourage Chechen separatism, but it was also wary of encouraging the South Ossetians and Abkhaz to secede – precisely because of the precedent it could set for other tiny nations within the former Soviet Union, not least the chain of restive Muslim republics in Russia’s northern Caucasus region. At a summit meeting of leaders from the Commonwealth of Independent States – the loose grouping of former Soviet republics – President Putin delivered an unambiguous warning of the consequences: ‘The Kosovo precedent is a terrifying one,’ he said, shifting nervously in his seat and almost spitting out the words. ‘It in essence is breaking open the entire system of international relations that have prevailed not just for decades but for centuries. And it will without a doubt bring on itself an entire chain of unforeseen consequences.’
Mikheil Saakashvili, re-elected as president of Georgia the previous month, was sitting in the audience, and gulped hard as he heard the Russian accuse Western governments of a grave miscalculation: ‘This is a stick with two ends, and that other end will come back and knock them on the head one day.’ In a separate meeting on the margins of the summit, Putin tried to reassure Saakashvili: ‘We’re not going to ape the Americans, and recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia just because Kosovo was recognised.’ But Saakashvili did not believe him, and in any case he was as aware as Putin was of the precedent set by Kosovo, and knew his own breakaway provinces might follow suit if he did not act quickly. His attempt to move against South Ossetia in 2004 had failed. Since then, with American help, he had transformed his military into a much more capable force. But if he was going to use it to retake Abkhazia and South Ossetia – risking confrontation with Russia – he would need much more than just logistical support from the Americans.