President Saakashvili, for all his eagerness to reclaim the ‘lost’ territories, decided to give diplomacy another chance. Russia, after all, had a new president, Dmitry Medvedev. And even Prime Minister Putin was sending mixed signals. Just as the Russians were sending railway troops into Abkhazia, Putin was asked by the French newspaper Le Monde what he thought about Saakashvili’s ‘peace plan for Abkhazia granting an unprecedented degree of autonomy’ and ‘giving the post of vice-president of the Georgian state to an Abkhaz national’. ‘I very much hope that the plan proposed by Mikheil Saakashvili will gradually be introduced,’ Putin replied, ‘because it is on the whole a sound plan.’
A few days later, on the margins of a summit of post-Soviet states in St Petersburg on 6 June, Saakashvili held his first talks with Medvedev. Both men appeared to approach them in a positive mood, as if they were really starting from a fresh piece of paper. ‘I think we will be able to resolve all the difficulties we face today and find long-term solutions. What do you think?’ said Medvedev.
‘I agree,’ replied Saakashvili. ‘There are no unsolvable problems. There are plenty of unsolved ones, but no unsolvable ones.’
Recalling the meeting later, Saakashvili said: ‘He seemed to have a very different style from Putin. He was open, he was engaging.’ (Saakashvili has a similar recollection of his first meeting with Putin.) The Georgian was encouraged to hear Medvedev suggest that he had ‘inherited these situations and didn’t initiate them’, and wanted to resolve the Ossetian and Abkhazian conflicts ‘within the framework of the territorial integrity of Georgia’.16 That amounted to a pledge that Russia was not interested in annexing the two regions and regarded them as part of Georgia.
Saakashvili said he left the meeting ‘full of hope’ and that Medvedev had suggested getting together in Sochi to ‘sit down and look at the different options’. But he did not mention that – as Sergei Lavrov points out – the prerequisite for any progress, as far as Russia was concerned, was that Georgia, given its stated intention to regain the two territories, should sign a non-use-of-force pledge. In an interview, Medvedev’s diplomatic adviser Sergei Prikhodko confirmed: ‘The key thing was a proposal to put together a document on non-use of force. They even named the venue where it could happen, in Sochi. Saakashvili reacted, as far as I recall, quite positively.’17
But the question of a non-use-of-force agreement would bedevil relations over the next months. Saaskashvili says the Russians wanted Georgia to sign such an agreement with the Abkhaz and South Ossetians – with the Russians as guarantors. But for Saakashvili that was ‘like giving a fox a mandate to guard a chicken house’. He would only agree to sign a non-use-of-force agreement with the Russians. But the Russians responded: why should we do that? We are not combatants in the area, we only have peacekeepers there.
Both men agreed that there was no point in meeting until they had narrowed their differences sufficiently for there to be a practical outcome. In the middle of June they exchanged confidential letters, which I have seen. Saakashvili sent Medvedev what he believed were a few helpful proposals to reduce tension in Abkhazia, but his letter – and Medvedev’s reply – revealed fundamental disagreements. Saakashvili proposed the removal of Russian peacekeepers from the areas of Abkhazia closest to Georgia, and the return of Georgian refugees to these areas (Gali and Ochamchira) which would be jointly administered by Georgia and Abkhazia. Only after this (in December, Saakashvili conjectured) could there be an agreement on the non-use of force, and on the return of Georgian refugees to the rest of Abkhazia. As a sweetener, Saakashvili offered Georgia’s help in preparing the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which is just north of Abkhazia – but in the meantime he called for the ‘rapid withdrawal’ of Russian military reinforcements and the annulment of Putin’s directive of 16 April upgrading relations with the breakaway regions. In his reply Medvedev welcomed the offer to help with the Sochi Games, but politely rejected everything else as pie in the sky. It was hard to imagine, he said, joint Georgian–Abkhaz administration of any part of Abkhazia, and it was premature to speak of the return of refugees. The priority was for Georgia to take real measures to reduce tension, and, above all, to sign a non-use-of-force agreement with the Abkhaz side and to withdraw Georgian troops from the Kodori Valley. If Saakashvili would agree to that, Medvedev offered a summit meeting to sign the relevant documents in July or August.
The Russians tried to work through the Americans to put pressure on their ally. Sergei Lavrov called Condoleezza Rice and said: ‘Saakashvili is playing with fire. Keep him away from adventuring. Convince him to sign an agreement for non-use of force.’
Rice replied, according to Lavrov: ‘Sergei, don’t worry. He wants to be a member of NATO. He knows very well that if he uses force, he can forget about NATO.’ Rice remembers the conversation. She says she even added: ‘It will be another generation before they are in NATO if they use force.’ But she also told the Russians that their own menacing actions were making it ‘difficult for Saakashvili in terms of domestic audiences to sign a no-use-of-force pledge’.
Medvedev and Saakashvili had one more encounter before war became inevitable. It was a steamy Saturday night in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The next day, 6 July, was President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s birthday, and he had brought exalted guests from many countries to an exclusive nightclub to celebrate. Medvedev had declined to meet Saakashvili for formal talks, but the Georgian approached him several times. Medvedev recalled later: ‘He’s a difficult man to avoid, because if he wants to get hold of you he sticks to you! We talked while sitting on a bus, and we talked while taking a walk in the park. In the evening we went out for a cup of tea and a glass of wine… we sat on a sofa and kept discussing the prospect of a meeting.’
The two men have different, and contradictory, memories of these conversations. Since it appears to have been a crucial moment in the breakdown of communication, leading a month later to war, the two versions deserve to be told.
Saakashvili says that he pressed for a follow-up summit in Sochi, as discussed at St Petersburg, but that Medvedev was evasive and hinted he was not in controclass="underline" ‘He said, “You know, I’m so pleased to be with you here, and we are listening to the same music, we like the same social environment, we are at ease with each other. In many ways we might have the same background, but back in Moscow there are different rules of the game, and I would not be easily understood if I rushed to a meeting with you now.”
‘And I said, “Look, a meeting is better than no meetings and we should get somewhere.” But he said, “A meeting now will be a disappointment because we will not get anywhere, and we might come off even worse than before.” And I tell him, “Dmitry, come on, what could be worse than we have now? We have daily provocations, things are really spiralling out of control, we have these incidents on the ground, it cannot get any worse.” And here he stopped me and said, “Well, I think you are deeply mistaken here. You will see, very soon, it might get much, much worse.” And then he basically turned around and left.’
It must be stressed that Saakashvili was speaking with the benefit of hindsight – after the war that broke out one month later. One must also remember that he has a mission to shape the history of those events to his own advantage. But he implied two interesting things: first, that Medvedev had indicated he was not fully in charge of policy (this is credible, given that Medvedev had been in office for only two months), and, second, that he had hinted darkly that Russia was planning military action (though Medvedev’s words can also be read as simply meaning that events were spinning out of control). The important thing, when piecing together the events that led to war, is that Saakashvili interpreted Medvedev’s words as a threat – which he might have been tempted to forestall.