There then followed five more points: cessation of hostilities, free access for humanitarian aid, Georgian forces to withdraw to their normal bases, Russian forces to withdraw to their position before the outbreak of hostilities, and international talks to be held on the future status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Point 5 contained an extra clause which would soon cause trouble. ‘Pending an international mechanism’, Russian ‘peacekeepers’ were to put in place ‘additional security measures’. That was a fluid prescription, which Moscow would use to justify maintaining its troops in a wide security zone, and even in parts of Georgia proper, long after the peace deal went into force.
Sarkozy flew to Tbilisi with the paper. But it was to point 6 that Saakashvili refused to sign up, because ‘talks on future status’ seemed to leave the question of Georgia’s territorial integrity open. Lavrov said in an interview that the whole point of having the clause about international talks on the regions’ status was to demonstrate that Russia did not intend to recognise them unilaterally: it would be up to an international conference to decide. But Saakashvili was adamant, and the point was changed, after a quick midnight phone-call from Sarkozy to Medvedev in Moscow, to read: ‘talks on security and stability’ in the two regions. Those talks have continued off and on, achieving little, in Geneva ever since.
But Saakashvili had already lost the big point. On 26 August, President Medvedev suddenly announced that Russia was recognising the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Two new states were born, which would be recognised by only Venezuela, Nicaragua and the Pacific island of Nauru. Even Russia’s former Soviet allies would not go down that road. Russia had finally accepted the Kosovo precedent (though not, of course, in relation to Kosovo itself). For all the world it gave the impression that annexation would be the next move, and that this had been Russia’s intent from the outset.
I have yet to meet a Russian who looked very happy about the situation. It can be pointed out that Georgia’s NATO aspirations have been knocked for six, or that Russia has allegedly ‘increased its security’, and is now building a new naval base in Abkhazia. But without doubt Russia’s security interests would have been better served by having a peaceful relationship with Georgia.
In the end, the tragedy of Georgia and its war with Russia may come down to the personal tragedy of one mercurial and deluded man. Nino Burjanadze, formerly a close ally of Saakashvili, says he ‘rushed into war totally convinced he would defeat the Russian army. The last time I spoke to him was five days before the war began, and I said to him: “If you start this war it will mean the end for my country, and I will never forgive you.”’ But another question is why Saakashvili’s supporters in the West, especially in the United States, while cautioning him against starting a war, at the same time encouraged his belief that he could get away with it. Angela Merkel and others knew about his impetuousness, yet NATO recklessly insisted on promising his country (and Ukraine) membership – even though that made Russia feel insecure. To this day, no serious attempt has been made to visualise a future in which all the countries of Europe and North America might act together to ensure their security, rather than imagining that the security of some can be built at the expense of the security of others.
The events described in this chapter illustrate better than any in the past 12 years the failure of Russia and the West to understand one another and to take one another’s concerns and fears into account. Bush preached and lectured. Putin raged and menaced. America said that Russia must give up its ‘sphere of influence’ in its ‘near abroad’. Russia said that America should stop acting as if it ruled the world. Bush accused Putin of communist-style authoritarianism. Putin accused Bush of Cold War thinking. Both were right. The result was inevitable.
11
RESETTING RELATIONS WITH THE WEST
Repercussions of the Caucasus war
The Russians were livid with the West for siding with Georgia over a war that it had started. They lashed out at everyone in sight, demonstrating a fragile grip on reality. The Georgian attack on Tskhinvali was compared to the 9/11 attack on the United States. In the true tradition of Russian conspiracy theory, Vladimir Putin declared that the Americans had instigated the whole conflict in order to shore up the position of Senator John McCain, Barack Obama’s Republican rival in the American presidential election.
The foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that certain foreign powers decided to use Saakashvili ‘to test the strength of Russian authority’ and ‘to force us to embark on the path of militarisation and abandon modernisation’. The minister insisted the Russians had done nothing more than take out positions from which the Georgians could attack them. Speaking to the British foreign secretary David Miliband on his cellphone, Lavrov referred to Mikheil Saakashvili as a ‘fucking lunatic’.
The Russians appeared to be oblivious to the fact that they were in the international doghouse having invaded and occupied a large part of a neighbouring country. At the end of August, President Medvedev made his first – of several – attempts to draw weighty conclusions from the war. He enunciated five new ‘principles’ of Russian foreign policy, some of which had alarming implications. Principle number four declared that defending the lives and dignity of Russians, wherever they might be, was the priority. This included ‘protecting the interests of our business community abroad’. Anyone who committed an aggressive act against them would be rebuffed, Medvedev promised. Point five declared that there were regions where Russia had ‘privileged interests’. This appeared to include all the neighbouring post-Soviet countries, where ethnic Russians lived. Medvedev pointedly did not use the expression ‘sphere of influence’ – but that is essentially what he meant. It implied that former Soviet republics such as Estonia and Latvia, now members of the EU and NATO but with large Russian minorities, were officially considered part of Moscow’s domain. The new policy was, perhaps, the precise opposite of what one might have expected a chastened Russia to adopt following the Georgia crisis.
Showing no sign of humility, the Russians saw the war as a pretext to plough on with their old, already rejected initiatives. In October President Medvedev rushed to a conference in Evian, France, and reiterated his call for a new European security treaty, saying events in the Caucasus had ‘demonstrated how absolutely right’ his idea was, and were ‘proof that the international security system based on unipolarity no longer works’. What was he saying? Had he forgotten that it was his country that had just violated the security and territorial integrity of a neighbour? His long-winded appeal for a new treaty fell mostly on deaf ears. This really was, as Saakashvili might have put it, the fox demanding co-ownership of the chicken-house.
As for Vladimir Putin, his new post as prime minister meant that the economy, rather than foreign policy, was now his major responsibility. That, too, gave him the levers to meddle in a region of ‘privileged interest’. The main lever was Gazprom, the huge state monopoly he had refused to allow his ministers to split up in 2002, which was now a handy instrument of foreign policy. Energy had become a convenient whip with which to punish neighbours. In 2006, a few months after the gas dispute with Ukraine, Russia cut oil supplies to Lithuania after it sold its Mazeikiai refinery to a Polish company rather than to Rosneft. The same year, power lines to Georgia were mysteriously bombed, and Russia refused to allow Georgian investigators to see the evidence or help with repairs. In 2007 Russia cut oil shipments to Estonia following a row over the removal of a Soviet war memorial.