GeorgianAdventure

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Prime Minister and former President traveled direct from the Olympics to North Ossetia and visited his commanding generals as they invade South Ossetia and, possibly, in case you missed it, the country of Georgia.

For those of you who haven’t been following what happened so far here’s a quick refresher.

Since about 1800 the Georgians regarded Ossetia as part of their country, whereas the Russians similarly considered Georgia a province of Russia. North Ossetia is in the Russian Federation, South Ossetia is in Georgia.

South Ossetia speaks its own language, and most of its people chose to have Russian rather than Georgian passports. It’s not that they wanted to be Russian but they didn’t want to be Georgian. The result was that their tiny country has been semi autonomous for about a decade and a half.

Russia armed, encouraged and provoked their South Ossetian allies to attack the Georgians at every recent opportunity. The Georgians fell for the provocation and retaliated with much bigger scale attacks. This is exactly what the Russians were waiting for. Now they had an excuse to “protect” those with Russian passports in South Ossetia. The Russian peacekeepers of South Ossetia soon morphed into the advance forces of the Russian attack on Georgia.

The Russians have now driven the Georgians out of South Ossetia but are still attacking them in other parts of Georgia. The Georgians, now realizing their huge strategic mistake, are calling for a ceasefire, which the Russians are studiously ignoring. They are calling for the Georgians to totally withdraw from South Ossetia before they will ceasefire.

There are major repercussions that might well flow from these Russian provoked actions. Chief amongst these for the West is the breaching of the major power pipeline in Georgia. This means that there are countries that are totally reliant on that pipeline, which will now have to get their power via Russia.

Similarly there is another semi autonomous region called Abkhazia. Georgia has contended for nearly twenty years with these two regions, in Abkhazia and South Ossetia that want to control their own destiny. Both of these are supported by Russia as part of the Kremlin’s strategy to weaken Tbilisi’s authority.

The West, in particular America, has, some might say, mischievously stirred the embers of this fire. At the NATO summit in Bucharest the Americans pressed for Georgia and Ukraine’s membership of the alliance. Primarily the Germans temporarily blocked this move, but NATO still gave a commitment to offer membership to the two countries membership at some future date. Moscow saw this as a challenge to its dominance in the former Soviet republics.

Russia hasn’t been shy to make it crystal clear that it will do anything to prevent NATO’s expansion on its borders.

America and Britain have been intimately involved in providing arms and military assistance to the Georgians. The claim being that this support is in place to encourage Georgia as an independent, sovereign state.

We were also trying to protect the pipeline across Georgia that carries the crude oil from the Caspian to the Black Sea, which was the only export route bypassing Russia’s stranglehold on energy via this region.

This defeat for the Georgians might well signal the end of Mr. Saakashvili’s rule and set back Georgia’s efforts to establish itself as a modern Western-looking democracy for the foreseeable future. In any event, this small-scale war risks further undermines the already strained relations between Russia and the West. We mustn’t lose sight of the dangers of any conflict in a region like this, and that is the risk of it becoming a bigger war.