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Russia’s diplomatic victory over West

Having won a brief but fierce war against the United States ally, Georgia, on the ground, Russia has also outplayed the West on the diplomatic front. Its counter-attack against the Georgian foray into South Ossetia on August 8 was not only swift and devastating but also carefully calibrated. After the Russian forces pulverised the U.S.-trained Georgian army and wiped out its air force and navy, Moscow refrained from bombing any civilian target. Russia also resisted the tem ptation to overrun Georgia, setting up a military presence only in areas adjacent to Georgia’s breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After its military objectives were achieved, Russia moved to consolidate the fruits of victory and ensure that the inevitable showdown with the West did not escalate into a full-fledged crisis. It has brilliantly attained both goals.

Moscow skilfully played “old Europe” — France, Germany and Italy, which did not want a break with Russia, — against “new Europe” — East European countries allied to the U.S., to foil Washington’s efforts to set up a united anti-Russia front of western nations.

An emergency summit of the European Union called to discuss the Russia-Georgia conflict, criticised Moscow for “disproportionate” use of force but rejected demands to impose sanctions on it fearing Russian retaliation against the energy-dependent bloc. The Kremlin welcomed Europe’s “responsible” reaction.

Once its military victory was sealed, Moscow accepted French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s mediation offer. Allowing the French leader to claim the laurels of peacemaker, the Kremlin skilfully played up to his ambitions to reassert France’s dominant role in European and trans-Atlantic politics.

The deal worked out on August 12 between Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Sarkozy, in his capacity as the current president of the European Union, basically laid down Moscow’s terms for peace with defeated Georgia, but its President Mikheil Saakashvili, with quiet encouragement from Washington and Brussels, sought to sabotage the agreement. He refused to give a binding pledge to renounce the use of force against South Ossetia and Abkhazia and rejected Moscow’s proposal for an international discussion on the future status of the breakaway territories — two key provisions of the Medvedev-Sarkozy six-point peace plan.

The U.S. openly backed Georgia in the U.N. Security Council, killing a Russian draft based on the six-point plan. The West’s game plan was clear: get Russia to withdraw its troops from Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and replace Russian peacekeepers in the region by European forces. This would have turned defeat into victory for both Georgia and the West. To make their case more persuasive, the U.S. and other NATO countries sent warships to the Black Sea in a show of support for Georgia.

However, Moscow played hardball, deploying its own Navy off the coast of Abkhazia. On August 26 the Kremlin recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, tipping the diplomatic battle decisively in its favour. The move allowed Russia to place the two territories under its military umbrella and make them out of bounds to the West.

Mr. Sarkozy, accompanied by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana, rushed to Moscow on September 8 to try and reverse the recognition, only to hear from Mr. Medvedev that the decision was “final, irreversible and irrevocable.”

To sweeten the pill Moscow agreed to pull back its remaining forces from Georgia in exchange for deployment of European observers in Georgia and a pledge from the E.U. to be a “guarantor of no use of force” in the region.

In a further gain for Moscow, the peace agreement Mr. Medvedev and the E.U. trio signed on September 8 made no reference to either Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia or its troops on their territory.

The full extent of Russia’s diplomatic victory became clear when NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer slammed the E.U.-brokered agreement as “not acceptable” because it ceded too much ground to Moscow, permitting it to retain a military presence inside Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The NATO chief’s outburst revealed a deep rift in the West over Russia’s new assertiveness. A day after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice predicted a “self-imposed isolation and international irrelevance” for Russia, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon met Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to discuss broader access for French companies to Russian hydrocarbons and other industries. He expressed the hope that EU talks with Russia on a new cooperation pact, suspended after the Georgia crisis, would resume as scheduled in October.

The West’s patent failure to isolate and punish Russia only served to underline the solidarity and support Russia received from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (SCTO), a defence pact of former Soviet states. Both alliances at their summits last month backed Russia’s “active role” in restoring peace in the Caucasus.

Part of the reason why the West, despite a fiercely anti-Russian media campaign, lost the diplomatic battle over Georgia is that it could not take the moral high ground after what the U.S. and NATO did in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Kosovo. Russia did not bomb bridges, TV towers and government offices as NATO did in the 78-day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999. Russia did not invent pretexts for going to war as the U.S. did in Iraq. And Russia had far weightier reasons to recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia than the West had in Kosovo.

While Kosovo has been the historic, religious and cultural heart of Serbia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia never belonged to core Georgia till the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, included South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia against the wish of their ethnically distinct populations, and his feared secret policy chief Lavrenty Beria, also of Georgian origin, sought to change the demographic situation in the region by resettling Georgians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, both regions refused to join independent Georgia and declared state sovereignty. Georgia’s nationalist leaders tried to retake Abkhazia and South Ossetia by force, but failed. Both regions voted in referendums for splitting away from Georgia and have de facto been independent for the past 17 years. However, Russia long refused to recognise their independence despite numerous appeals from their leaders and parliaments.

Serbia never used military force to regain Kosovo after 1999, but was still dismembered nine years later. Georgia waged wars against South Ossetia in 1991-1992 and against Abkkhazia in 1992-1994, and then again attacked South Ossetia in 2004, but Russia stood by the principle of Georgia’s territorial integrity. The U.S. and the E.U. recognised Kosovo’s unilateral independence in February 2008 after calling off talks between Serbia and Kosovo. Russia recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia only after Georgia mounted a brutal armed attempt to re-conquer South Ossetia on August 7.

The West betrayed cynicism and hypocrisy when it argued that Serbia’s partition had been justified, whereas Georgia’s territorial integrity should be upheld even after its army killed hundreds and left homeless thousands in South Ossetia. No amount of demagogy can obscure the fact that Serbia was broken up because it was seen as a potential Slavic fifth column in the NATO heartland, while Georgia is being defended because it is the West’s ally and Russia’s enemy.

Moscow has seized upon its military and diplomatic victory in the Georgia crisis to recast the strategic equations in the former Soviet Union. Russian leaders lost no time to reassure neighbours that they still adhere to inviolability of the post-Soviet borders, provided no one repeats Georgia’s folly of using armed force to resolve a territorial dispute. In recent weeks Mr. Medvedev met the leaders of Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan to push forward the peaceful settlement of the remaining “frozen conflicts” of Transdniestr and Nagorny Karabakh.

In the wake of the Georgia crisis, Moscow persuaded its partners in the CSTO defence pact to set up a regional army in Central Asia to guard against external threats. It secured agreement from Uzbekistan to build a new gas pipeline from Turkmenistan via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to Russia that would double the pipeline capacity to between 80 and 90 billion cubic metres. The deal cements Moscow’s control over Central Asian energy supplies and undermines the chances for the U.S.-pushed NABUCCO pipeline project bypassing Russia.

Russia’s nuclear-capable bombers flew to Venezuela earlier this month and will be followed by warships later this year in the first ever military foray into Latin America that demonstrated U.S. vulnerability in the face of the deployment of the Pentagon’s missile defences in Eastern Europe.

Finally, Russia warned NATO not to cross the red line by expanding further into the former Soviet Union and giving membership to Georgia. “We will not tolerate it,” Mr. Medvedev said. After what happened to Georgia, the West would be well advised to heed the Russian warning.

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